With some distance it can be easy to forget that, back in 2019, the two culture-defining phenomena of the 2010s came to their long-awaited conclusions within a single month. Avengers: Endgame hit theaters on April 26, and Game of Thrones rode off into the sunset on May 19. The forces of Westeros even met the White Walkers the same weekend the Avengers were saving their fallen comrades from Thanos' humanity-halving snap. A popular meme suggested that, with Jon, Sansa, and Arya in one impossible battle and Tony in another, it would likely be a bad weekend for the Starks.

Benedict Wong and Liam Cunningham were at the heart of those two behemoths, as Doctor Strange's sidekick Wong and Game of Thrones' Davos Seaworth. The pair are back this week in a project that's slightly more under the radar.

3 Body Problem, adapted from Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, is a sci-fi series from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, working in collaboration with TV veteran Alexander Woo. Though the talent behind 3 Body Problem are known quantities, the premiere of a big, risky new series is a different beast than the eighth season of Thrones or the 22nd MCU movie.

"Something new is always glorious," Cunningham tells me over Zoom. "I think 𓄧most of the time we do try and avoid repeating ourselves and, obviously, the best 🍬way to do that is to do something new and give yourself a new set of challenges because it keeps the creators and actors and writers and everybody involved on their toes and gives them a number of new problems to solve.

“The easiest thing in the world is to go back and repeat yourself because it worked once before, so let's not rock the boat and let's just do it again. And for some people that's fine, there's nothing wrong with it, but if you want to challenge yourself you have to come in… on the ground floor of something that's new and this is gloriously new."

Cunningham is right about that. 3 Body Problem is bursting with ideas, kicking off with scientists discovering that the laws of nature aren't observably true in the lab anymore. Soon, we learn that a group of people scattered around the world are beginning to have their vision obstructed by an ominous countdown that no one around them can see. No one knows what it signifies, either. Add in a mysterious virtual reality helmet containing a game that seems to be beamed into the series' present from decades of technological advancement down the line and you have an intriguing tangle of leads to track down.

Wong plays the character doing the tracking, a detective named Da Shi. Cunningham is his boss, Wade. Both take on greater, but spoilery, significance later on in the series. It's safe to say that an existential threat to humanity emerges as the season progresses, and Cunningham and Wong are part of the force attempting to stop it.

"[The events of the show are] not beyond the realms of imagination. If we looked at the existential threat that just went, that we filmed through, the whole COVID thing. I mean nobody knew where that was going to go. And this was the smallest enemy one can imagine, a virus. Certain comparisons could be done with our story, except this is a threat not from within, it's from without," Cunningham says.

"I mean look at the drama the world had over COVID, it was extraordinary. It changed many people's perceptions of how they live their life. And we were filming this entire story during the middle of that. Which was kind of extraordinary. But [in the show] we have this incredibly entertaining threat. This story of this threat that's coming and how is humanity going to deal with it. And what is the threat going to do to society?"

As new as 3 Body Problem is, it brought Cunningham back to working with familiar crew from his run on Thrones, and old castmates like John Bradley and Jonathan Pryce. Wong said that he felt the sense of camaraderie, too, even as a newcomer. "Obviously, I've been on similar juggernauts before, but with this one you can definitely see that [this is] a family that has worked alongside each other for the best part of ten years," Wong explains. "They were all there and there's a lovely sort of shorthand that you could see which allows for more space and time for us to put things on the screen and work together."

All eight eꦉpisodes o༺f 3 Body Problem will premiere on Netflix on March 21.