3 Body Problem Cast and Crew Talk Adapting Books

3 Body Problem is finally out today, and fans can watch the adaptation of Liu Cixin’s award-winning sci-fi novel on Netflix. The newly released season was created by Game of Thrones alums David Benioff and D.B. Weiss along with True Blood producer Alexander Woo, and it follows the first book in Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. Of course, Benioff and Weiss are no strangers to adapting books after heading seven seasons of Game of Thrones. ComicBook.com attended the premiere of 3 Body Problem in Los Angeles and spoke to the cast and crew of the series, and they talked about bringing the book to life.

“Keeping the spirit of everything we loved when we read the books,” Woo explained when asked what was the most important thing about adapting the story. “Anyone who’s ever read the books, I was like, ‘You’ve never seen anything like it.’ So you want to keep that same feeling when you’re doing an adaptation of it. So that’s a very vague question because there’s so many things, but that would be the most important thing.”

“I think adaptation is always a tough, tricky thing,” director Derek Tsang added. “I mean, adapting it into a film or into a show, you always somehow lose something. So I think the most important thing is really keeping the essence of the book, the essential message. You can play around with character and setting a lot, but I think the core message and the core essence, it’s something that you have to keep. And I think David, and Dan, and Alexander did a great job with doing that.”

“Don’t read the books,” Liam Cunningham replied when asked how he makes book characters his own after going from playing Ser Davos Seaworth in Game of Thrones to Thomas Wade in 3 Body Problem. “I never read Game of Thrones, but I haven’t read 3 Body Problem. There’s a good, there’s kind of a professional reason for it. My job is to interpret what the guys, David, Dan, and Alex give to me, and that’s my entire focus. If I read these books, I’m going to come in, I have an imagination. I’m going to come in with preconceptions. So I do like these scripts so much that at the end of all of this, I will sit down and open up the books and go, ‘Oh, okay.’”

“For me, I think it was really about how is the best to tell the story versus … I was taking little inspirations for the book, but I also made it my own in terms of her voice because that was never talked about,” Sea Shimooka said of playing Sophon.

“I have to have empathy for the character, and I have to find that empathy,” Rosalind Chao (Ye Wenjie) said when asked what is the most important thing about bringing a book character to life. “No matter how. I’ve played some characters who have done some really terrible things, and I have to find empathy and a reason to make them do that thing. That was easy with Ye Wenjie, the writing was so good. It was kind of impossible to not be able to delve into it because when the words are on the page, it makes life easy. Dan, David, Alex; they’re my heroes.”

“The only constraints I had on reading the book was time, so I only got through one book before we started shooting, and I read it at the same time as all of the scripts,” Jess Hong (Jin Cheng) added. “So I got the double whammy of like, ‘Oh, this is amazing.’ Running. ‘Oh, this is amazing.’ Running. ‘Oh, what world am I in right now?’ I thought I was just blown away and I laughed and cried and gasped and the whole thing. It was incredible.” 

You can watch our interviews with the creatives behind 3 Body Problem at the top of the page.