ALEX RIDER Season 3 Key Art | ©2024 Amazon Freevee
All three seasons of the British spy thriller series ALEX RIDER are now available in their entirety for streaming in the U.S. on Amazon Freevee. The series is also playing in the U.K., Germany, and multiple other countries.
Based on the series of bestselling novels by Anthony Horowitz, ALEX RIDER follows the title character, played by Otto Farrant, an English teenager who discovers that his late uncle and his late father were both spies.
The clandestine U.K. government group, the Department, that hired both men (and got them killed in the line of duty) enlists Alex to infiltrate a school for them in 2020’s Season 1. Then they cut him loose, despite Alex’s desire to continue to help saving the world. Season 3 is based on SCORPIA, Horowitz’s fifth novel in the series. Scorpia is a deadly international agency that promises Alex “the truth” about his father if he’ll join them.
Sofia Helin plays Scorpia’s head, Julia Rothman. Helin earned international fame with her award-winning portrayal of police detective Saga Norén in the Swedish television series THE BRIDGE [BRON/BROEN]. Some of Helin’s other recent credits include MYSTERY ROAD, ATLANTIC CROSSING, THE EMIGRANTS, and LIMBO.
ALEX RIDER executive producer Eve Gutierrez has worked with fellow executive producer on Jill Green on multiple series, including COLLISION, INJUSTICE, VEXED, NEW BLOOD, THE KILLING KIND, REBUS, and the upcoming NINE DEAD BODIES IN A MEXICAN MORGUE and RENDLESHAM.
Gutierrez and Helin get together on a joint Zoom session to talk ALEX RIDER Season 3 with Assignment X.
Gutierrez’s collaboration with fellow exec producer Green dates back decades. “Very frighteningly, we’re nearing thirty years of working together, through three different companies. It’s very unusual in this industry, and clearly speaks of my respect for Jill, and her supporting my career, because thirty years ago, I wasn’t a producer. So, we work incredibly closely. Obviously, we have an incredible shorthand after all these years of working together, and to bring it into ALEX RIDER, of course, we have had the good fortune of working on several projects with Anthony [Horowitz, also an executive producer on the series], which ultimately led to him feeling that we would share his vision for bringing ALEX RIDER to the small screen.
Sofia Helin is Julia Rothman in ALEX RIDER – Season 3 | ©2024 Amazon/Freevee
What is the division of responsibilities between Gutierrez and Green? “It varies project by project. We don’t have a clear delineation. It gives us the flexibility to dial up or down our involvement on a particular show. So, each project, and almost minute by minute, we will take the lead in different ways on a show. But there is no set way.
“With something like ALEX RIDER, which is now in its third season, and very much has a clear identity as a show, neither of us need to be as hands-on, I suppose, in a day-to-day sense. Very often, [because of] Jill’s background, she’ll be more across the strategic decisions, and I was more recently a day-to-day producer, and on the ground producer. So, I suppose I kind of keep in a little bit more on those smaller decisions as well.”
Everyone involved, Gutierrez relates, was enormously impressed with Helin’s earlier work. “You don’t know how excited I was when Sofia agreed to come on board. I mean, I was just excited by the casting director coming to us and saying, ‘Sofia is available. Should we approach her for this role?’ I was so utterly thrilled when she said yes.”
For her part, Helin says she was unaware of either the ALEX RIDER books or TV series until she became involved. “And I was so impressed when I started watching it, and so intrigued by playing a part like this, because I had never played such a part before. It’s kind of a dream role to do, actually, to be that kind of complex character. So, I just jumped on board instantly.”
Helin says she did not read the novel SCORPIA after she was cast. “I just went with the scripts [by Guy Burt]. It was so well-written already, everything was in place.”
How does Helin see Julia Rothman, and how does she think Rothman sees herself? “I think she is so hurt, she is blind to other people. She’s so driven by her own pain, so she doesn’t see anything else. But she doesn’t know that, of course. So, I think she just thinks she’s acting for the best of everybody.”
So, Rothman tells herself that the world needs a good shake-up, and she’s the right person to do it? “Exactly,” Helin confirms. “Someone has to do it, and it’s best that it’s someone that is good at it. I think she’s in that kind of inner dialogue, if she has a dialogue. Everybody has, I guess. But hers is a bit tricky.”
Helin is Swedish. Is she playing Rothman as Swedish, or more generally international? “International, I guess. She’s born and raised in Malta, but she also spends most of her time in New York. She sees herself as a citizen of the world.”
Much of ALEX RIDER Season 3 is set in Malta, and the series shot there on location. Gutierrez describes it as an “incredibly beautiful island. Fantastic.”
Helin had never been to Malta prior to filming, but Gutierrez had “been a couple of times before.” Because “It is almost the norm in the world of film and television, shooting in one place and having to cheat it for another, it was a real privilege on this series to be able to be based on Malta and to shoot Malta for Malta, and really embrace everything that makes the island very special. It’s got an incredible history, and it’s genuinely at the crossing point between Africa and Europe, and has a fantastic connection with the water. And so, we really used all of those elements to our full advantage in this series.”
