AMC will premiere the six-part dramatic action series Into the Badlands on November 15, 2015 at 10pm ET/PT. Created by Al Gough and Miles Millar, the series is set in a future when a “feudal society has emerged and the strongest and most brutal rose to wealth and power. This area came to be called the Badlands, and is divided among seven rival Barons who control the resources necessary to daily life and enforce their rule with the aid of loyal armies known as Clippers. Clippers enjoy status and comforts the general population can only dream of, and they are willing to sacrifice their lives in service to their Barons. Few Clippers ever live to see their 30th birthday, but Sunny (Daniel Wu) is no ordinary Clipper. Demonstrating lethal proficiency in martial arts, Sunny rose swiftly through the ranks to become Quinn’s (Marton Csokas) Head Clipper and most trusted advisor.”

Emily Beecham stars as The Widow, a new Baron who’s challenging Quinn’s position as the most powerful Baron.

AMC’s Into the Badlands cast members and executive producers were on hand at this year’s San Diego Comic Con and in addition to participating in a Q&A with Comic Con attendees, they took part in roundtable interviews to further discuss the new show.

Al Gough, Miles Millar, Marton Csokas, Emily Beecham, and Orla Brady Roundtable Interview:

Will we get an idea why your character chose the butterfly symbol and the name The Widow?

Emily Beecham: “Yeah, absolutely. She’s taken under a wing of a bunch of young girls and she’s been training them as skilled fighters. I think the symbol of the butterfly, she sees it metaphorically as a symbol for her and these young girls rising out of the bad experiences they had in their past. They were abused and she had an abusive husband. Like breaking out of a cocoon and becoming a bold, powerful and free butterfly. She uses that a lot when talking to the girls and she’s very protective of them, guiding them. So I think it’s a symbol of strength and femininity, a feminine, strong symbol.”

Were there any other characters that inspired you?

Emily Beecham: “Yeah, tons. Loads. I watched an awful lot of Kung Fu movies thinking that would help me with the martial arts. Yeah, it was preparing for what we were going to is very difficult martial arts, but we had a really intensive fight week training, and we needed it.”

What was martial arts camp like?

Emily Beecham: “The training camp, it was really challenging. Not only physically, but mentally as well because it was exhausting. And especially in the New Orleans heat…we were training in serious heat. We had to become more flexible and build muscles in my body that I hadn’t used before, like the stomach muscles and everything. You have to do the same moves repeatedly on wires at bizarre angles, and fight against huge men who are twice the size of me and really fast and agile. It was exciting and challenging. It was good.”

How did you come up with the idea for the show?

Al Gough: “We wanted to do a martial arts show. The first films we did in Hollywood were Lethal Weapon 4 with Jet Li and Shanghai Noon and Shanghai Knights with Jackie Chan. It was something that it’s such a wonderful sort of form but you don’t really see it on television, because usually they don’t give the time to actually do it correctly. So when we went in and pitched the show, the first thing we said was, ‘You have eight days to shoot an episode but then you’re going to need simultaneously eight days for a fight, to actually be able to do these fights properly and get all the pieces and really be true to the authentic Hong Kong martial arts style.”

Miles Millar: “The other thing we wanted to do was really elevate the idea of what could a martial arts show be? Because that wouldn’t just be about martial arts. It would be about real characters, real emotion, and then a story and drama you would follow in the vein of Crouching Tiger, that women would like. The drama would be as magical and involving as the action. It wouldn’t just be about martial arts and fights, like a cop show. It would be something that would be more elevated and more interesting and more original. So the idea of this became a science fiction series really at its core, even though it borrows visually elements from the Victorian era. So it’s how do you reinvent this genre and pull from other, all Asian cultures? The Japanese cinema, Kurosawa, from Chinese cinema, Hong Kong cinema and do this deliberate mashup of Asian and Western, particularly Western Westerns, and make it feel and be authentic to itself so it’s uniquely original. I think you see the trailer, certainly you’ve seen nothing like this in terms of a world creation that feels real and different and textured. The idea this is a distressed future but also the idea that almost like the jungle, the environment is encroaching, things are crumbling. It’s moldy and sweaty. It’s dirty. It has an authenticity and a veracity to how it feels and looks. It’s very important.”

