A guide to who's who in the new season of Da Vinci's Demons has been shared on USA Today. It includes brief interviews with the cast.
Leonardo da Vinci (played by Tom Riley)
The first season found the genius inventor to be a cocky sort and one whose search for knowledge was almost artistic in its level of obsession, Riley says. "As a result, everyone around him would be collateral damage."
The next chapters in his life, however, find da Vinci's veering more toward the wise man of his later years and discovering that the negative influence he has on his friends is also a negative influence on himself.
Riley also found da Vinci a little too good at figuring out things — which viewers watch via his animated "Da Vinci vision" — so expect that to change as he makes his way from Florence to South America in search of the mythical Book of Leaves.
"What I love about how Harrison Ford plays Indiana Jones is that you feel this is a guy who's out of his depth — like early John McClane in the Die Hard films and not later John McClane, where he can jump on a plane from a freeway. This is a guy just using wits and is in pain and is not invulnerable," Riley says.
"Taking Leonardo out of his comfort zone and to a world where not only does he have no understanding of the culture around him but the things that are going on around him are almost supernatural and fantastical, it puts him in a place where he is struggling." The actor also warns that da Vinci might have to look inward and figure out if his quest is even worth it.
"His whole thing is being hung up on the most impossible task — not necessarily the one that's the most interesting," Riley says. "And it doesn't get much more impossible than fragments of a potential book that may or may not exist in a land that is yet to be discovered on the other side of the world on a map that I found ripped off someone's skin."
Another interview with Tom, David S. Goyer and Laura Haddock has been posted by Los Angeles Daily News.
While Riley and Haddock spent months together on-set filming, Leonardo and his sometime lover Lucrezia will be mostly on separate journeys this season.
“The thing that Laura and I have always stuck to is the idea that actually they’re very similar,” says Riley, 32, who was off the next day to shoot a British independent film, “Kill Your Friends.”
“They’re both on a quest that they believe is more important than anything else — both leaving death and destruction in their wake. And both have men in the shadows telling them what to do.”
