The new season of The Lazarus Project is packed with excitement: more time travel, more action, and more faces. Zoe Telford is one of the new cast members to join the series. FILMHOUNDS quizzed her all about Season 2.
Where does the new series pick up from?
Oh, well. Buckle up! We pick up at the beginning of Season 2 where the world is locked into a loop. So the world ends every three weeks. The Lazarus team has to obviously find a way of undoing that. We meet my character, an astrophysicist called Kitty Grey, who is heading up a group of scientists who are building a time machine …
Tell us about Dr. Kitty Gray.
She's an outlier. Science is her world and she is completely dedicated to it. Dedicated her life to that. I can very much imagine that the people who work with her might worry about her mental health and happiness because she's always the first in the lab and the last one to leave. She gets four hours of sleep a night. She's relentless. In pursuit of excellence. She wants to do something very radical, which is to create a machine that travels through time.
Is this character a new type of role for you?
A genius astrophysicist is a new one for me!
Did you do much research to prepare for the role?
I did do a little bit of reading about black holes and quarks. But I think you kind of have to have a really solid understanding of maths before you can kind of really, really kind of dig deep into that stuff…
But viewers don't need to understand what quarks are to enjoy the show?
No, certainly not!
What attracted you to this project?
Well, if somebody asks you, Do you want to play a genius astrophysicist? Who's building a time machine? It's a bit of a no-brainer!
But the great thing about what I really like about Joe's [Barton] writing is that it is across-the-board kind of brilliant. So all the characters are, are really well-written and kickass characters. You know, the guys are great, the women in it are fantastic. And for that reason alone, it was a big draw. There's some really poignant and beautiful parts of it, as well.
It struck me watching that the show raises a lot of philosophical topics and political questions. Do you think it's a political show?
I think it looks at the instability of our planet, for sure. So obviously, part and parcel of that is politics and what's happening politically in the world and between countries. I wouldn't say it's necessarily at its heart, but it's in there, absolutely. I think often when something is fantasy then it's a very good and safe way to explore those kinds of things because it's not so much on the nose. There's a safety in that, I suppose. So I guess in that respect, it is a good vehicle to explore the instabilities that human beings face.
If you could go back in time, where would you go and why?
I've been thinking about this… I would invent a pregnancy-simulating machine. I would go back to the dawn of time. I would make sure that everybody went through the pregnancy stimulating machine in the hope that if everybody could experience the feelings of carrying a child, they might not inflict violence on other people and there would be less pain, suffering, and war in the world.
Do you have any projects coming up you're excited about?
I'm just about to start Season 2 of something called Showtrial, which was on the BBC last year.
You can watch Season Two of The Lazarus Project on Sky now.
