Blade Runner is one of the few franchises where financial disappointment has never stopped it from feeling culturally untouchable. Ridley Scott‘s 1982 original flopped before becoming arguably the most influential science fiction film ever made, and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 repeated it at a bigger budget, losing money theatrically while critics called it one of the great sequels.
With just over two months to go until the premiere, Amazon now appears to be properly rolling out the marketing for its live-action series, Blade Runner 2099. The latest images do the expected work of selling the show’s scale and atmosphere, but the more interesting detail may be a behind-the-scenes story. Entertainment Weekly has debuted exclusive first-look photos from Blade Runner 2099 ahead of the limited series’ Nov. 25 launch on Prime Video, alongside new comments from stars Hunter Schafer and Michelle Yeoh.
The images show Schafer’s Cora alongside Lewis Gribben’s Elias and Dimitri Abold’s Bebeto, plus Yeoh’s Olwen with weapon drawn and the two leads moving carefully through a crowded space. It’s more of the “sunshine noir” aesthetic showrunner Silka Luisa has described, a deliberate break from the perpetual rain of Scott’s original. The more entertaining material is Schafer’s account of shooting her first major scene opposite Yeoh, an interrogation in which Cora, a human hiding among replicants, gets grilled by Yeoh’s replicant Blade Runner.
“That was sort of an insane day,” Schafer says. “I was put through the ringer with that,” she recalls. “Because I was strapped to this platform, flipped upside down, they’re spraying me with a hose, and I’m covered in this weird goo that heals replicants. The amount of substances that I was covered in was kind of absurd.” As for her scene partner, Schafer adds that “Michelle’s character is so stoic and scary in that scene. Michelle was having a lot of fun with that scene being menacing.”
Yeoh, for her part, seems pleased with the result. “I love the way that scene came off,” she says. Blade Runner has a long tradition of grueling interrogation scenes doing heavy thematic lifting, from the Voight-Kampff test that opens the 1982 film to K’s baseline exams in 2049, and the fact that 2099’s version involves replicant-healing goo hints at how much the show’s premise inverts the old setup. Luisa has been open about the state of things in 2099, telling EW earlier this year that “There’s been a replicant uprising that feels like it’s been bubbling up. And between 2049 and 2099, that’s happened. So the war has happened, and the humans have lost. Our worst fears imagined.” She added:
“The replicants are now the power brokers of the city. And humans are the second-class citizens.”
Meanwhile, Luisa comes off Apple’s underrated Shining Girls, Shogun’s Jonathan van Tulleken directs the first two episodes, and the producer list includes Scott, 2049 co-writer Michael Green, and Isa Dick Hackett, daughter of Philip K. Dick. The road here was not smooth, with a planned Belfast shoot scrapped during the 2023 strikes before production landed in Prague, and the show has been sitting finished for the better part of two years. Long post-production windows can mean trouble or can simply mean a streamer waiting for the right slot, and a late-November global drop of all eight episodes reads like Amazon positioning this as its holiday centerpiece. On the evidence of two actors this invested in an interrogation scene, the show at least seems to be taking the assignment seriously.
Blade Runner 2099 premieres Nov. 25 on Prime Video.