SFX clusive: Bigger, darker, more adult, but at the same time funnier…
The cast of Merlin is bigging up series three of the show in the latest SFX magazine : “It’s war. Full-blown war,” says Anhony Head with the kind of zeal his character, Uther, saves for burning witches “It’s huge. I have to say, some of the effects are amazing. When you see a huge, flaming catapult shot rolling down the street, it’s like, ‘Oh my god!’ Big, big stuff.”
Colin Morgan adds: “Bad things are happening. There are some big things coming up. The third series is set a year in the future. We get straight into the action and we don’t really hold back on a lot of the confrontations, and the changes in the characters are evident right from the very beginning. Friendships are being forged and broken and reborn and burned again. And that’s within the first couple of episodes; really within eight pages of the first script.”
But it’s not all doom and gloom. “It’s still a family show. Kids can still watch it,” says producer Julian Murphy. “We’re careful about what we do. People watch it on different levels… We also keep a lot of humour. We still do episodic comedy stories. There’s a fantastic story where a goblin appears – played by Mark Williams – which is probably the funniest episode we’ve ever made. But we are a little bit darker than when we started, without a shadow of doubt.”
Read loads more of this four-page feature on series three of Merlin (and see some fabulous images we’re allowed to put online yet) in SFX 200 , out next Wednesday.
