In 2001, Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which follows Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) as he deals with the Old and New Gods alongside Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane), a.k.a. Odin, was published. 19 years later, the television adaptation of the show will air Season 3 on STARZ January 10, 2021. Gaiman sat with CBR to discuss the latest season, how past screen adaptations of his work influenced Season 3 and the highly anticipated Lakeside storyline.
CBR: After the past two seasons of American Gods, as well as having a few of your other properties adapted to screen, what have you learned from this experience, and how's that going to be applied to the upcoming season?
Neil Gaiman: I think it's interesting. The biggest thing that I learned wound up probably being making Good Omens, where I was writing it, and I was showrunning. In many ways, the thing that I learned was not to believe things that sounded very credible that people would tell me.
You know, somebody would say, "We can't. You can't do this. We can't afford it," and I used to believe that, and then once I'd show run the thing, I'm like, "No, that's actually not true." We can't afford to do the $600 thousand version of that, but we could also do a $300 thousand version of that; we could do $150 thousand version of that, and we could also do a $75 thousand version of that, which is what it costs us to turn on the lights in the morning and shoot something, and we have to have something on film. So, let's assume that we're going to shoot it and move on from there and figure out how, and it was, it made me a lot harder -- I guess, to put it bluntly, a lot harder to bullshit having show run my own series, because I knew that, actually, if you want to do something, there is always a way.
With that notion of there's always a way and anything really is possible, what are some of the theoretical impossibilities or more fantastical things we can expect from Season 3 with that mindset?
One of the things that we knew that we wanted to do, for example, was shoot Lakeside. It's one of the sections in the book that people loved the most. It was one of the things that I've been looking forward to ever since we began, and then figuring out, "okay, how do we do this?" How do we shoot this winter place? How do we do it? What's it going to be? What's it going to feel like? How do we get all of this amazing, little, small town place onto a screen and summon up and evoke Wisconsin in the winter? And what are the ways of doing that? I think that, for me, was the biggest and most exciting one.
Feeling like the American Gods team and under the leadership of Chic [Charles Eglee], we're starting to deploy CGI as its own art form. One of the things that American Gods has always been is beautiful. Even, you know, in the second season -- which might not have been as strong on story as Season 1, let alone Season 3, which is fantastic -- it was always beautiful, but making sure that the beauty carried the story was huge for me in the same way that one of the things we wound up doing... Season 1 was fantastic, but it wound up feeling a little bit episodic, almost like an anthology show. Here, they go to another town, and they meet another god, and another thing happens.
One of the really important things for us in Season 3 was for the whole thing to feel integrated. All of the story that we had in Season 1 and Season 2, where was it going? How do we get to this point? So Shadow now, getting Shadow particularly to step up and be our lead, be are hero.
And Ricky's, you know Ricky, if you're going to talk to Ricky, you will find -- or if you've ever talked to Ricky, you will find -- he is one of the sweetest, funniest, most charming human beings on this planet, and Shadow as a character is a lot more sort of taciturn and a lot less charming than Ricky. So, allowing the version of Ricky in Lakeside as he's adopting a new identity to become just more vulnerable, funny, charming, more Ricky was an absolute delight.
Based on the Neil Gaiman novel of the same name, American Gods stars Ricky Whittle, Emily Browning, Bruce Langley, Yetide Badaki, Ian McShane, Omid Abtahi and Ashley Reyes. Season 3 will premiere on Jan. 10, 2021 on STARZ.
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