The early days of 3 Body Problem’s mystery are centered where so many of us find ourselves these days: a video game. This one is, as Jack (John Bradley) describes to Jin (Jess Hong) in the show, light-years ahead of what we know: a VR world where you can really taste, smell, and feel the world (and its many threats). As Hong describes it, those 3 Body game scenes felt “epic” to shoot, thanks to the production design of the world.
“The set design team partially built some of the sets. So you could just walk in and climb up to the second level of a castle and look out,” Hong told Polygon. “Everyone worked hard to try to create at least the atmosphere of what we would experience watching it back.”
All the more glamorous was the sleek, mirrored headset that the organization behind the game issues to players in the show. Behind the scenes, however…
“The visor felt less epic, because every time I put it on and off, it would pull my hair a little bit. It was constantly a: Oh my gosh! and then, Ouch!” Hong laughs.
Still, the design — at least from afar — is immediately evocative and dramatic, glossy and reflective in a way that scans as totally alien. Liam Cunningham, who plays Wade, felt similarly, on all counts.
Image: Netflix
“It’s an absolute nightmare to film,” Cunningham says. “Because I swing it around, and I’ve got it all over the place — there was no way of keeping the camera out of the reflection.” As such, the VFX team had to step in fairly liberally to make sure the cameras — et al. — didn’t show up in the visor. But in his view, it was worth the effort: “It’s extraordinary. It’s beautiful to look at.”
No one had more to say on the usability of the headset than John Bradley, whose early episodes are marked with enough headset usage that he got the “really weird and really isolating” experience of sitting in it.
“You put it on while the camera guys are setting the shot up and while they’re sorting other lights, so you can be in that helmet for a good five, 10 minutes,” Bradley says. “And it’s a bit like being in this sort of isolation tank, where everybody’s sort of getting on with their own work.”
And the experience only gets weirder from there, as you sit “hemmed into this thing” where you can’t really see or hear anything around you: As Bradley experienced, eventually your brain tries to focus on something and lands on your own eyes.
“You just start to see your own eyeball, and you can’t focus on anything else. And it looks like you’re looking deep into your own soul,” Bradley says. “It’s a bit like sometimes when you’re lying in bed and you start to hear a clock tick and you can’t hear anything else.
“You start to see yourself the way the world sees you. And you don’t always like what you find.”
3 Body Problem is now streaming on Netflix.