Can you talk about the challenge of writing these episodes knowing you wanted this amount of action, knowing the history you’ve had working with fight units and actors?

Al Gough: “It was a very interesting setup of the show. Obviously, we have to set out and write the best story you can tell.”

Miles Millar: “And create the best characters and do the best casting. It’s giving the show soul and heart. The way to get, in terms of a martial arts fight to be great, is that you really care about who’s fighting. It’s all about the work you do as character creation and the relationships. If you have a character entering a fight that you really care about, then the fight’s going to be much better than if it’s just guys fighting, or women fighting. So that’s the difference between the B movie and something that’s really elevated. The reason The Walking Dead works is that you really care about those people and their jeopardy. So that was our aim for this, that if you care about these people and their emotional journeys and their dilemmas, then you will care when they get into fight. That will elevate the martial arts, too.”

How do you shape episodes within these constraints?

Al Gough: “Like I said, we had an eight day fight unit. What we did is we offset the fight unit from the main unit so that actors could move back and forth to be able to do the fights.”

Miles Millar: “It’s a 3D chess game.”

And in terms of storytelling?

Al Gough: “We’ve written a lot of martial arts movies and we always write out the fight sequences. We did it for Jackie, we did it for Jet. What you have to do is make sure all the story points and the emotional beats are within the fight and they have to be scripted.”

Miles Millar: “We usually find an environment or a concept. So for example, we have the sword fight in the rain that was in the first episode. The concept was a sword fight in the rain which would be involving our hero, Sunny [played by Daniel Wu]. So how does that work within the emotion, but then how do we practically build a set that has rain towers and going to shoot eight days in the rain? What does that mean for wardrobe and vehicles? In terms of the practicalities, how are you going to drain a set of water for eight days? How are you going to keep actors from freezing? So, under their things they’re wearing wetsuits. It’s all practicalities of production but also you want the visual power of that sequence.”

Will we see Lydia is the person actually pulling the strings? She seems more powerful than she’s portrayed.

Orla Brady: “I think Lydia begins to have, literally begins an understanding of autonomy at a certain point. I think she has seen herself, as many women do, in relation to she’s a wife or a mother or some sort of part of a larger picture. I think during the course of our story, she finds an old copy of A Room of One’s Own. I don’t know how much I’m allowed to say but there is a moment when she begins to question everything, the way she has lived her life and that maybe she wasn’t that person. Maybe she is somebody who has a different life. That could be, so I’m glad you asked that.”

Miles Millar: “That’s true of a lot of the characters in the show, that they’re all actually reaching a crisis point in their lives. Marton [Csokas] has a crisis and The Widow is also struggling at this point, so it’s all about people in crisis.”

Marton, you play a lot of villains. What do you make of this character?

Marton Csokas: “Also in my career I’ve played a lot of great characters, but the more commercial things seem to be in people’s minds. I thought this is an adventure. There were many aspects that I liked. It wasn’t sort of a straight line of a story at all. It’s influenced by all the things that have been discussed already. It has an Oriental quality, it has a Victorian quality, a neo-Victorian quality. It has the potential to be a parable for the life that we live now while maintaining an older storytelling structure but thrown into the future and have the adept hand of Al and Miles who go inside the world that we’re articulating and comment philosophically and psychologically on the human condition. And, the women are very strong. It’s a whole universe and as a metaphor for what we endure every day and very heightened circumstances in the future. So it brings out Darwinian qualities in people and it also brings out existential questions too. And they live, love, die in this very unusual world.”

Is your fighting style more medieval?

Marton Csokas: “Yeah, samurai with a broadsword so it has a medieval aspect, yes. But it also has the long list of martial arts styles that Stephen Fung and Master BD utilize. It’s a hybrid of things.”

The stunt crew are all friends. How do you work their relationship into your show?

Al Gough: “Basically, you have the person who is going to double for the actor, trains the actor. So it’s a lot of that and it’s all, again, as Emily said and Marton said, they have this training which they really want to get you flexible and using muscles and knowing how to do things over and over again. And then you train with their team and choreograph with their team. And then the team can sometimes double for you or doubles for the person that you’re going to be fighting against.”

