After a glut of post-apocalyptic book-to-screen adaptations over the years, the excitement for these projects has started to wane. However, we’re here to ask you to muster your enthusiasm for one more because Apple TV+’s Silo is a dystopian series you do not want to skip.
The new gritty mystery series is an adaptation of Hugh Howey’s popular book trilogy, which includes Wool, Shift, and Dust. It uncovers the story of the last 10,000 people on Earth who live underground in a city-sized silo that protects them from the toxic world outside. No one knows who or why the silo was built, but when some of the inhabitants start to seek answers they discover the deadly truth.
Silo is filled with a cast of all-star talent, including Rebecca Ferguson, Common, Harriet Walter, David Oyelowo, Iain Glen and Rashida Jones. Also part of the line-up is Avi Nash, marking his second post-apocalyptic TV appearance after a recurring role in The Walking Dead.
Gizmodo Australia spoke with Nash ahead of Silo’s premiere to find out more about the dystopian series and why it’s worth a watch.
Nash plays Lukas Kyle in Silo, a character who enters the story around mid-way through and brings a dose of optimism and hope.
“He’s a dreamer and he’s a lover. He’s not a fighter and in this dystopian post-apocalyptic world, you know, we need those dreamers and lovers,” Nash said. “I think Lukas represents, for me, something that’s really amazing about humanity, that you can kind of put us in the worst situations possible that we can imagine and we will still have people who dream about what it might be if we were somewhere else. They still dream about how things could be better.”
“For me Lucas is hope,” he added.
Many of Nash’s scenes are shared with Rebecca Ferguson’s Juliette, an engineer on a quest to solve a loved one’s murder. The duo are often found in the cafeteria which features a wall-sized screen with a video feed to the outside world. Like many things in Silo, Nash revealed this set was actually built completely practically:
“They tried to keep things as practical as possible…” Nash explained.
“That screen is actually practical, so it’s not a green screen. That screen actually lights up and it’s sort of all LED and you can see just what you see in the show, as I’m sitting there.”
The transition of the world of the silo from the books to the screen is one thing many fans are no doubt looking forward to seeing, Nash included. The actor said he questioned at first how a 144-level underground city would look on screen.
“I was like, how are they going to do it? And then Apple went and did it. They built the thing,” Nash said. “…just the scale and scope of everything was unbelievable… I’d never seen anything like that.”
Like all good sci-fi, Silo attempts to dissect societal issues on screen, which leads to some “big questions”, according to Nash. In particular, those questions pertain to the nature of truth.
“I think to me the big question in the series, and as a sci-fi, that sets it apart from maybe some of these other dystopian sci-fi’s, is a question about truth, and who deserves to have the truth,” he said.
“You know, is it just the government and then that’s how they control the population? Or is it the way that sort of exists in our world today, where we live in the post-truth age…?”
“So I think Silo is sort of packaged in an action-y dystopian, ‘let’s go figure this thing out’ way. But I think it asks some really big questions,” he added.
Silo spans a ten-episode season, but it’s the beginning and the end of the show that Nash said were his personal favourites.
“I think that the world-building that happens in the first episode is incredible. I think it does such a great job of giving you that feeling that I had when I walked onto the set of like, holy shit, this is really happening,” he said.
As for the season finale, the actor teased: “We get all the answers that we wanted, and a lot more questions.”
The first two episodes of Silo drop on Apple TV+ on May 5 with new episodes released weekly through June 30.