First Look at ‘Blade Runner 2099’ Starring Michelle Yeoh
- Jul 23
- 7 min read
Client: Michelle Yeoh – Talent
It’s got to be pretty daunting taking over the reins of one of the most important and influential science-fiction franchises in pop culture history, but Blade Runner 2099 showrunner Silka Luisa had two crucial mentors on her journey to the land of replicants.
The first was the writer behind Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, Michael Green. “He was a really important part of the development process,” says Luisa. “I came in with the pitch and basic concept for the show, the characters, and all of that, but Michael had been through writing 2049. He knew the world really well. He knew the pitfalls. He knew the strengths. He understood how to build out the kind of noir mystery for it. And so he was very helpful.”
The second person who shepherded her through the process? A guy by the name of Ridley Scott.
“What an incredible experience,” Luisa gushes of the original Blade Runner director (who, like, Green, serves as an executive producer on the new series). “It’s once in a lifetime to have your hero sit down with you and tell you what it was like making your favorite movie.”
But it was more than just the legendary director sharing old war stories. “It was really important for Ridley to be a part of the development process,” Luisa notes. “Because both visually and in terms of story, there are mythological canon points in his film that we’re touching, and it was really important to both get his blessing and have his insight into what his original intentions were.”
Now, five years after the show was first announced, Blade Runner 2099 is finally coming to Prime Video, with a premiere date set for some point later this year.
“I am so excited for people to see it,” she says smiling. “There is so much legacy with Blade Runner. Every person who touched the show in any way is a huge fan. Everyone was very well aware of the weight of what we were doing, and we did it with great care. And when you’re taking on something like this, you’re very thoughtful and deliberate about each step. That is why it has taken so long, because we wanted to make sure we got it right.”
And getting it right meant threading the needle in terms of paying homage to the past while also offering something new. “We stayed very true to the noir principles of Blade Runner. And there’s a mystery at the heart of the show that looks both forwards and backwards in terms of mythology that fans are gonna be very excited about.”
Luisa shared all the inside scoop with Entertainment Weekly on what to expect when it comes to the new story, the new characters, and the new look of Blade Runner 2099. And now, we share that scoop with you.
The setting
It will not shock any practitioner of simple arithmetic to learn that the events of Blade Runner 2099 take place 50 years after Blade Runner 2049. And Los Angeles has undergone a pretty big transformation.
“There’s been a replicant uprising that feels like it’s been bubbling up,” Lousia explains. “And between 2049 and 2099, that’s happened. So the war has happened and the humans have lost. Our worst fears imagined.”
Welcome to the new world order. “The replicants are now the power brokers of the city,” says the showrunner. “And humans are the second-class citizens.” (Bummer for us.)
And the story we will see on screen is not just informed and inspired by the two Blade Runner movies, but also by the novel on which the original film is based: Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
Therein lies the main thread of the series. Notes Luisa: “The show is really imagining what comes after us, and what does it mean to be human in a world where humanity is no longer relevant?”
“There’s a tone to his novel,” Luisa says. “There is a zaniness to it, but at the same time, he has really dark themes and circumstances. And I think the juxtaposition of this kind of bubblegum tone with these dark ideas was something I really gravitated toward.”
There was also another advantage of going back to the original source material.
“We did return to the book for a lot of the world building,” says Luisa. “Because it’s a TV show and you have so many more hours to fill, we have this great opportunity to actually build out the world, and to go to other places, and to build out parts of history and parts of the universe that I feel like fans have been really curious about and just haven’t gotten to see yet. And the book was really helpful in helping us guide us where we could do that.”
Start reading now for your inevitable Easter egg hunt!
The story
If you were hoping to somehow see Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard and Ryan Gosling’s K stomping around on screen again, put those hopes to bed, as Luisa explains that Blade Runner 2099 will feature all new characters, and with good reason. “We are taking place so much in the future that obviously none of the same characters are around.”
Leading the new cast is Michelle Yeoh as a replicant Blade Runner named Olwen. “She is hunting down a group of missing rogue replicants,” explains Luisa. “She’s in the final days of her life, so she knows she has only days left to live because replicants know down to the day when they’re gonna die. It’s certain and it’s definitive.”
