On Thursday, HBO announced it would be releasing a sixth and bonus episode of the Chernobyl podcast featuring its lead star Jared Harris and the usual Craig Mazin, the show’s creator as well as NPR’s Peter Sagal. Harris, who has previously played King George VI Netflix’s hit show The Crown, played Valery Legasov, the Soviet expert in nuclear physics who is credited with conceiving most of the clean up after one of the most famous nuclear disasters in history.
The podcast, made up of five episodes of interviews and afterthoughts with Mazin and Sagal, mostly dealt about the process of writing, casting and directing the show. It delved into the historicity of Chernobyl’s drama, the politics surrounding the nuclear accident in 1980’s Ukraine as part of the Soviet Union, and the relevance the government-sponsored war on truth has had as of late. This bonus episode, however, kicks off with Mazin’s reflection on even more relevance now that Russia has acknowledged they shot a missile recently, which spiked up radiation levels 16 times higher than normal. Has a new arms race started?
@hbo.chernobyl
The rest of the episode has Harris talking about his acting experience as he starred in one of the most watched shows of all time. Chernobyl is deals with the precise moment the nuclear accident took place on April 26, 1986, as well as the steps the Soviet government took to downplay the effects of the accident, to save face internationally disregard thousands of innocent lives. It also seeks to do justice to Valery Legasov, who committed suicide to years to the date of the accident.
@hbo.chernobylAside from being a critically acclaimed series, the show has pissed a lot of people off (mostly former Russian Communists), broken viewership records, and helped Chernobyl tourism soar.
Read more:
‘Chernobyl’: Russian Communist Party Looking To Ban Miniseries And Sue Its Creators
The True Story Behind The Scientist Who Handled The Chernobyl Disaster, V. Legasov
Chernobyl Tourism Soars After HBO’s Miniseries, And That’s Actually A Terrible Thing
