‘They have a deep love for each other’: Foundation season 3 will show you a side of the Cleons you haven’t seen before, the Apple TV+ show’s cast says

Foundation season 3 will show you a side of the Empire’s three rulers that you haven’t seen before.

That’s the verdict of Lee Pace, Cassian Bilton, and Terrance Mann, who portray the aforementioned trio, i.e. Brother Day, Brother Dawn, and Brother Dusk, in Apple‘s space opera.

In Foundation‘s first two seasons, the three characters, who are all clones of the Imperium’s first autocrat Cleon I, never saw eye-to-eye. Indeed, despite the fact they jointly lauded it over vast swathes of the galaxy, each clone was as self-serving as their fellow rulers were.

The Apple TV+ show’s third installment, though, will depict a wildly different perspective on the weird granddad-father-son yet brotherly dynamic (hey, I did say it was weird!) that exists between this season’s Cleonic trio. With each clone’s genetic makeup becoming more unique with every generation that passes – read more about that in my Foundation season 1 episode 9 recap – there’s a tenderness to their familial bond that wasn’t there in prior seasons.

“It’s entirely universal in that you have a shorthand with your family,” Bilton told me of the trio’s collective dynamic. “They understand you in a way that you’re not otherwise understood.

“With the Cleons, they’re going through something no one else understands. Maybe Demerzel [played by Laura Birn] understands it in a way that she sees it from a distance, but she’s not going through the experience of being a clone. So, I think they have a deep love, more so than before, for each other.

“There’s this gorgeous scene that we shot where the three of us sit together for the first time in season 3,” Bilton continued. “I won’t say why, but we convene to have a drink and a laugh. When it comes to the ease of that, we’re very lucky as cast members that we get on so well off-camera. We just do it on camera this time.”

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“There’s a rare sense of humanity,” Mann added. “We’re emperors but we’re also clones, so we’re constantly trying to grab and hold onto what we believe to be human to try and make us feel important [to someone] and more alive than just existing as the kings of this faltering empire.”

That’s not to say that Dawn, Day, and Dusk won’t butt heads throughout one of the best Apple TV+ shows‘ third installment. Whether it’s Brother Day’s The Big Lebowski-inspired indifference to actually ruling the galaxy or another issue, this season’s Cleons are still prone to making decisions for selfish means, even if it’s to the detriment of their fellow clones.

“As different as they are persona-wise, they’re still the same, which is the key to understanding them,” Pace mused. “They don’t have the intelligence of Hari Seldon or Gaal Dornick. They don’t possess the cerebral capacity of Demerzel. What they have is a gut instinct that tells them ‘this is how we or I survive’, so they’re very wily in that regard.”

How do you think the Cleons’ individual and collective stories will play out this season? Let me know in the comments. Ahead of its July 11 debut on one of the world’s best streaming services, see what I thought of its first five episodes by reading my Foundation season 3 review, too.

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