As Emmy nominations approach, Vanity Fair’s HWD team is diving deep into how some of this season’s greatest scenes and characters came together. You can read more of these close looks here.
The Character: Maeve, Westworld
When HBO first announced an ambitious new series called Westworld from Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, expectations were both sky-high and a bit muddled. How would Michael Crichton’s 1973 Jurassic Park precursor about a Western theme park populated by malfunctioning, rebellious robots translate to the world of Peak TV? Initially, the show also had to overcome some critical controversy and concern about whether Westworld was just another genre show where the systematic and violent abuse of women existed simply for thrills and chills.
However, as the first season unfolded and the show’s narrative twists and turns kept audiences on the hook, stars Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton asked viewers to be patient. And eventually, a new narrative emerged. The women of Westworld weren’t victims at all. Far from it. In fact, when the irresistible temptation to compare these misbehaving tourist attractions to Crichton’s other famous fictional Park of horrors arises, Wood’s character, Dolores, emerges as the season’s biggest threat. She’s the lurking, monstrous Tyrannosaurus Rex whose destructive properties are largely hidden from view until the grand finale. But if Dolores is Westworld’s T. rex, then Newton’s Maeve is the velociraptor—a clever girl who is forever testing the park’s fences. No wonder she quickly became an audience favorite.
While Wood spent much of the season playing wide-eyed wonder and confusion, Newton had the distinct challenge of shifting in and out of three different roles that were all part and parcel of the same creature. She had to be at once a tender-hearted, tormented homesteader protecting her daughter; a cynical, canny, and seductive brothel madam; and a third figure behind those characters, slowly waking up to the world around her. Though Maeve defies conventional character description, Newton is fond of calling her a “freedom fighter” and describes the chance to play so many facets of a single woman at once as purely “delicious.” The fact that she delivered—especially without using the usual tools an actor has in her arsenal—makes Newton’s season-stealing turn all the more impressive.
How She Came to Life
From her very first moments on screen, Maeve—dressed in slightly anachronistic and shocking pink—makes a bold impression on both Westworld viewers and visitors to the park alike. A great deal of care went into the host’s costumes in Westworld, because, for the most part, they would be the only costumes these characters would wear for the duration of the show. But while Dolores’s blue dress, Hector’s hand-tooled hat, and the Man in Black’s, well, blacks immediately translate as archetypal, Newton is eager to add her cranberry silk saloon dress to the pile. “Iconic,” she says of Maeve’s heavily accessorized madam look.
“They should always stand out amongst the scenery of these dusty backgrounds,” costume designer Trish Summerville says of Maeve and her protege, Clementine (Angela Sarafyan). “They’re kind of like the candy of the town. You want them to pop, and you want them to draw attention. Maeve pops.” But though Maeve may stand out visually right away, it took a few episodes for her character to entirely coalesce. Given Westworld’s unorthodox approach to shooting Season 1, that’s no wonder.
Unlike a typical audition process, Thandie Newton’s introduction to Westworld didn’t come via reading a script. Before seeing a single line of dialogue, the actress met with Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy via Skype to discuss broader themes and ideas from the show. This was only the first step in what would prove to be an unusual process for every member of the cast—especially for Newton. Scripts came through eventually, of course, but the actors on Westworld were kept entirely in the dark about how the season would unfold—a process the Westworld actors have described as equal parts frustrating and delightful. Though she says the showrunners always had “the whole season firmly in their grasp,” Newton herself got to discover some of the show’s more dramatic twists—“oh my God, and the moment when Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) realized that he was a fucking robot!”—the same way a fan would.
Given how often they had to play confusion or shocked surprise, operating without the larger picture in mind may have only enhanced the work both Newton and Wood were doing. But Newton says that for the first half of the season, she was only playing “fragments” of a woman who had to keep waking herself up over and over again—Groundhog Day-style—to the truths around her. “Because she is coming into consciousness, she’s discovering things about herself, as the audience are,” Newton says before revealing the Episode 6 scene that, for her, turned Maeve into a fully realized character.
Having learned some truths about her robotic nature, Maeve, in perhaps the show’s most meta moment, forces one of the park’s techs, Felix (Leonardo Nam) to show her around the Delos Corp. lab. “Maeve is walking around looking at the artistry of how the hosts have created it,” Newton describes. “She realizes the full extent of what they are as creations, and that they’re not human. I mean, that's just such a betrayal.” Here, Newton delivers one of the season’s most arresting bits of acting once again without the benefit of an actor’s usual bag of tricks. Maeve not only has no dialogue, but also has to keep her features relatively still as she pretends to be a catatonic robot, all while absorbing the earth-shattering reality of her own existence—including seeing footage of the pastel-clad homesteader version of herself in a Delos commercial.
