Head examined
Ran Tellem, executive producer of The Head, takes DQ inside the making of the survival thriller’s third and final season, explains how its locations and storytelling style have evolved and reveals why he is backing the rise of English-language series produced outside the UK and US.
From an international scientific research station in Antarctica to a huge freighter in the middle of the ocean, The Head has always found a way to ensure its protagonists are confined to hostile, isolated and remote locations that offer no means of escape as they face up to a litany of horrors.
Debuting in 2020, the survival thriller begins as the summer crew of the Polaris VI departs Antarctica, leaving 10 people to continue working through the cold, dark winter. But when the summer crew returns six months later, they find seven bodies, two people missing and just one survivor – who may be a murderer.
Two years later, season two picks up the story aboard the Alexandria, a scientific vessel located at Point Nemo in the South Pacific Ocean, the most remote point on Earth. Conjuring familiar feelings of suffocation and loneliness, the crew soon discover a decapitated head that sets another murder mystery in motion.
Now in its third and final season, the show’s tradition continues. The new episodes are set in the Sahara Desert, in an area known as Bir Tawil on the border between Egypt and Sudan – the only place on the planet still considered ‘no man’s land,’ with neither a government nor rules to govern it. Seemingly then, it is the perfect place to conduct experiments that would be forbidden in any law-abiding country.
What links all three seasons is a mysterious algae that could be the key to reducing – or reversing – climate change. It was discovered in Antarctica, hence the season one location. Season two needed the surviving characters to continue their experiments without interference, “so we picked the loneliest place on Earth,” executive producer Ran Tellem tells DQ. “Then, in season three, what we needed to do was conduct an experiment on human beings, and we need a place where you can do something illegal. When you do something illegal, you need a place that has no law. But where on Earth is there no law?
“Suddenly we had a eureka moment. I found the place. No nation rules there [in Bir Tawil]. There’s no laws, there’s no government, there’s no dictatorship or democracy. You can do whatever the fuck you want. And once we had that, we had the anchor for this season and this is where we bring in a group of five guinea pigs, five human beings who have agreed for a very rewarding sum of money to participate in this experiment, which might save us all. This is the beginning of season three.”
The story then continues to follow Rachel (Olivia Morris), who is continuing her father Arthur (John Lynch)’s research, which can only be conducted in a place where no rules exist – until a new death and the disappearance of a head once again makes the remote location a nightmare.
Produced by Spain’s The Mediapro Studio in association with Hulu Japan, the series has won global audiences thanks to its multinational cast and its distribution on networks including Max (Spain, the US, Latin America and Portugal), Starz (UK and Germany), Canal+ (France), NENT (Nordics), SBS (Australia) and Prime Video (Italy, the Netherlands and India), among others.
The S3 cast features the returning Morris, Lynch and Katharine O’Donnelly alongside new additions Clara Galle, Stanley Weber, Nine D’Urso, Ned Dennehy, Godehard Giese, Sara-Marie Maltha, John Kavanagh and Atsuro Watabe, with British, Spanish, German, Japanese, Irish, French, Sudanese and Danish actors all appearing on screen. Jorge Dorado returns to direct, having previously shot the first two seasons.
Tellem doesn’t count The Head in seasons, however, describing the new run as episodes 13 to 18. “It’s one big 18-parter,” he says.
That wasn’t always the case, with S1 initially launching as a six-part limited series. But when the series found a global audience, thoughts naturally turned to how to continue the story.
“The biggest transition was from season one to actually having season two and finding the idea,” Tellem admits. “Once we uncorked that, we understood what we needed to do. But the creative challenge was still there because we had major characters who were killed.
“For us, the core of the story is still that duel between Maggie [O’Donnelly’s apparent sole survivor from S1] and Arthur and the fight between them. The creative task of season three was then to try and see how we could do that with a character who is no longer alive. We found, I think, a really interesting solution to that.”
The exec jokes that The Head was inspired by The Terminator, “in the way that sometimes things in the past will come to haunt you in the present. That’s the way we’re doing it,” he says. “Also, part of the way we are able to keep ourselves excited and fresh is that each season is written by different writers, and also has a different storytelling method. In that sense, we feel like we are not repeating ourselves and we’re finding new ways to tell stories.”
