For an apocalyptic drama, new series Station Eleven feels weirdly a little familiar. When an at-first unassuming new illness starts to spread across the population, its affects are soon realised to be deadly and the world turns to chaos. Yeah, pretty familiar…
The series starts when Jeevan (Himesh Patel) is watching a play when suddenly the leading man dies on stage. Trying to help out, he takes one of the young actors, Kirsten (Matilda Lawler), back to her house. However, little do the two know that this is ‘day 0’ of the upcoming pandemic and their lives are soon to be entwined forever.
Created for television by Patrick Somerville, Station Eleven spans multiple timelines and tells the stories of the survivors of this flu outbreak as they attempt to rebuild and reimagine the world anew while holding on to the best of what’s been lost. However, this isn’t your typical post-apocalyptic series (we’ll get to the Shakespearian travelling troupe later) as it focuses on the positives that can come after incredible hardship.
“The humour is one of the things that sets it apart for me, from a lot of the things that you may compare it to,” Himesh Patel tells us when we speak to him about the series. “I think a lot of the best things do this, where you can balance comedy and drama in a way that the drama hits harder. Because it almost sideswipes you in a way. I think it also lends a tone to the show, which is ultimately of hope and joy.”
The series jumps ahead to the future in episode two, where we’re reunited with a now-adult Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis), who is part of a new group of people. However, unlike plenty of post-apocalyptic fiction, this group isn’t dealing with the undead, or other humans (though there is a bit of that) or trying to get back to the technological advances we’re currently at.
No, this group have decided to travel the country performing Shakespeare plays: “For some reason there’s an enduring human interest in them,” Mackenzie Davis tells us and we ask her why she thinks this group of people have decided that it’s Shakespeare that will help people through an apocalypse. “The structure and certainty of these plays are still mined in our 2020 era for new meaning, and there are revivals. I just saw Macbeth last week, and I saw Hamlet two weeks before that. We’re not stopping making these plays. But there’s also a finite collection of them and I think the structure of that provides a degree of certainty in an uncertain world to these characters who have chosen the most uncertain way of living in that world.”
That these group of actors have decided to perform their art to bring joy to themselves and the population during a time of incredible hardship resonated with Davis, seeing as that’s pretty much what she did in deciding to continue being part of the show during the Covid-19 pandemic: “It’s something that Patrick, myself and other people spoke about a lot – how there’s this echo in the show of what was happening in our real life,” she says. “Of this single focus obsessive pursuit of something. It doesn’t have to be the arts, but that’s the field that we work in. It can be to the detriment of your personal life and to your relationships and your mental health, but you just keep moving forward until you finish the thing that you have to finish.
“It’s very positive and it also like takes a lot out of you. I think there’s something about this survival story that echoes throwing yourself into your career, your art, in a way that it can feel like life and death sometimes. It’s not for anybody else around you, but for you it can feel like life and death. Patrick was playing with echoing that in the structure of the story and having these big, huge dramatic moments through Shakespearian reconciliations on stage, and treating them like life and death moments. Because that’s what it feels like sometimes. And sometimes it’s just chill as hell. You never know!”
In this future, Kirsten is no longer with Jeevan, and the reasoning behind that mystery is told through a series of flashbacks taking place during the early years after the pandemic. Luckily, Patel found an easy way to measure the various stages in Jeevan’s life during those years: “My beard was how I kept track of time,” he laughs. “I wrapped beginning of June, I think it was, and I looked at a photo of myself in January when we started and I measured (I didn’t literally measure) the length of my beard and it really brought home to me how long we’ve been on this show!”
Luckily, the various stories and timelines didn’t just rest on Himesh Patel’s beard length, but rather with showrunner Patrick Somerville who is no stranger to wrangling crazy stories for TV, writing the series Maniac. “Patrick can hold an almost inhuman amount of stories in his mind at one time, as is evidenced by the structure of the show,” Davis says. “He’s really collaborative. He has a lot of space for a lot of epic stories, all at once. I think all of us were amazed by it. We were like: ‘what’s happening with mine?’. He had the whole three dimensional map in his head.”
“I was thinking about it in the sense of the creatures in Arrival that can perceive time in a way that humans never can,” Patel muses. “He just perceives stories in a way that I just can’t. He’s talking about it in this all-encompassing way because every bit of the story exists in his head at the same moment. It’s pretty amazing.”
The irony of filming a series about a devastating flu pandemic during a devastating flu pandemic was not lost on the cast, who found it a strange experience to film during the Covid outbreak: “The process of it all was pretty intense in a sense that there was a lot more to think about in terms of outside of ‘action’ and ‘cut’,” Patel nods. “You’ve got to put a shield on, you have to make sure that you’re sanitising your hands. Personally, when I work, I like to get to know the crew as much as I can because you’re carried by these people for months. We still got to know each other, but I didn’t see their faces until my last day when for some reason everyone was given cupcakes. So to eat the cupcake they had to take their masks off and it was the weirdest thing! I’d made up half their faces for five months and then suddenly I got to see them! It was quite emotional, really. But it was strange”
“I think I developed an almost Pavlovian response to getting ready to act,” Davis adds. “Especially in the first part of the show, we were shooting indoors in an airport. That should give an indication of how dead the world was at that time, that we were shooting at an airport that no planes were ever flying. It was very dark inside the place that we were filming in for months. We were all wearing shields and masks. I just couldn’t see anything. I’d have to get so close to people’s faces to see them and I felt like I was always walking through a haze to get anywhere. Then when you get to do your job you could take off your mask and see everything. This really stark shift from murky alienation into absolute clarity made it really deeply desirable to be on set and get to act.”
The pandemic has certainly changed a lot of people’s lives. However, what it certainly hasn’t changed is us genre-loving folk enjoying end-of-the-world goodness. In fact, Patel has starred in two of them in the past few months with Don’t Look Up last December and now Station Eleven! “Yeah, it’s pretty strange in both projects being told the world will end!” he laughs. “It’s very strange that the two projects that I wound up doing during the pandemic, one was about the pandemic and the other one was about the potential end of the world in a different way. It’s just a very big coincidence. The fact that they were both in development before the pandemic even happened… I’m still trying to wrap my head around the probability of that. It’s like a new niche that I’m building for myself…!”
Join us for the end of the world as Station Eleven is released on Starzplay on 30 January.
