His Dark Materials bosses explain unseen leaked Lord Asriel moment
The fantasy series may have drawn to a close but there's still chatter about *that* unseen alternative take.
While season 3 of His Dark Materials was a truly epic journey and natural endpoint for the fantasy series, the launch of the anticipated third season also saw an image emerge that got fans talking and speculating in a big way.
The image in question showed Mrs Coulter (Ruth Wilson) and Lord Asriel (James McAvoy) embracing, and now, writer and executive producer Francesca Gardiner and executive producer and CEO of Bad Wolf Jane Tranter have addressed it.
Speaking earlier this week at the RTS panel Anatomy of a Hit: His Dark Materials in the British Museum, the pair discussed the season 3 episode 7 moment that never was.
It's not a fully deleted scene but an alternative take and just a moment from the scene that they cut from His Dark Materials. In the actual scene, they have a conversation but no embrace.
When asked about it at the panel talk by journalist Rebecca Cooney, Gardiner said: "It was a still from an earlier scene of the actors.
"When you’re shooting a scene like that you have various actions. So, it was a hug between them which I think has been blown up to an idea that it was more of a romantic situation."
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Tranter added: "There was an idea of it was more of a missing kind of love scene."
"Yeah, exactly and it absolutely wasn’t that," Gardiner continued. "We did really explore the idea of what the relationship between Asriel and Mrs Coulter was in the third season.
"We were all in agreement that after that moment, at the end of season 1, where Asriel offers Mrs Coulter a place beside him on the mountain and she turns him down – that’s really the end of their romantic relationship together."
She continued: "Mrs Coulter’s overall arc is less about the man she’s with and much more about her relationship with her daughter. Her relationship to her idea of motherhood and her relationship with herself, which is of course, represented with the golden monkey.
"And there was so much rich territory to be mined there. It felt maybe a little reductive to then lean back to a romance with Asriel."
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Speaking about the decision to include a romantic moment between Asriel and Mrs Coulter, Tranter also said: "I think it was a really good decision that Francesca initiated and advocated, and we were all in agreement that actually Mrs Coulter has been so shaped her entire life by the patriarchy of the world which she, Lyra, Asriel and everyone exists in.
"And that actually at the moment of such an intense sacrifice and having done and achieved all the things that she has achieved throughout all those three seasons, to end with a kiss seems wrong in the interpretation of Mrs Coulter that Ruth gave, and that [writer] Jack [Thorne] and Francesca built for her.
"So, I feel very proud of that decision and it’s not that we haven’t provided an audience with a romantic spark. It’s very clear that Lyra was conceived in a passionate relationship between those two; but that was then, and this is Mrs Coulter’s path now."
Gardiner concluded: "I think there is something kind of romantic in the idea that it’s not about their love story. Fundamentally, it is about their love for Lyra."
His Dark Materials seasons 1-3 are available to stream on BBC iPlayer now.
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