ALEX RIDER Season 3 Key Art | ©2024 Amazon Freevee

Season 3 of the spy thriller ALEX RIDER premieres in its eight-episode entirety on Amazon Freevee in the U.S., the U.K. and Germany. 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. In Season 3, which is based on SCORPIA, Horowitz’s fifth novel in the series, that deadly international agency contacts Alex, promising him “the truth” about his father if he’ll join them.

While writer Guy Burt developed ALEX RIDER for television, creator Horowitz is still heavily involved as an executive producer. He gets on Zoom to discuss Season 3.

With so many novels in the ALEX RIDER series, who decides which book should be adapted for a particular season? “The decision to adapt SCORPIA was made by Jill [Green, Horowitz’s fellow executive producer and spouse], me and Guy Burt. We were a very close, friendly team.

As with its Season 3 adaptation, Horowitz feels that the novel SCORPIA, originally published in 2006, is “definitely the turning point in the series. It’s the first one that had a really dark ending, it had a plot that was much darker than many of the other books, and it’s also the book where Alex begins to really dig into his own character and, as a result, change. I think it’s the platform on which all the later books stand.”

Are there elements of other books besides SCORPIA in Season 3? “No. There are extra elements that Guy, and to some extent I, added, but these did not come from other books. You might note a guest appearance by Razim from SCORPIA RISING – that’s a book we’d like to adapt one day.”

Much of ALEX RIDER Season 3 is set and was shot in Malta. However, Horowitz reveals, the SCORPIA novel takes place in Venice. “It was quite interesting that when we got to the end of Season 2, we had [Scorpia assassin] Yassen Gregorovich [Thomas Levin] dying on the floor, and giving out his last line, ‘Go seek the Widow in …’ Then he said, ‘Venice, Paris, Rome,’ all these different locations [in different takes], because we didn’t know where we were going to film.”

Venice got ruled out pretty quickly because, Horowitz says, “It was going to be impossible to shoot in Venice. First of all, financially, it is insanely expensive to shoot there. Secondly, it is just so difficult in terms of logistics, of closing sections of the city and getting the permissions and all the rest of it. It was never going to be in Venice. I think Malta, which has very strong connections to Venice architecturally and historically, is a fantastic stand-in. And one of the things I love about this season is the production values that Malta gives us.”

There are moments when the Department seems not only duplicitous but actually evil, causing Alex to think he may actually side with Scorpia. Since Scorpia trains its agents to become assassins, how does Alex square his own beliefs with this?

“Alex is not a natural killer,” Horowitz relates. “In the books, he seldom kills anybody, certainly not deliberately. People do tend to fall like flies around him, but he is not a James Bond character, he’s not an assassin. It’s only, I think, in SCORPIA RISING that he actually kills somebody in cold blood, in a very terrible moment at the end of the book, and everything in that book builds up to it, because there is no way around that. But I would have said that he is searching for the truth in this series, not to hurt people. He does want to bring Scorpia down and end them, he knows they are a threat to the world, but I don’t think he sees himself as an avenger quite so much as somebody who is seeking peace. I think in one of the earlier episodes, he says to Tom [Alex’s best friend, played by Brenock O’Connor], ‘While Scorpia exists, we are never going to be safe. They have to go.’”

In the books, Alex has a romance with the character Sabina. Although Sabina, played by Charithra Chandran, appears in Season 2 of ALEX RIDER, his primary love interest is computer whiz Kyra (Marli Siu), introduced in Season 1 and continuing throughout. Horowitz explains that, “In the very last book, NIGHTSHADE REVENGE, it is clear that [Alex and Sabina] have a future together.

“Kyra is an invention of the writer Guy Burt. I was totally supportive of that as an idea, because I think, first of all, Marli Siu is a wonderful actress, and secondly, Kyra adds computer know-how, which is very helpful to the plot, but mainly, because Alex is being played now not by a fourteen-year-old, but by someone who is playing a very late teenager and who is actually in their twenties, and it would be sort of strange if he did not have feelings for somebody else on this planet. And what I love about this series is the way that those three characters – Tom, Kyra, and Alex – have all become such wonderfully close friends.”

