There is a lovely preview article and interview with Tom on the Philly.com website, about tonight's premiere of Da Vinci's Demons season 2.
There's plenty of the same off-the-wall madness in Da Vinci's Demons, writer-producer David S. Goyer's delirious TV drama that returns for a second season 9 p.m. Saturday on Starz.
Off-the-wall?
Saturday's episode opens atop Machu Picchu (in present-day Peru) where holy men in terrifying masks are preparing to decapitate Leo as a sacrifice to the Incan sun god. Huh?! OK, let's come back to that.
Da Vinci's Demons is a thrilling adventure story full of comic-book heroism, violent intrigue, and wild sex worthy of The Borgias - and enough crazy inventions to shame MacGyver.
British thesp Tom Riley (Monroe, Lost in Austen) stars as the eccentric Florentine artista who can't sit still, so brimming is he with ideas, plans, theories, memories - and enough charisma to burn up a whole city.
"My impression of da Vinci was only about his art, his brushstrokes. I didn't expect a man who was antiauthoritarian, rebellious, and heretical," Riley said in a phone interview. He said he really wasn't aware of the full extent of da Vinci's brilliance. "Tom Stoppard . . . once told me being a genius is being able to sit at the top floor of the house without having to use the stairs while everyone else is at the bottom trying to figure out how to put one foot in front of the other," he said. "Da Vinci just saw things faster than everyone else."
