Warning: This article contains spoilers for 3 Body Problem, now streaming on Netflix.
It’s the rare mystery/thriller series that frontfaces a large ensemble of scientists as the heroes of the story. Yet that’s the core conceit of 3 Body Problem — Netflix’s big-budget adaptation of Liu Cixin’s book The Three-Body Problem — which frames scientists as the likely conduits for humanity’s survival from an impending invasion of the extraterrestrial Trisolarans.
Helping those scientists are two hardboiled humans: London detective Da Shi (Benedict Wong) and his mercurial, potty-mouthed boss, Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham). The well-funded but shadowy organization they work for has tasked them with finding, and collecting, scientific minds with the right skills to protect Earth from our unwanted global invaders. The duo spends the season investigating a string of physicist murders and then collecting the survivors to be put under their care.
While the scientists are a compelling ensemble, Da Shi and Wade are the oddest couple of planetary saviors. Da, or Clarence as Wade calls him, is the chill, empathetic “people person” who builds trust to reel in the scientists. Wade is the finely-tailored, morally challenged “big stick” who always knows “someone” somewhere who can get copious obstacles erased.
In our sit down with Wong and Cunnigham, the actors agreed that their characters possess the perfect yin-yang energy, which was lucky considering they’d never worked together before.
“How they work together is great,” Wong told IGN about their strong character rapport. “They strategize, they plan, they execute, and they get results.”
“You can tell from the get-go that these boys have been working together for a long time,” Cunningham observed. “They are unlikely allies, these two. You’d never put two of these characters together, and it works beautifully.
“His efficiency,” he pointed at Wong. “His scheming,” he pointed at himself. “It’s extraordinary.”
On-Screen Matchmaking Gone Right
Despite working with many of the same peers and adjacent projects, Wong and Cunningham have never been cast against one another until 3 Body Problem showrunners David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo envisioned it.
“When I first met them on Zoom when I was filming Dr. Strange [and the Multiverse of Madness],” Wong remembered. “I didn’t have a script. They only gave me a character breakdown. And it sounded very, very familiar to me. My parents were [also] from Hong Kong. They said he was born in the seventies. He grew up there for the best part of 20 years. I said, ‘He sounds a lot like me.’ Then Alex just confessed, ‘Oh, yeah, we just copied your Wikipedia page.’ So the subtext of saying, ‘We just want you,’ wooed me,” the actor laughed.
On the other hand, Cunningham had worked with Benioff and Weiss for seven seasons as the wise old salt Davos Seaworth on Game of Thrones. Then two years after that show’s series finale, Cunningham said he got a very unexpected phone call from the duo.
“I was actually pretty close to signing on for another project, a pretty big project,” Cunningham shared. “But I get a phone call from David and Dan and they go: ‘You know that gig?’ I go, ‘Yeah?’ ‘You’re not going with them. You’re coming with us.’”
“This is probably one of the most unprofessional things I’ve ever done,” he said. But I went, ‘Yep. Okay, that’s fine.’” He admits it was only after he hung up that they might have only wanted him for a few days.
Both actors admit it wasn’t until they both got their first scripts that they exhaled a bit. “The scripts came through and I saw this Dublin maniac on the page, and it just leaped off the page,” Cunningham laughed. “I could hear myself speaking the words as I was reading them. Then I knew I was going to have a huge amount to do with Da Shi, and when I found out this man was doing it,” he pointed to Wong. “And suddenly my shoulders dropped. The tension went.”
International Men of Mystery
As 3 Body Problem zings through a lot of heavy science concepts and theories, it’s Shi and Wade who ground the story in very black and white, actionable steps that are taken to prepare for this impending threat. They operate like they’ve been plucked from a John le Carré novel, or a modern noir, which Cunningham deemed “not a bad analogy” to explain them.
Wong said he gleaned a vibe of “Colombo, Liam Gallagher swagger” about Da Shi that he kept top of mind in his portrayal, while Cunningham said Wade is all about leaving the audience hanging with more questions than answers.
“There’s a bit of a mystery man about him,” he said. “Does he work for someone? How has he got the Secretary General of the United Nations on the end of the phone telling them what to do? Where did he get 300 nuclear weapons when he wanted a thousand? You’re kind of going, ‘Who elected this guy? How did he get the gig?’ We know nothing about this man.”
And that remains a constant for both men even to the very end in the season finale, “Wallfacer”. After the failure of the Staircase capsule launch, Wade is visited by a projection of Trisolaran, Sophon (Sea Shimooka), who promises him a place in their regime when they arrive, and no way to evade them until the day he dies.
In the final scene, Shi takes his now 24/7 charges, Jin (Jess Hong) and Saul (Jovan Adepo), for a small road trip to a patch of Florida swamp buzzing with every kind of bug imaginable.
Wong said because Wade assigned him the pair “as my bedfellows as such,” they are his mission if another season is ordered. “When [he] sees them, they’re just kind of pessimists. I have to show them that the glass is more than half full, [like] bugs survive,” he said of their toast to the bugs. “I have to get them back on track, and that’s what he does. He gets results.”
For more coverage, read IGN’s 3 Body Problem review and enjoy a smart scientist answering our dumb 3 Body Problem questions.
Tara Bennett is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @TaraDBennett.