The Maltese location included a lot of steep narrow streets. Did this pose any particular production challenges?
ALEX RIDER – Season 2 key art | ©2021 IMDb TV
“Malta’s an incredibly film-friendly island,” Gutierrez reports, “so we were really welcomed. It’s so incredibly ancient that, yes, everywhere there are stairs and hills. In ancient times, that was embraced by the architecture. So, there was definitely more of a challenge, I suppose, in transporting equipment from one area to another. But it was all part of the fun, and a tiny little sacrifice for the fantastic onscreen value that we got there. And there was lots of shooting on boats – different types, different sizes of boats. There’s a small tourist boat that opens Episode 1, and the Consanto ship, which is in an incredible dockyard area there. It was a fantastic experience, actually.”
The dockyard and decommissioned ships hosted some intense action sequences. “And I can tell you,” Gutierrez confides with a laugh, “it really did smell as bad as they suggested in the episode.”
Rothman owns some very beautiful properties, in Malta and elsewhere. Did Helin feel any ownership of those spaces?
“Of course. I opened up my imagination for her as a persona, and so, that’s my job, to just jump into her way of thinking, and owning it. So, yes. I started fantasizing about especially the clothes and the jewelry she had. She had some rings that I always fantasized that she had asked her former husband to shoot an elephant to get her those ivory rings. I was really fascinated by her, and had so much fun fantasizing about her. So, I guess I owned her space.”
Did Helin have to learn anything in order to play Rothman? “For this specific part, it was mainly about the language. [English] is not my first language, and really going deep down to the dialogue and explore it. And also, if I play a cop [as in THE BRIDGE], then it’s closer to me.
“[Rothman] is a character that is so far away from me, I can just let go and let it happen,” Helin laughs. “It’s like when a child plays. It’s really, really serious, but it’s totally not me. So, I more fantasized than prepared specific things. I researched some things about her. She has a persona that’s very interested in art, and so I had a look at that, and looked at Malta, and the environment there. But it’s mostly about diving in.”
Rothman approaches the orphaned Alex with a maternal attitude that may or may not be an act. Did Helin decide on playing her that way or her own, or was it in concert with the director? “I just loved [director] Andreas [Prochaska, who directed the Season 3 premiere episode] immediately. So, it was very easy for us to find her and to play with her. And also, Andreas is so experienced, he knows how to help an actor build a character. So, there was a collaboration. And of course, an easy way to get into a boy without a mother is quite an obvious choice for anyone who wants to come close to him.”
Having been involved in all three seasons, what does Gutierrez see as being different about Season 3? “You really feel like this is Alex starting to now come of age. There’s a darker tone [in contrast] to the earlier series. The idea was that we wanted Alex feel, season by season, like he’s growing up and is becoming more emotionally complex in his life, and so we really achieved this, I feel, in this season.”
As ALEX RIDER made its three seasons over the course of five years, beginning in 2020, were there any issues in keeping Farrant and his peers, Brenock O’Connor as Tom and Marli Siu as Kyra, looking as though they are still in their teens?
“Not really,” Gutierrez replies. “Otto is very youthful. And as I said, we kind of have embraced in the show thematically wanting to feel like they grow with the series, and so, we’re not looking to exactly replicate how they would have looked in the last season. We imagine that a little bit of time has passed.
ALEX RIDER – Season 1 Key Art | ©2020 Amazon
“We did make a deliberate decision this season not to see them in school uniform and at school. We felt like that wasn’t going to sit well with the audience, but we wanted them to have moved past that phase, because that’s obviously a large element of Season 1. They are just youthful, and it’s such a gorgeous relationship they have with each other. They’re genuine friends in real life after working with each other for five years.”
And what would Gutierrez and Helin most like people to know about ALEX RIDER Season 3?
Gutierrez responds, “I would say this season is the biggest emotional journey for Alex as a character, and we are putting the spotlight on relationships that have developed across three seasons. So, for people who have loved Seasons 1 and 2, and maybe are just coming to the show now, they’ve got time to catch up, thank God. I think it’s just the depth of the relationships and the complexity of the emotions. I think that’s something that people can really lean into.”
Helin says, “What I loved about the script is that it’s very complex. You cannot judge what is right and wrong easily, and I think that’s really the world we’re in today, where we see very, very complex and dangerous scenarios before our eyes. So, apart from really entertaining the audience, I guess it would be nice if they reflect on their own choices.”
Related: Exclusive Interview with ALEX RIDER actors Marli Siu and Toby Stephens on Season 2
Related: Exclusive Interview with ALEX RIDER actors Ronke Adekoluejo and Brenock O’Connor on Season 2
Related: Exclusive Interview with ALEX RIDER executive producer and creator on Season 1 of the Amazon Prime series
Related: Exclusive Interview with ALEX RIDER star Otto Farrant on Season 1
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Article: Exclusive Interview: Actress Sofia Helin and executive producer Eve Gutierrez on Season 3 – Exclusive Interview
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