Wion Exclusive: Luke Evans, Michiel Huisman, and Jessica Ann Collins talk about their latest series 'Echo 3'

An all-new series 'Echo 3', starring Luke Evans, Michiel Huisman and Jessica Ann Collins released today on Apple tv plus. WION got the opportunity to catch up with the cast members for a quick, short chat about their experiences.  

Created by two-time Academy Award winner Mark Boal, 'Echo 3', is a cinematic thriller set on South America's Colombia-Venezuela border with English and Spanish dialogues.  

The series is layered with personal drama, set against the explosive backdrop of a secret war. Excerpts from the interview: 

Q: 'Echo' is a series that contains, a wedding gala, personal drama, war, drug issues and much more. Also touches on the topic of national security, can you comment on the experience of bringing together such a vast category in one script? 

A: Jessica Ann Collins: The complexity of the series on those topics is what makes it very compelling. 

Michiel Huisman: I agree, and knowing that you have a writer behind you, a writer like Mark Boal, who is really comfortable in telling stories with such backgrounds like military and geo-political, it really helps and it means that I feel that I can focus on my character and know that somebody else understands the bigger picture. 

Luke Evans: And I think also following from that, it means that because there is so much going on as you said, there is so much, each character is going through their own personal struggle, they have to carry their own baggage throughout the story and it is different from each one. It crisscrosses through the Spanish-speaking cast, then we hit back to Washington, it's constantly moving and so what it provides is a canvas of very interesting things, which means you never get a moment to relax. . You are always following these stories and realising how they are inter-thread with each other. That's a great story if you are always on the edge of your seat. This journey was so immersive and that's what you see onscreen. A complex fabric of storylines that affect each other.  

Q: Can you comment on the efforts you had to go through to get your dialects right?   

A: Michiel Huisman: Ah. You said dialect.  

Luke Evans: Yes.  

Michiel Huisman: No effort at all.  
(All three laugh)  

Luke Evans: I overreacted the most. I'm Welsh, and British, and I have done American many times but I have never done this, Southern accent before. So I put a lot of work in before we came to Atlanta where we started the project. Then we had an incredible dialect coach who came with us. She was there every day, wherever we were, I would work with her during my time off, in the evenings, I wanted to do a good job, and it's not easy when you take a different accent. You want to find the nuance in the dialect, you know I am surrounded by Americans, and I always you know want to impress them. It's an exposing thing to do, taking on somebody else's accent and doing it for such a long time.   

Jessica Ann Collins: My joke is that I was raised in the American South, I was trained at Julliard's, and I felt like Luke had a better Southern accent than me. (Laughs).  

Michiel Huisman: Well you know, Cynthia, our dialect coach, she is kind of like a special forces' operator, she was our rock. She was really good.  

From playing a military man in 'Game of Thrones' to playing a military man in 'Echo 3', can you comment on the experience?  

Michiel Huisman: Oh, my God! It was a completely new experience for me. That was also one of the reasons why I was dying to play this character. He was a very different character from the ones I have played before. He is a very complex guy, a guy that comes from privilege, and still chooses to join the absolute pinnacle of the American military, he is a bit arrogant and somewhat controlling, and maybe in the military that serves him well because he somehow likes to control the battlefield, and that suits him in the marriage that's not really working well for him. So this was a completely new experience for me, one that I was dying to take on.