‘Westworld’s Wright revels in Bernard’s growth
Bernard Lowe, the Westworld host with the most reserve, showed a surprising tough-guy persona in Sunday’s episode of HBO’s sci-fi drama.
The cultured, cerebral, careful and sometimes confused android impersonated an action star, punching an attacker in the neck and throwing him through a glass divider. Later, he remembered the cause of a laboratory slaughter: He coldly ordered faceless drone hosts to go on a murder-suicide rampage.
“Bernard’s mild-mannered, until he’s not,” says Jeffrey Wright, the actor who plays the increasingly complex character.
In Westworld’s population of humans and android hosts, Wright ( Angels in America, The Hunger Games) straddles two groups: He’s a robot, built in the image of human park co-creator Arnold Weber, who works with humans and manages the futuristic park’s hosts.
“He holds a position unlike the other hosts. He’s experienced in the host side and the human side, so he’s (different from) Dolores or Maeve,” although he’s been a little slower in developing a consciousness, Wright says. “He’s wrestling with allegiances.”
Bernard was mild-mannered at the start of the first season, a puppetmaster pulling hosts’ strings inside the protected confines of park management offices.
In Season 2, he’s been out in the very dangerous wild, his conservative attire in tatters after being pursued, imprisoned and dragged all over the park.
Bernard also battles hand tremors, speech difficulties and full-on convulsions, the consequences of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head ordered last season by Arnold’s partner, Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins).
“His synthetic brain was not invulnerable to bullet holes,” Wright, 52, says wryly.
If that’s not enough, Bernard has to make sense of experiences from multiple timelines, because he can’t fix his memories to particular points in time. That confuses Bernard, who pictures past events as if they’re in the present. At one point, he asks, “Is this now?” The multiple timelines are complicated for viewers, but also for Wright. Scenes often were filmed out of order to meet a demanding production schedule.
“It’s been the most challenging math that I’ve had to work through,” he says. “As actors, most of us are used to understanding as much as we possibly can, but we understand, because of the scale and trajectory of ( Westworld), there are going to be limitations to what we know.”
Sunday’s episode took Bernard in new and demanding directions. Early in the episode, android Clementine (Angela Sarafyan) dragged and dumped him outside a cave. Inside, he discovered — surprise! — Elsie (Shannon Woodward), a human park behavioral analyst missing since Bernard, acting on Ford’s orders, attacked her last season.
Relying on previous memories, Bernard opened a secret entrance to an underground compound, where Bernard and Elsie found James Delos, founder of the company that owns the theme park, or at least a hybrid version: an android body copy with transplanted human consciousness. When Delos attacked Elsie, Bernard quickly subdued him.
Bernard “holds a position unlike the other hosts. He’s wrestling with allegiances.”
Later, Bernard realized he had some control, telling Elsie: “For the first time, I get to decide who I want to be.”
For all his physical and mental difficulties, Bernard is learning shocking truths about the park: that Delos is collecting data on its human guests and that rich people see technology as a path to eternal life, reportedly a realworld pursuit in Silicon Valley.
Wright sees parallels to contemporary matters. “Delos has motives beyond being a theme park … and ques- tions of corporate control and agendas are beginning to be explored in a way that I think will resonate today.”
If Bernard can keep from leaking too much cortical fluid, he has a chance to uncover more of Westworld’s mysteries while learning more about who he is and what he wants to do.
“In the first season, Bernard was on a journey of discovery about the park that led to discovery about himself,” Wright says. “Now, he’s becoming aware of a larger game that’s being played.”