Miles Millar: “I think you’d be amazed how much everyone does. You’ll never know what’s a double and what’s the real actor. It’s the point of the technique that we’re using that when you see Marton in a big fight with one of our other characters, that you’ll see Marton and you’ll see with Emily. When she fights, you really feel she’s doing all of it. So it’s just the skill set of people like Stephen Fung, they know what moments to pick the real actor, what moments to double. It’s a magic trick but it works.”

What can you say about the visual palette that distinguishes each set?

Miles Millar: “Well world building is key to a show like this. We spend a lot of time talking about the visual palette and how this show would be different. We didn’t want to verge into cliche or venture into the dusty Book of Eli/Mad Max desaturation desert. It’s a deliberate choice the saturation to go for jungle. One of the inspirations was Chernobyl which 30 years after Chernobyl, it was a paradise for wildlife, a refuge. Nature’s taken over and encroached. Even Angkor Wat. You see nature’s incredibly strong, it’s violent, and it’s much stronger than man. So the idea that this world, it has the facade of respectability but actually if you look closely, everything is distressed. There’s sweaty bedspreads. The curtains are moldy and ripped. It’s a distressed future which is sort of like a facade that the barons have put on, and that each baron has a very distinct look. They’ve taken things from the past and turned them into their own. So Quinn and his clipper force wear red vests. It’s minimalist Samurai Asian.

There’s another baron we meet called Jacoby and his clippers wear tartan. There’s a steampunk Neo-Victorian feel to the show which is deliberate in terms of its aesthetic. You look at the show, it feels like it’s set in the past but actually look closely. Everything’s streamlined. It has a futuristic edge to it in terms of the design of particularly the wardrobe. Lydia and Jade who are Quinn’s respective wife, their outfits are actually modeled after classic 1970 Halston outfits. So if you look closely, it all works as a whole and Lydia’s color is purple for example. Jade’s color is blue, so the choice of color palettes for both characters is very deliberate. The Widow’s is black but the butterfly is jewel-toned. So it’s really looking at the show in a very deliberate way that when you see these characters, you’ll know who they are. So it’s really important that the choices of color and silhouette for the wardrobe were very specific. And, again, it was all about trying to create an original world that we hadn’t seen before.”

As actors, how do you make the characters three dimensional?

Marton Csokas: “All the combination of things that have been discussed. Wardrobe’s obviously very important and that’s going to a Neo-Victorian element. There’s a cummerbund and a high collar. There’s long lines in the trousers and boots. That’s going to make me, whether I like it or not, walk in a certain way and I can adapt accordingly, but it gives an elevation. He’s a baron, he has an elevation. And in the color, red, says passion, desire, lust and blood, all those kinds of things, royalty.

Within the words that we have, the overall structure of the story, I try and look for psychological archetype. And then bring detail into that based upon work that an actor should do and can do. So there’s animal work and there’s psychological work. How to speak, what accent, what rhythms? How does this person think and accordingly how do they see the world around them? And then the world of course informs how they behave based upon their interpersonal relationships. Power is a strong driving force in this world. Everybody needs to survive. Who do they trust? Betrayal. We’re dealing in that kind of currency so you build somebody up for your own benefit, you always have to be careful that they don’t usurp you. Will they, won’t they? And if I’m building somebody up, will I undercut them at some stage?

In some ways, it’s an expansive world. It’s also a very small world because it turns on a small area. You can be knocked off any second. A vast world, but at the same time, Emily as The Widow, if we were sitting in this proximity, might well thrust a dagger in my side. Lydia and her husband and wife could very well take a fork or [knife], but they also need each other so the tension is enormous. If you get rid of somebody, everybody else is going to come from the swarm.”

Al Gough: “It becomes like a power vacuum. The thing with the barons is they’re sort of part warlord, part feudal king and part mob boss. The Badlands, the economics is they’re all interrelated. They all control certain resources that they need from the other. So it’s always the uneasy alliance of those nation states, as it were.”

Watch the Into the Badlands official trailer: