‘It starts with a bang this season and we don’t give you room to breathe’: ‘Foundation’ Season 3’s stars on completing the far-future sci-fi saga (exclusive)

As the prime architect of the predictive science known as psychohistory, “Foundation’s” Hari Seldon is one of the most fascinating characters in sci-fi literature and Apple TV+’s spectacular adaptation of sci-fi master Isaac Asimov’s stories scored a decisive victory casting distinguished British actor Jared Harris (“Fringe,” “Mad Men,” “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows”) in the role.

Seldon’s calculations have forecast the crash of the Galactic Empire and he forges ahead with a plan to create a structural life raft to ensure humanity’s survival in the face of 30,000 years of darkness. His brilliant young mathematical prodigy Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) has worked alongside the famed psychologist for the show’s past two seasons and now a showdown with a telepathic warlord known as The Mule is inevitable as the third season kicked off on July 11. 2025.

We connected with Harris and Llobell on the eve of “Foundation’s” latest 10-episode enterprise to learn what this new season hopes to accomplish when the Cleonic Dynasty’s grasp on the galaxy begins to crumble and the Foundation rises in strength and influence as worlds shift alliances.

“You always learn something every time you’re in front of the camera and you learn from the people you’re working with,” Harris tells Space.com. “I enjoy doing what I do so I’m grateful for the opportunity to do it. Hari is both a known quantity and an unknown quantity. I don’t really know where they’re going to take the character each season. I sit down, I get all ten episodes, I read the scripts, and I’m transported on this journey just the way people are when they watch it. And the writers do a really good job of making sure that the character evolves from season to season. Even though there’s a version of Hari that’s stuck in stasis, you’re always trying to find a way of being able to play that character in a way so that you can still live in the moment and there’s an element of uncertainty and surprise and that’s all kind of baked into what happens.

“They’ve gone way beyond how he exists in the narrative of the books. That was sort of a demand of telling the story in this format, that you had to have a group of characters who were going to evolve from season to season. And that’s one of the genius strokes that they’ve come up with in figuring out how to make these different characters immortal in a sense. That’s a conversation you have with the writers when you sit down and read the scripts. They want to hear our thoughts, our responses, our ideas. Sometimes our questions inspire rewrites and they take things in different directions. That’s an important part of the process.”

Foundation — Season 3 Official Trailer | Apple TV+ – YouTube

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For Llobell, this season is an especially exiting one as we’ll finally get a heavyweight showdown between Gaal and The Mule (Pilou Asbæk) in true Hollywood fashion like a sci-fi version of the 1952 Western classic, “High Noon.”

“Gaal is definitely intimidated by what’s been building up so much for this one moment,” she reveals. “It feels like a chase, like a cat and mouse and they finally get to confront each other. There’s a threat and the threat is that either one of them dies or both of them die. Anything can happen. There’s a lot at stake. He’s everyone’s enemy by halfway through this season. He’s not just Gaal’s, he’s really a threat to Empire as well. So it’s an interesting dynamic that the two forces that were once against each other now have a common enemy. It starts with a bang this season and we don’t give you room to breathe. I think it’s so rewarding.

“We’ve really laid the groundwork in season one and two of building up these worlds and expressing who these people are and where they come from, and now we get to really just dive straight in. We’re outside a lot too and that’s really great because you can see the contrast in everyone’s costumes and it’s just a good reflection of the story. David [Creator David Goyer] is amazing. He’s got everything in his head. He knows what his vision was for this eight seasons in. He’s really brilliant to work with, he’s a genius. Jared is a funny guy and super generous. I adore him and his wife. He reads between the lines and sees things I sometimes don’t. His ego doesn’t get in the way at all and he’ll give lines away.”

As Harris describes it, “Foundation” is a mixture of high-brow science fiction with old-fashioned adventure storytelling, married with palace intrigue like something straight out of “I, Claudius” or “Rome.”

“You can see the direct link back towards what inspired Asimov to write the story, which was when he read about the fall of the Roman Empire,” Harris notes. “It’s this sort of melding of different strands. There are lessor productions that folded tents and walked away and this one didn’t. They were determined to complete the story and get it out there. That’s the most satisfying thing for me, not just to complete the storytelling, but also the quality that’s involved. It’s a visually spectacular, visually stunning show on top of everything else.”

“Foundation” Season 3 airs on Apple TV+ with new episodes each Friday.