‘The Season’ Cast on a Hong Kong Drama About More Than the Rich

There are no trailers on a boat. This is the logistical reality that Toby Stephens found himself confronting somewhere in the middle of shooting “The Season,” Hulu‘s new drama about the bad behavior of Hong Kong’s sailing elite – a show that, almost by design, offered its cast nowhere to hide.

“Normally when you’re filming, you can go back there, and at lunchtime you can have a little snoozy,” Stephens says, with the weary affection of a man who has made his peace with it. Instead, he meditated on deck. His castmates photographed him doing it. There was, apparently, a sitar soundtrack.

Six episodes. Fifty days. Humid, floating, relentless. And by all accounts, a genuinely wonderful time.

“Because we had such a fun cast,” says Karina Lam, who plays Fiona Hext, “all that just became so much easier.” Jessie Mei Li, who plays the American Cola despite being resolutely English, agrees. “You just have each other to get through it. And we had so many belly laughs with the crew.”

The warmth is real, but so is the craft that went into making “The Season” – a show that arrives on Hulu on June 17 with all six episodes at once, produced by PCCW Media and SK Global, shot almost entirely on real Hong Kong locations, and built around a cast that spent most of production at sea.

For Lam, the challenge was language. She has spent 25 years acting in Cantonese and Mandarin – launched her career in Hong Kong, built a parallel life as a singer in Taiwan, was born and raised in Canada – and describes herself as a hybrid in the most literal sense. “I dream in Chinese,” she says. English fluency and English acting, it turns out, are different muscles entirely. “There are certain things you can only express in Cantonese,” she says. The ambiguity of Chinese, the way meaning pools in the spaces between words, resists translation.

Mei Li had the opposite problem. Playing an American in a production staffed by Australians, Brits, a Chilean director and a Hispanic DP, her brain kept mutinying. “Because I like to assimilate when I’m talking to someone, I can’t help but copy them,” she says. The accent kept slipping. “There were just some times where my accent was coming up. I’ll be talking to Chris, and I then suddenly say something in a scene that just sounded Australian.”

Chris Pang, for his part, was wrestling with something thornier than phonetics. His character, Andrew Fung, is written to be obnoxious – cartoonishly, gleefully, exhaustingly so. The question was whether audiences would stick with him. “Andrew is unabashedly and unapologetically an asshole,” Pang says. “He just says the most outlandish, most horrible things. And it’s going to be a mission to find that balance, where you say these things but you still like this guy.” The goal, as he frames it: “an asshole, but one that you can’t help but love.” Director Marialy Rivas, he says, encouraged him to push further than he thought wise. He pushed too far, regularly. “Marialy would give me a take and just be like, just go all out, and I’d go way too far. Like, okay, we’re not using that.”

Stephens, playing Christopher Hext – patriarch, power broker, the kind of man who wears his wealth like armor – was after something quieter. The danger with characters like this, he says, is that they flatten into archetype. “Characters can come across as sort of one-dimensional, kind of evil rich people who are just sort of sociopathic.” What interested him was the gap between the performance of power and whatever lives underneath it. “They’re all masking. They’re all throwing up these things about, I’m rich, I’m powerful, I’ve got this status, but underneath it, they’re all human beings who are all terrified. They feel all of these other things.”

It is, perhaps, also a description of Hong Kong itself – a city that presents one face and contains multitudes. All four cast members return, unprompted, to the idea of the city as something more than backdrop. “Hong Kong seems like a character on its own,” Lam says. She has shot dozens of films here and found herself, through this production’s use of real locations and an outsider’s lens, seeing it differently. “I’ve shot so many Hong Kong produced films here, and it’s never been this way, in this kind of lens.”

Mei Li goes further. The show moves between worlds – the gleaming marina set of the ultra-wealthy and the more grounded lives of characters outside that orbit – and the city absorbs both. “It’s not just we filmed it in Hong Kong. It’s like, this show is about Hong Kong in so many ways.” Stephens, characteristically, cuts to it: “This show could only take place in Hong Kong.”

The series is created and showrun by Yalun Tu, with Marialy Rivas serving as lead director and executive producer. It is produced by PCCW Media in partnership with SK Global, the company behind “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Thai Cave Rescue” and “Delhi Crime.” International sales are handled by Fremantle with support from De Maio Entertainment. Beyond Hulu, the series will stream on Viu across Asia, the Middle East and South Africa, and on Now TV in Hong Kong.

As for what comes next: Stephens is returning to the U.K. for a period film about two nuns on the run during the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII – “Thelma and Louise in Tudor times,” he calls it – titled “The Reformation of Mother Agnes.” Pang has written a crime thriller, currently titled “Brother Gangster” (“I think it needs to change,” he says), with director Jane Woo attached to helm. Mei Li heads to the Soho Theatre in London this summer for “Tender,” a four-person comedy by Dave Harris – only her second time on stage. “It’s something a bit different,” she says. Lam is due to begin filming in September on a project with a Malaysian director, details undisclosed.

All four have moved on to other projects, other cities, other worlds. But Hong Kong has a way of pulling people back.