Blade Runner 2099’s Tom Burke Teases the Show’s Aesthetics and Themes

Prime Video series Blade Runner 2099 was announced in 2022, delayed in 2023 as part of the Hollywood strikes, and cast Hunter Schaefer and Michelle Yeoh as co-leads in 2024. It’s been a long road, in other words. However, another cast member, Furiosa‘s Tom Burke, talked about it in a recent interview—offering some tantalizing hints of what fans can expect.

Until this point, all we’ve known is the setting (obviously, it takes place in 2099 and is a sequel to both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049), and that Yeoh is playing a replicant nearing the end of her days. Speaking to Variety, Burke couldn’t divulge anything about the plot, but he did say 2099 is “much closer to the aesthetic of the first movie than the second movie,” and referenced “that somewhat kind of Baroque, eclectic mix of cultures and time periods.”

He also, cryptically, called the show “out there” and said he had “a moment of just letting go” to embrace what that meant. Thematically, the series sounds like it will continue to follow what the Ridley Scott and Denis Villeneuve movies, as well as Philip K. Dick’s source-material novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, have also explored: “what makes somebody human and what makes somebody not human. Or when does somebody cross some threshold …  Can we really have a full sense of humanity without being very aware of our own dual sides? We all have the capacity for great evil as well as great good. I suppose every genre does that to some extent, but I do feel that the morality, that whole kind of thing is handled so well in the Blade Runner world, to me. It’s got subtleties and nuances to it that I don’t think necessarily all sci-fi always has.”

Along with Schaefer, Yeoh, and Burke, Blade Runner 2099‘s cast includes Maurizio Lombardi, Dimitri Abold, Lewis Gribben, Katelyn Rose Downey, Daniel Rigby, Johnny Harris, Amy Lennox, Sheila Atim, and Matthew Needham. Prime Video has yet to reveal a release date.

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