‘Westworld’ Spoilers: Find Out Why Its Stars Are Calling It An ‘Intellectual Nightmare’

Is HBO’s new show “Westworld” considered a Western series or a sci-fi series? If lead star Evan Rachel Wood, who plays robotic host Dolores Abernathy, were to be asked, it’s a little bit of both.

“It's science fiction, it’s a Western, it’s an existential drama and an intellectual nightmare,” Wood told the Rolling Stone, adding, “and I've never really read or seen anything quite like this — including the movie. And for those of us playing the hosts, it was also like the Acting Olympics: ‘I need you to have a panic attack, and then I need you to be in character, and then I need you to go into computer mode, and then I need you to breathe, and then I need you to be downloading…’”

Show creators Jonathan Nolan and his wife Lisa Joy really wanted to deliver something new to television. In most sci-fi movies, humans are always the protagonists, while robots or machines are trying to bring them down. This time, they wanted to turn the tables.

“We wondered, ‘What if we flipped it? What if we make the robots the good guys, and people are the ones who are horrible and f—ked up?’” said Nolan.

“I'll put it to you this way: ‘Interstellar’ was, for me, a love song of a human spirit,” Nolan said of the 2014 movie he co-wrote with his brother Christopher Nolan. “The first season of the show that Lisa and I put together — it's pretty much the exact opposite of that.”

The Nolans’ vision explains the show’s tagline, “Every Hero Has a Code.” Entertainment Weekly reported that it’s because the protagonists of this updated version of Michael Crichton’s 1973 film are actually robots, while the humans who go to the Western theme park seem to be devoid of morality.

The new trailer released by the network shows how the robotic “hosts” deal with humans’ deception and shocking indulgences. The trailer shows glimpses of how humans run amok in Westworld, with violent shootings, sex scenes, a milk-drinking cowboy with holes in a body and several dead bodies scattered all over the street.

“Westworld” will be released on HBO on Sunday, Oct. 2, at 9 p.m.