Fresh off of recent joint BBC productions Chernobyl and Years and Years, HBO released the full-length trailer for its next British Broadcasting Corporation collab. His Dark Materials, due to debut this fall, will be a television adaptation of Philip Pullman’s bestselling fantasy series of the same name. And though the show doesn’t yet have a solid release date, HBO and the BBC must be feeling optimistic about it—it’s already been renewed for a second season.
The show stars Logan’s Dafne Keen as the orphaned Lyra Belacqua. She lives in a world controlled by an oppressive church, and embarks upon an adventure after children, including her best friend, begin to go missing. She falls under the care of the menacing Mrs. Coulter, played by Jane Eyre’s Ruth Wilson, who seems to know a bit more than she’s saying about the missing kid situation. The show will also star James McAvoy and Lin-Manuel Miranda
The first book in the series, The Golden Compass, was adapted into kid-friendly film that flopped in 2007. (Its tepid reviews weren't helped by a promised boycott by some Catholics.) But HBO’s take on the story appears to be an altogether darker affair. In the world of His Dark Materials, humans are accompanied by “dæmons,” physical manifestations of their souls that take the form of talking animals. In the trailer, Mrs. Coulter’s monkey dæmon physically attacks Lyra’s dæmon, Pantalaimon, causing the girl to scream, writhing in pain. And it also doesn’t look like whatever is going on with the missing children is particularly pleasant.
Wilson, however, seems to have had some fun with her villain role. "You’ll see that she becomes a bit of a monkey when she’s at her worst," she said of her character during a panel at San Diego Comic-Con Thursday. "I do something quite nasty to a child. It was quite fun, though!"
