Maxance Vincent
Costume designer Michael Wilkinson has worked in the world of science-fiction and fantasy before, with films like TRON: Legacy, Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, Sucker Punch, Man of Steel, and, most recently, through the world of Star Wars in Andor (we also talked to him on that show last year here). However, his latest work in Netflix’s 3 Body Problem may be his most ambitious yet since the show itself was “a huge challenge,” as he tells Awards Radar on Zoom:
“There was so much to cover. Not only the sequences that took place in contemporary London, but we also, in our story, travel across the world. We visited Scotland, New York in the United Nations, the Panama Canal, and Switzerland. Every day was a challenging reality to create, let alone the huge parts of episodes one and two that took place during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 70s.
There was a lot of research to be done to try to get that right and do justice to that very sensitive period in recent history. But there was also a third level, which was the level of the game that this alien culture had created with their very sophisticated technologies, where they would plant players in their virtual recreations of different time periods that were supposed to be so incredibly authentic and believable. You could feel every grain of sand and smell the costumes. It was really challenging to come back to life. We went to Shang Dynasty China, 16th century Europe, and 13th century Mongolia with Kublai Khan. There was a challenge every day, and it was definitely never boring.”
In discussing with showrunners David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo, Wilkinson knew how passionate they were about adapting Liu Cixin’s vision to life and reinventing long-format storytelling after doing so with HBO’s Game of Thrones:
“We knew we wanted to be original and fresh with our storytelling. We wanted it to be an intelligent story that makes the audience really pay attention and concentrate. For the costumes, I think they just wanted them to feel incredibly authentic. Some pretty strange things happen to our contemporary characters, and we wanted to make sure that we spent enough time with the clothing and characters to make the audience feel like this is their world. So when strange things happen, it’s much more believable and feels like these things could happen. I spent a lot of time doing lots of thinking about the details of how these contemporary characters would dress themselves so that they felt incredibly authentic and not designed, with lots of idiosyncratic details that would draw the viewer in. I knew that our only hope for drawing the audience in was to create characters that we really cared about and identified with, and I put a lot of work into the contemporary costumes’ details.”
Designing costumes for a show that blends so many genres together could seem very challenging, and Wilkinson admits that “it felt like I was designing 13 shows at the same time.” However, he wanted to ensure that each specific genre and world had its own type of textures and details to make it feel as real as possible. But one of the larger discussions he had with the showrunners was on the creation of the Sophon (Sea Shimooka), the San-Ti’s concept of humanity present in the video game as Jin (Jess Hong) and Jack (John Bradley) explore its different levels:
“This constructed character exists in the game, and we spent a lot of time looking at many different options of what that might look like. But when I met Sea Shimooka, the actress who plays the role, she had such a strong physicality and a minimal modern quality to her. We created something a little bit timeless and touched on different genres. It was almost like something from a video game. But we also wanted it to feel visceral and be aware of the textures and the flow of the fabric, so it would be something that humans could relate to and something that would move as she floated through the air or walked on lava. That was a costume that we spent a lot of time thinking about prototyping to come up with what we saw as a finished product.”
With such an ambitious show like this, there was much to cover in our interview, which you can listen to below. We also discussed the challenges of contrasting the costumes of Jin and Jack in the video game to the real world, avoiding clichés when creating the Sophon, designing contemporary looks for the Oxford Five, the research process of the show’s Cultural Revolution scenes, and working with Benedict Wong and Liam Cunningham in building the looks of Clarence Shi and Thomas Wade.
You can listen to my full interview with Michael below and see all episodes of 3 Body Problem on Netflix.
[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]
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