THE LE TTER FOR THE KING
Royal MailW W W.SCI FI N OW.CO.U K
hands up and magical forces come out of
their fingers,” says Davies. “The question
was... how do you build a world that can
feel fun and exciting but have real jeopardy
where people can get hurt and characters you
care about could possibly die – yet feel like
it was an appropriate thing for both families
to be able to watch together and for adults
to watch by themselves? It was incredibly
difficult to do but in the end, all the actors
really got it.”
Serkis agrees that maintaining this
family-led vibe was key, especially with
today’s binge-heavy culture and abundance
of boundary-pushing content: “I think the
messages it’s trying to send out are really
important for young children: working
together as a team, coming together and
overcoming individual problems to fight
against a greater evil,” she suggests. “When
you have the chance to sit down and watch
something with everyone in your family, it’s
a really nice shared experience.”
With the show’s first series consisting of
just six episodes, it surely won’t be long before
audiences find themselves eager to find out
what’s next for Tiuri, Lavinia and their quest
to save their world from darkness. “I’m quite
happy leaving it up to Will and the creators
because they’ve done such a brilliant job,”
says Serkis when quizzed on where she’d like
to see Lavinia go in Season Two. “Ideas that
I’ve heard so far for the second series make
me think that 1) It’s really exciting, and 2)
I could never come up with those ideas on
my own,” she laughs. “We’ll just have to
wait and see.”
Davies is also hopeful he’ll get to return to
the complex characters and immersive worldsthat Dragt created – and he has no shortage
of source material to pull from should the
opportunity arise. “The great thing is that
Tonke wrote a second book, The Secrets Of
The Wild Wood, which is fantastic. In some
ways with Season One, it was a case of: ‘What
can we leave out?’ – there was just so much
more we wanted to put in,” he teases. “There’s
a lot more story that we want to tell.”The Letter For The King will be launched on
Netflix on 20 March.| (^035)
Blind Ambition
Biting off more than you can chew isn’t always a bad thing...
Tiuri’s quest might be pretty daunting, but the cast and crew also had their work cut out for them whilst
bringing The Letter For The King to life. Thankfully, they quickly discovered that ignorance is bliss. “It’s
funny because none of us had made a TV show like this before,” reveals Will Davies, the show’s writer.
“We really didn’t know what we were doing so we bit off far more than we could chew – but in a
funny way precisely because we didn’t know what we were doing, nobody who knew anything about
television would have tried to do what we tried to do,” he laughs. “We tried to do something that was
hopelessly over-ambitious and as a result it’s got this scale that’s out of proportion to the size it really
should have been. That fits the story, to me,” adds Davies. “It needed to be this huge world so we could
really feel how difficult the journey for these young people was.”