There are no trailers on a boat. This is the logistical reality that Toby Stephens found himself confronting somewhere in the middle of shooting “The Season,” Hulu‘s new drama about the bad behavior of Hong Kong’s sailing elite – a show that, almost by design, offered its cast nowhere to hide.
“Normally when you’re filming, you can go back there, and at lunchtime you can have a little snoozy,” Stephens says, with the weary affection of a man who has made his peace with it. Instead, he meditated on deck. His castmates photographed him doing it. There was, apparently, a sitar soundtrack.
Six episodes. Fifty days. Humid, floating, relentless. And by all accounts, a genuinely wonderful time.
“Because we had such a fun cast,” says Karina Lam, who plays Fiona Hext, “all that just became so much easier.” Jessie Mei Li, who plays the American Cola despite being resolutely English, agrees. “You just have each other to get through it. And we had so many belly laughs with the crew.”
The warmth is real, but so is the craft that went into making “The Season” – a show that arrives on Hulu on June 17 with all six episodes at once, produced by PCCW Media and SK Global, shot almost entirely on real Hong Kong locations, and built around a cast that spent most of production at sea.
