WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Foundation Season 1, Episode 8, "The Missing Piece,” streaming now on AppleTV+.
Foundation's scope is larger than any single planet, family, or ruling class. Based on Isaac Asimov's novels, the Apple TV+ series follows a band of exiles who learn that the Galactic Empire is doomed to collapse. Saving humanity from ruin proves tricky when it's in direct opposition to how the Empire wants to rule. Zephyr Halima (T'Nia Miller), a priestess, is one of the few brave enough to confront ruler Brother Day (Lee Pace) about his morality and flawed perspective. She also embraces the soul that's developed within the long-living robot Eto Demerzel (Laura Birn), even if their final meeting leads to Halima's undoing.
Ahead of Zephyr's departure from Foundation in "The Missing Piece," CBR sat down with T'Nia Miller for an exclusive interview. Miller discussed her love of working in sci-fi and shared what attracted her to starring in Apple TV+'s Foundation series adaptation.
CBR: Foundation is a remarkably dramatic sci-fi series that eschews some of the more basic morality of other entries in the genre. At its core, it is pure drama with spaceships.
T'Nia Miller: That's exactly what it is, "drama with spaceships." Can I steal that line?
Of course! As a performer, is that ever daunting to take on?
Well, I originally got the script for Zephyr Halima and I went, "Oh, no, she's far too nice." I played a nice role recently, and I was getting all these offers of nice characters, but nice is boring. I don't like being nice. But I got on the phone with [Series Showrunner David S. Goyer]... I'm a spiritual being. We're all spiritual beings, but I have a spiritual philosophy. Zephyr Halima and I share some of the same values. Her principles and ideologies are very, very close to my own and it turns out, also very close to David's, who follows Tibetan Buddhism.
So we had this conversation. I was so inspired by that conversation, so inspired to find out and get all the scripts. [Zephyr] had fight in her, and she challenged the empire... I said, "Yeah, that's a bit of me." I think with any character, any role you go into, we're so light and dark. We all do these different shades of gray. We're such contradictions. When you get a script that reflects that, it's just a delight to delve into. [Foundation] shows humanity at its worst and its best within the same breath. I think the show does that beautifully. Of course, it's sci-fi, so we really get to play, because this world doesn't exist. Things happen that don't happen in our world. I love working in this genre.
You've got plenty of other strong down-to-earth dramatic fare, but Foundation isn't your only genre work. You've been in sci-fi like Doctor Who and horror like with The Haunting of Bly Manor. What excites you the most about genre-fare like this?
You know when you're a kid on the playground, you're five years old, and you pretend to be an astronaut, or you pretend that you can fly? Here we get to do it with cameras and lights. It's just the ultimate playing field isn't it, really? I remember being on set where [Zephyr] has this huge speech. We're in this historical setting which is stunning, absolutely stunning, and just to be there with all those SAs, you don't get to do that on your regular... I love drama as well, but you don't get to do that on a regular drama set.
Sometimes the sets are bigger than you are. For example, I just finished... I can speak about it yet. But there's another sci-fi project that I just finished, a series that's in the works. Sometimes you walk onto the set, and you're just blown away by somebody's imagination in the art department. I think that's always very exciting. The things they do on Doctor Who, you wouldn't believe it. A hoover, the hose of a vacuum cleaner, with some gaffer tape and spray paint, and you're like, "Wow." It's honestly [the most impressive] arts and crafts. They make it look incredible.
So much of Zephyr's screen-time is spent bouncing off of Lee Pace's Cleon and Laura Birn's Demerzel. What was it like to have them as scene-partners, helping ground this massive series in their personal connections?
I've got to tell you, I felt like a fish out of water when I did Foundation... Because they're filming for a year because of blasted COVID. [Zephyr's] not the biggest role. It's not a series regular, and it's such a massive production. Up until that point, I had been doing these jobs where I was there from the beginning to the end, and I could feel the temperature of the set, and what was expected. You suss out mates, you grow together, where here it's like, "No, boom, you're in it."
But Lee, bless him. I said "Okay, what am I doing here? What's going on? Help me out." He was such a gentleman. He really held my hand, and [so did] Laura Birn, who plays Demerzel. Lee really held my hand, because there is so much going on, and the director has to think about so many different things, and so I would do a take, and I looked at Lee, like, "Was that okay? Was that all right?" Bless him. He just knows what I'm doing. He would offer some notes as well. He's such a gentleman. We certainly found our beats together.
With the conclusion of this latest episode, we have to say goodbye to Zephyr. What was your response to reading that in the script for the first time?
Oh my god, it's so beautiful. A lot of people preach the preach, but they don't walk the walk. Zephyr really does. And because I believe in another realm, it really sung to me. When my grandmother was passing away -- she raised me along with my mother, we're very, very close, she's my matriarch, and she's passed now -- and leading up to her death, there was a time when you could see that. I felt like she had one foot in this realm, and one foot in the other.
She was a real spiritual being. Her whole life was about other people. She also wasn't one to be fucked with, and she reminded me of Zephyr Halima in that way. So, she wasn't ever scared of death. She always saw it as a new beginning and a way to this journey that we have here in this lifetime. For me, for my Nan, and for Zephyr Halima, it's a discovery of love. And how to remain in that love space always, when we're challenged with ego, or challenged with the empire, and earthly things. So I found it really beautiful. It was beautiful to do with Laura.