Chloe Grace Moretz says The Peripheral is ‘sci-fi with a heart’: There is nothing clinical or cold about it

Prime Video’s new sci-fi extravaganza The Peripheral began streaming on Friday, October 21. The show, based on William Gibson’s bestseller of the same name, stars Chloe Grace Moretz and Jack Reynor as two siblings caught in an unusual time travel story. The stars spoke to Hindustan Times about their fondness for the author’s work, their own chemistry, and what makes The Peripheral stand out in the genre. Also read: Night Sky review: This hollow Amazon sci-fi thriller does disservice to talents of JK Simmons and Sissy Spacek

The Peripheral is set in the near future (2030) when a woman named Flynne (Chloe) finds herself helping her brother–war veteran Burton (Jack)–in what she assumes is a virtual reality simulation mission. However, she discovers that she–or at least her conscience is travelling 70 years into the future–and what she sees in the ‘game’ is actually happening, just in the future.

Talking about her familiarity with William Gibson’s work, Chloe says, “I knew William Gibson beforehand and before jumping into the meeting with Jonah and Lisa, I ran through the book and fell in love with the characters and the depth of the world. Our meeting was just us unpacking the script. From the get go, they really focussed on Flynn and Burton’s relationship and how it was like the homing beacon of the show. No matter how far we went into the future and how intricate we got with the sci-fi, we were always going to come back home to their relationship.” Jack adds that he, too, was a fan but was also drawn to the fun elements of the show, including the action sequences his character is involved in. “I had been a fan of William Gibson but not until I started to engage on the project did I read The Peripheral. One of the things that I found so compelling was how conceptually time travel might be achieved with the exchange of information as opposed to the physical body going from the past to the future. Beyond all that, it just seemed it was going to be a lot of fun. All that stuff was great to shoot. It’s really gratifying for an actor to go to work and have fun every day,” shares the actor.

The Peripheral releases in an environment saturated with science-fiction shows and films. From time travel to alternate reality, there is no sub-genre that has not already been explored. But Chloe argues her show is different. “The difference here is that this is sci-fi with a heart,” she says, explaining, “There is nothing clinical or cold about this, which a lot of sci-fi falls into the traps of. This one centres on a human storyline. It’s about a family and how they can take the information they are getting from the future to mitigate the impending doom.”

At the beginning of the show, the Peripheral’s avatar of Burton is piloted by Flynne, which means it is basically someone who looks like Jack but has Chloe’s mind. “That’s not something you get an opportunity to do every day as an actor. That was really cool,” says Jack, talking about the composite character. Explaining how the two went about portraying that, he says, “It felt like a fun and exciting challenge to have your co-star inform you how you are going to play this sequence. We talked about it at length over a couple of video calls and ultimately it was a lot of fun just to hold that in my mind what Chloe had told me.”

The first two episodes of The Peripheral were released on Prime Video on October 21. The remaining six will be released one at a time, weekly every Friday, with the finale to stream on December 9. The show has been created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, creators of Westworld.