ARCADIA FIRE

Guillermo del Toro’s Trollhunters expands and finds aliens

The lowdown on Guillermo del Toro’s second Tale Of Arcadia, 3Below.

1 IT’S INSPIRED BY THE WIRE AND BREAKING BAD – KINDA

Part two of Guillermo del Toro’s Tales Of Arcadia trilogy, 3Below, arrives on Netflix later this month. It expands the story of Prince Krel (Diego Luna) and Princess Aja (Tatiana Maslany), who were first introduced in Trollhunters. The duo escape from their planet with their bodyguard, Vex (Nick Offerman), only to crash-land on Earth in the idyllic town of Arcadia. As they try to fix their spaceship, the alien trio find themselves having to blend into the town as humans.

The trilogy, as a whole, is del Toro’s second television project and he tells Red Alert it wasn’t a medium he felt compelled to jump into until he watched The Wire and then Breaking Bad. “From that, I said this is a medium that I want to be part of. You watch TV now because what binge-watching and long-form give you is an intimate relationship with characters. It’s like you know them.”

2 IT’S THE MOST SCI-FI PART OF THE TRILOGY

Executive producer Rodrigo Blaas tells Red Alert that the visually ambitious CG series is the result of their epic world-building. “Netflix from the beginning allowed us to write the canvas which allowed us to plan ahead,” he explains. “We say 3Below is our crossover mostly because it really is the story of Aja, Krel and Vex and making their story here on Earth. It’s different from Jim’s story in Trollhunters. We think of the unique emotional journeys for these characters. When you have that in place, you start playing.”

3 IT FEATURES DEL TORO’S SIGNATURE AESTHETIC

As with most things from del Toro, 3Below: Tales Of Arcadia was conceived as a complete world for the director, where fashion, characters and landscape all played a part. “There are certain projects that come like a song and everything lands,” he says. “And sometimes, everything lands and they ask you things over the course of three years and you can answer anything [about it]. Arcadia came like that. I knew it needed to look like Pasadena [California]. I knew that it needed to look like it was frozen in time. I knew that the story was atemporal, like the clothes were modern but the clothes were in the ’50s.”

4 IT WILL BE WEIRD

Another key storyteller from Trollhunters who’s part of the 3Below writer’s room is Arrow co-creator Marc Guggenheim, who says they’ve taken what they’ve learned from the first series to build this one. “A lot of it had to do with the amount of story we could pack, or not pack, into an episode,” he reveals. “We’re telling a more ambitious story this time. Trollhunters was a very classic hero’s journey. 3Below is more eccentric and left of centre, and we’re trying a crazier story.”

5 IT INVOLVES A REAL CLOSE ENCOUNTER

3Below will also boast the vocal work of Oscar-winner Glenn Close as the voice of the alien Mothership. Executive producer Chad Hammes says when they conceived the idea of Mothership, del Toro said it had to be Close. They landed her because they give her character a rich evolution. “She’s robotic in her first voice sessions but Guillermo wanted that because we needed her to start from one place and then become an emotional character.” TB

3Below comes to Netflix on 21 December.