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New Details About Netflix’s Sense8 Reported

Netflix acquired the exclusive rights to a new sci-fi thriller series called Sense8 last year. The series comes from the Wachowskis (of The Matrix fame) and Babylon 5 writer J. Michael Straczynski. Fo...
New Details About Netflix’s Sense8 Reported
Written by Chris Crum
  • Netflix acquired the exclusive rights to a new sci-fi thriller series called Sense8 last year. The series comes from the Wachowskis (of The Matrix fame) and Babylon 5 writer J. Michael Straczynski.

    For most of the time that has passed since the announcement, very little has been known about the plot, though Straczynski shared a bit in an interview in September.

    To recap, these are some things he said at the time, speaking to Comic Book Resources.

    “The series is contemporaneous with current events,” he explains. “It is somewhat science fiction in some respects. It concerns eight characters around the world, who are joined telepathically with each other, or empathically, and those who are after them and hunting them to try and stop this next evolution. And the cool thing is that we’re gonna shoot this in the countries that the stories are taking place.”

    He said that shooting will take place in Mumbai, Nairobi, London, Mexico, the U.S., Germany, and possibly Russia.

    “This is gonna be a show that will be shot around the world simultaneously,” he says. “We’re gonna have five different units shooting at the same time to tell the story, and it’s gonna be ridiculously huge, and the cool thing about working with the Wachowskis…when they did The Matrix, they didn’t want to do a show like anything else they’d ever seen before, and The Matrix created a whole new cinema language. And they said, ‘If we’re gonna do television, then we have to do the same thing. We have to create a whole new vocabulary for television production…for television, which you can do in TV. And so coming into this, working with them, we’re pioneering some new techniques and new approaches in television storytelling. It’s quite extraordinary.”

    Here’s the full interview:

    TVLine is now reporting that the eight characters are connected by a shared “violent” vision, and that among the so far uncast regulars are “a closeted Mexican telenovela hunk, an Icelandic party girl, a German safe-cracker, a Korean businesswoman, an African bus driver and a transgender American blogger,” as well as a villain named Mr. Whispers.

    Each episode, according to this report, will follow characters’ separate stories, and are shot in the UK, Seoul, Mumbai, Nairobi, Berlin, Mexico City, San Francisco and Chicago.

    The Wachowskis said a few months ago that pre-production would begin in January.

    “We’re excited to work with Netflix and Georgeville Television on this project, and we’ve wanted to work with Joe Straczynski for years, chiefly due to the fact his name is harder to pronounce than ours, but also because we share a love of genre and all things nerdy,” the Wachowskis said when the project was first announced. “Several years ago, we had a late night conversation about the ways technology simultaneously unites and divides us, and out of that paradox Sense8 was born.”

    If nothing else, the show should be visually pleasing. In addition to Straczynski’s comments, Netflix announced at CES that all of its original shows will be produced in 4K.

    Image via Image: Anna Hanks (Flickr/Wikimedia Commons)

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