When it comes to her performance in this scene, Newton is quick to give credit away. “I would be making it up if I said there was anything special about what I did. It’s really beautiful editing, great music [Ramin Djawadi’s orchestration of Radiohead’s “Motion Picture Soundtrack”], really clever use of visual references. And yeah, I had to fill in a little gap there with acting. But I was as much in awe of that set piece as anybody when I watched it. Because as you’re doing it, you’re just doing little bits. Trying to piece it all together in your head, but really, it’s the director, the showrunners, that have the whole piece in their minds. So I was really impressed when I saw the finished result.”
Just as with the rest of the characters, clothes often made the women when it came to Maeve. Summerville designed the brothel costume in meticulous mix-and-match detail to evoke a woman who feels in control of every aspect of her life. Maeve in the Mariposa is “a powerful entity.” That look stands out in contrast to the the more muted pinks of Maeve’s frontier life, where “softer pastels and cotton fabrics” reveal her as “very vulnerable” to attack. But any Westworld fan will tell you that in some of her most powerful moments, Newton is operating without the benefit of a single stitch of clothing.
“Well, it definitely added a lot by what it had taken away,” Newton says of the scenes where her character is literally stripped bare. “I couldn’t hide behind anything. And that forced me to find a confidence physically in myself and also an acceptance. It’s like, ‘Well, here it is! Nothing I can do about it.’ You know what I mean? Just, talk about humility, you know? I felt this incredible sense of peace, and it was like it was a gift It’s one of the most profound acts I’ll ever commit, being naked in Westworld. I didn't do it lightly. It was deeply disturbing, but at the same time, I did feel this incredible peace. It wasn’t until afterward that I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, I am naked a lot in this show, man.’”
Summerville says that she offered Newton up a modicum of protection in the form of a merkin. “It’s kind of like a little fur bikini. It’s a prosthetic that’s made so that you don’t feel like you have to be completely naked. I do think it helps a lot, especially in the beginning. It just gives you kind of a sense that you’re completely not naked.” But she also reserves particular admiration for the way Newton approached those nude scenes. “She was completely fearless and very professional. I just remember walking in the trailer on the day where we shot her gutted on the butcher table. She was just kind of laying there with this whole belly open, full of intestines. She’s just very professional. I mean, she’s in incredible shape, so I think that helps a lot as well. You know? Yeah, she has, like, flawless skin. Everything looks amazing.”
A number of other characters—including Wood’s Dolores, James Marsden’s Teddy, Rodrigo Santoro’s Hector, and more—also spend a fair share of their time in the buff in Westworld Season 1. Every single one of those scenes upends the usual lascivious eye of cable TV nudity: bad things happen to the characters who ogle these naked hosts, and there is inherent power in seeing the the cast shut down like naked, broken Barbie Dolls. But even even Armistice (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) and Hector—who get to fight their way out, clotheslessly, in the end—are operating under someone’s orders. It’s only Maeve who is fully awake in her nudity. Your mileage may vary on whether Maeve is ever actually in control, but you’d also be hard-pressed to find something more visually arresting on Westworld than Newton gripping a scalpel and subverting the notion that a nude woman is a vulnerable woman.
Having worked as long as she has on film and television projects “that maybe didn’t capture the audience's imagination,” Newton is as thrilled as anyone that Westworld has caught on the way it has. (James Franco recently stopped her in New York to gush over his love of Maeve.) And while the fate of many characters are up in the air, there is zero doubt that Maeve will take center stage once again in Season 2. Of her character’s choice (yes, it was a choice) not to escape the park in the show’s finale, Newton says: “That decision is so powerful and badass. I don’t know what it is that she wants to go back for. I really, really don’t. It could be a number of things. But I’m just completely shocked by it. And clueless as to what will follow, but I know it’s gonna be pretty devastating. Whatever it is, is gonna be devastating.” Given the Season 1 performance Newton delivered often without benefit of dialogue, costume, or a sense of the larger picture, we can’t wait to see what devastations she brings with a few more tools and maybe even a belt to hang them on.