The head of Scorpia, Julia Rothman, is portrayed by Sofia Helin, star of the influential Swedish/Danish thriller series THE BRIDGE. Was Horowitz a fan before she was cast in ALEX RIDER? “Yes. Sofia Helin is brilliant as Julia Rothman.”

For a while, it seems as though Rothman may turn out to be Alex’s mother, partly because of the visual similarity between Farrant and Helin. While this isn’t the case, Horowitz notes, “Julia is a sort of a mother figure to Alex. She’s a mother to the evil side of him, that’s for sure. And she is also very, very closely connected – in the books, it’s explicit that she was having a relationship with Alex’s father. So, it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to suspect, but she’s something more than a mother, she’s something even more than a mother. She is everything that is bad in his life, somehow, personified.”

Were there any big challenges in making Season 3? “There are always challenges. We have more action in this series than Seasons 1 and 2 and that stretched the budget. We had to lose Venice, and the Consanto factory became a boat. But this is normal in modern TV. You have to find a creative way around obstacles.”

Season 3 has been announced as the final season of ALEX RIDER. Did Horowitz and company decide that SCORPIA would be a good book for the series’ climax, or did they decide on the adaptation before it was known the series was ending?

Horowitz’s response is surprising. “Well, I’m not entirely sure that we are ending the series. There is always hope that we’ll come back in another form, or another shape, if not with Freevee, then with somebody else. There are plenty of other streamers out there, and this is the best of the three seasons, I think, so I do hope, given that there are another nine books out there, that Alex Rider will be seen on the screen again.

“That said, when I was talking to Guy Burt, and we had done POINT BLANC [as Season 1] and EAGLE STRIKE [as Season 2], we saw that what we had was a trilogy. This was going to be the SCORPIA trilogy, which would introduce Scorpia, the evil organization, in Season 1, develop that in Season 2, and then come to a climax in Season 3. And I think that when I look at what we’ve done now on the screen, it does feel like a complete unit, and that it is the right place to stop, at least with Freevee. Let’s see what happens next.”

If ALEX RIDER were to come back, wouldn’t it require changing, as the actors playing Alex and his peers are moving from adolescence into adulthood?

“Yes. It was inevitable we would have to stop after Season 3 anyway. COVID and other circumstances have meant that this has been a very slow process, bringing Season 3 to the screen. It’s been more than a year since ALEX RIDER was actually out there on the [previous] season. So, we have reached the natural pausing place, and recasting would have been necessary, no matter what happened.

“Again, I don’t know. I would love to see NIGHTSHADE and NIGHTSHADE REVENGE filmed. I think they make a fantastic pair, and to do that with a different Alex, perhaps not with the Department, because they don’t really feature in those stories, to sort of reboot, rethink and reimagine. All of this is possible. And it’s only because this season is so good that I hope that it isn’t completely over. But if it is, it’s a great place to finish.”

If there is an ALEX RIDER reboot, how would Alex’s knowledge of spy craft be explained? “We’d throw the audience into the middle and let them pick things up as we move forward.”

What else does Horowitz have coming up? “We start shooting NINE BODIES IN A MEXICAN MORGUE next month and I’m writing a novel, a sequel to MOONFLOWER MURDERS. We hope to shoot [the television miniseries adaptation] next year.”

And what would Horowitz most like people to know about Season 3?

“That for reasons that I’m not quite sure why, it is by far the best season we have done, it takes everything to a new height, it is more cinematic than any of the other ones. The plot is one of my favorites, all based on scientific fact. I think Guy has done his best writing, the performances are standout, we have the best trio of villains with Jason Wong, Thomas Levin, and the wonderful Sofia Helin, who absolutely nails Julia Rothman. I watched it in its completed final form for the first time last week, and I watched it just like an audience member, rather than the creator, and I was blown away.”

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Article: Exclusive Interview: Creator and executive producer Anthony Horowitz on Season 3 of the spy thriller series

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