“Will operates from a place of such immense love and clarity, which I think is often common with people who are dealing with facing their own mortality,” reveals “3 Body Problem” star Alex Sharp. For our recent webchat about portraying Will Downing, a brilliant scientist diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, Sharp recounts a day on set when “there was a line that was ended up being cut. In the bar scene at the beginning of the season, where Jack makes a comment to Will about something to do with him giving up and just being a teacher, Will responds, ‘don’t you think there’s something really noble about dedicating your life to the future?'” he recalls, adding, “that’s just Will. Then you put that person in the position of being terminally ill and it’s like almost a microcosm or metaphor for what humanity is dealing with. The imminent potential demise,” he explains. “The relationship to time in the show is really interesting. Fighting back within this specific amount of time. But Will is going through what humanity is going through, on a smaller scale. And he responds with love. That’s how he chooses to accept his fate.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
SEE Exclusive Video Interview: David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and Alexander Woo (‘3 Body Problem’ creators)
“3 Body Problem” was co-created by multiple Emmy-winning “Game of Thrones” duo David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, who serve as co-creators and producers with writer/producer Alexander Woo (“True Blood”), based on the Hugo Award-winning novel “The Three-Body Problem” by Chinese author Liu Cixin, the first in Liu’s “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy. Benioff, Weiss and Woo co-wrote the pilot episode together, titled “Countdown,” which takes place in both 1960s China and modern-day England, where astrophysicists try to uncover and expose what is ultimately revealed as an existential threat to humanity from a distant and more advanced alien civilization known as the San-ti. The sci-fi drama’s international cast also includes Rosalind Chao, Jess Hong, Benedict Wong, Jovan Adepo, Eiza Gonzalez, Sea Shimooka, Marlo Kelly and “Game of Thrones” alums Jonathan Pryce, John Bradley and Liam Cunningham.
Sharp spent time with death doulas (practitioners who guide terminally ill patients through the process of dying, death and grief) to help him prepare for the role. He also decided early on that to portray Will authentically, he would lose a substantial amount of weight. “When you lose that much weight it changes how you walk, how you talk. Everything changes. The look in your eye, it’s a whole extra layer to how you move through the world, and it helps psychologically because the character really loses everything.,” He says. “He loses his friend. He lost his career. He loses the woman he loves. He’s losing his body. He’s losing his life. It’s quite hard to play a character that loses that much. Usually, you get some small victories here or there, but that it just kind of helped with that, and understanding how someone operates from that place, and the different ways that you can break as a person.”
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