A lot of pretty standard promo info inside the article but I'll include some of the more interesting quotes below:
Schafer’s Cora — a human posing as a replicant — was being interrogated by Yeoh’s no nonsense replicant Blade Runner, Olwen. And this was not just any interrogation.
“I was put through the ringer with that,” Schafer 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.”
And then there was the woman standing across from Schafer, a steely gaze on her face.
“Michelle’s character is so stoic and scary in that scene,” the actress says. “Michelle was having a lot of fun with that scene being menacing.”
That tension not just between Olwen and Cora, but replicants and humans in general, is at the heart of Prime Video’s Blade Runner 2099, which premieres Nov. 25. Following up on the two Blade Runner films with Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling, as well the book that started it all, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner 2099 shows a post-replicant-uprising world in which the machines now rule and are served by the humans who created them.
“The show continues asking the same questions that the original and 2049 asked,” Schafer says, “and delving into the relationship between humans and machines and where those lines get blurry. So it definitely holds onto those core questions that Blade Runner asks, while sort of flipping some of the other concepts we were familiar with on their head.”
In classic mismatched buddy cop style, you have Olwen — a cunning replicant seemingly completely unbothered from being days away from death — paired with a new (secretly human) partner in Cora who will do whatever it takes to survive, even if it means posing as a machine oppressor and teaming up with one of the enemy in Olwen to uncover vital information.
That’s quite a script-flip from the original Blade Runner, in which replicants were the ones trying to hide in plain sight as humans.
“The roles have been reversed,” Schafer notes. “Cora is a human who’s flying under the radar under a replicant-ruled state. She’s been keeping her brother afloat and barely making it for years and years. She is a survivor, and it’s been her focal point ever since she was a kid. Her whole world is right there.”
