‘Station Eleven’ Challenged Himesh Patel & Creators To Make Pandemic Show “Not Be About Despair” – Contenders TV: The Nominees

deadline.com:

The creators and star of the HBO Max series Station Eleven became worried about releasing a show about a pandemic during the second year of the Covid pandemic.

However, creator Patrick Somerville, director Hiro Murai and star Himesh Patel focused on the limited series’ hopeful message.“We just tried to stay true to our initial conceit, which was to make this pandemic show about intimacy and people, and not be about despair,” Murai said at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees award-season event.Contenders TV: The Nominees — Deadline’s Complete CoverageBased on the Emily St.

John Mandel novel, Station Eleven depicts both a present-day pandemic and 20 years in the future when society rebuilds. In the future, people have returned to nature and continue acting to share stories.“It didn’t need to be about the pandemic to get what was beautiful about [the book] into the show,” Somerville said. “It was a way to talk about what the world was like already.”Patel plays Jeevan Chaudhary, a single man who accompanies a girl (Matilda Lawler) traveling alone on what happens to be the first night of the outbreak.

He’d filmed scenes depicting the pandemic before production and post-production shut down in 2020. Waiting to resume production, Patel kept in touch with Murai and Somerville during lockdown.“Obviously, we all had to contend with how strange it was, what we shot before and how it became more meaningful than we could have imagined,” Patel said. “To have had that creative dialogue and had that be open through what was a very turbulent time for everyone around the world but to have that relationship continue throughout all that was actually really important to me.