To that point, season one is largely told in flashbacks, which reveal what happened over the deadly winter inside Polaris VI. Then S2 happens in the present, with viewers standing right next to the characters as they try to work out what exactly is going on.
In S3, there are two timelines, one in the past and one in the present. “The question for the viewers is why the hell are we telling you both stories,” Tellem says. “You understand they’re supposed to be connected, and you ask yourself what is the connection? At the end, when we reveal it, it is very powerful.”
Tellem also admits that continuing what would have been a limited series has allowed the show to wrap up storylines that otherwise would have been left open.
“In a way, that baton handling between writers closing stories that started with other writers is really beautiful,” he says. “We are closing stories that started in season one with characters that completely disappeared and suddenly come back because their stories were still open. In that sense, we treated season three as the last part of the trilogy.
“It is also telling you a story that you can watch without knowing season one and two. But if you watch season one or two, it’s going to be the most rewarding thing – everything comes to an end and to a close. Every character fulfils their entire arc and entire journey.”
The exec is clear, however, that events and consequences in season one have not been changed retrospectively by subsequent storylines as he and Dorado have maintained creative oversight of the series since the beginning. “We would not let that happen,” he notes. “We remember every creative decision we took in season one and season two and why we took it.
“But with switching writers then comes a whole new load of fresh ideas and thinking. Jorge and I try to prevent them from repeating the moves that we have done, but every writer has a completely different way of setting the adventure. There are many times when I read the script where I was blown away, and so in that sense, every writer has a different way of telling horror. It’s endless. I still open my computer every morning and kill people for business.”
Production on S3 took place in the Canary Islands, as well as mainland Spain, in Segovia, Madrid and in desert areas in the south of the country. But despite the extremely varied locations featured in each season, “the Head has a look of its own,” Tellem notes. “You can see it’s The Head in the styling, the directing and in the music. But, of course, it’s a desert [in S3], so it’s different lighting but it is beautifully shot.”
Filmed predominantly in English, each season of The Head also has a secondary language – Danish in S1, Spanish in S2 and now French – that leans into some of the guest cast that feature alongside returning actors. The multinational cast is also reflected in the writers’ room, which on S3 was led by Spanish-British head writers Dominic Harari and Teresa de Pelegrí and includes Rachel Kilfeather (Vikings: Valhalla S3), Martine Moore (Bwitches) and Pearse Lehane (Doctor Who Confidential).
The realities of television production today meant filming the series has become increasingly difficult amid shrinking or stagnant budgets and the demand to deliver more for less. “But at the same time, you are more experienced and season three was quite amazing because we had a 24-hour television-making factory,” Tellem says. “Working with the first unit and second unit in parallel, crossing hours, is really demanding. Not that I need to flatter Jorge, but to be the director of the entire 18 episodes of the entire series is, I think, mind-blowing.”
Tellem’s proudest moment making “the severed head trilogy” was seeing the series picked up by US streamer Max for audiences around the world. “To have an English-speaking show on Max that is not made by Americans or Brits is an exquisite moment,” he says.
“That’s a thing I’m happy to say we’ve done, and that’s what we’re trying to do here at The Mediapro Studio. Our claim to fame is to say we can tell stories in English created by people from anywhere in the world and people will watch. Ninety-nine percent of people watching The Head have no idea it was made in Spain.”
With that in mind, The Head is among a growing number of series – including Turkey’s El Turco and Italy’s Costiera – that can claim to be English-language series not produced in an English-speaking country.
“It’s like the third wave, right?” Tellem adds. “The first wave was we were watching shows in our own country and in English [from the US and UK]. The second wave was saying, ‘OK, we can watch The Bridge even though it’s in Danish and Swedish, but it’s got subtitles.’ And the third wave is we can watch content in English that is not made in the UK, the US or Australia – and it works. It could be made in Turkey, in Uruguay or in Spain and it would work. That’s what I’m here for.”
tagged in: Canal+, Dominic Harari, Hulu Japan, John Lynch, Katharine O’Donnelly, Max, NENT, Olivia Morris, Prime Video, Ran Tellem, SBS, Starz, Teresa de Pelegrí, The Head, The Mediapro Studio