If the tale of a desperate replicant coming up against their expiration date sounds familiar, that is very much intentional.
“Her story is very much taking the Roy Batty story from the first film,” says Luisa of the iconic Rutger Hauer performance. Only this time, there is one major difference. “We’re telling it from the replicant’s point of view.”
And they plan to go deep on that vantage point. “We have the benefit of television where you have all of the hours that you could want to explore the nuances of this very relatable and human fear of not wanting to die,” notes Luisa. “There’s something about the idea that you’re not winding down when you die. You’re spiraling out. There’s a volatility, a danger, and a desperation to it, which I think Michelle really tapped into in her performance.”
The other key figure is Olwen’s partner, Cora, played by Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer. Instead of another replicant trying to blend in as a human, Cora is actually the opposite.
“Hunter is playing a human who is a fugitive and has spent her life running from Blade Runners,” explains the showrunner. “And now has to pretend to be one.”
But the act has worked almost too well.
“In this struggle to survive and just trying to live day-to-day, she’s actually lost her humanity,” Luisa says. “So she’s a human who has lost her humanity. And the question for the series is: Once you’ve lost her humanity, can you regain it?”
Olwen and Cora will be working together and investigating the missing rogue replicants — and this being Blade Runner, don’t expect any of the answers they find to be simple or expected.
The look
You could very easily make the case that Blade Runner is the most influential science-fiction movie of all time. At least when it comes to the look of the film. No other project has inspired such a wide, countless swatch of copycats.
With its rain-soaked alleys and neon signage, the original Blade Runner set the template for dystopian future-noir thrillers. The 2017 sequel was equally visually arresting with its orange radiated skies from acclaimed cinematographer Roger Deakins. So nailing the right visual story was just as important for Blade Runner 2099 as the words on the page.
For Luisa, that meant looking to both the past and the future.
“Ridley’s film, from a visual standpoint, was a key north star for us,” she explains. “We definitely leaned into the layered tactile look of Ridley’s film. There was the idea of everything on the inside is on the outside. All the components of inside of a building are now on the outside of the building. And we used that, which made sense in a post-war city. That’s a very practical way to have a city with these hodgepodge elements. So a car has a battery from an air conditioner, and you have to reuse parts.”
And while 2099 similarly reuses parts from the original Blade Runner style handbook, it also adds some fresh chapters of its own.
“Every film has really moved the visual look forward,” says the showrunner. “So Ridley’s was dark and rainy. Denis’ was cold and snowy.”
And for 2099? “We leaned into sunshine noir. You’re still very much in the Blade Runner world, but the show is about a birth. It’s about a birth of a city. It’s about a birth of a replicant era. These characters are discovering who they really are. And so the climate is hot, it’s sticky, it’s sunny. We’re on the coast a lot. We’re in Santa Monica a lot. So it’s like you’re seeing Ridley’s texture, but you’re seeing it in the sunshine noir filter.”
As for how much practical versus computer-generated effects they used to create their new world, Luisa says, “We’re very in-camera for most of the show. I think it just gives the world a believability. It’s better for the actors. They can move through spaces. It helps make a world that is very foreign feel very true. They can touch everything.”
There was one thing in particular Luisa was looking forward to touching on set: an actual Blade Runner spinner. It was imperative to the showrunner that they got the flying car first made famous in the original film right for their new incarnation.
“Paul Inglis had worked on 2049 [as supervising art director]. And it was so important to him to get the spinner right — to make sure it felt like it was an evolution, but it was still in concert with all the films. I think fans are gonna be really, really, really excited when they see it.
Luisa certainly was. So excited that she had her own personal fangirl moment.
“The day the spinner arrived on set for the first time was the one day I took a selfie,” she says.
But wait, it was even more awkward that than. “First, I started to, like, casually lean against it and take a quiet one,” she reveals, laughing off her failed attempt at subtlety, hoping nobody would notice. Eventually, she abandoned all shame. “And then I finally was, like, getting in there.”
Now she just hopes fans will likewise all be getting into Blade Runner 2099.