Alex Garland was the last person I met before the world went into lockdown. The British writer/director of Hulu's unsettling new thriller Devs was in New York to scout locations for his still-under-wraps next project in early March, meeting with me in the basement library of his Midtown hotel. Twenty-four hours later, the World Health Organization would declare the coronavirus a pandemic, and the world as we knew it would start to slowly fall apart. Big things were happening, so I had big questions, mostly about whether or not free will is an illusion.

This is the central question of Devs, which is currently streaming exclusively via FX on Hulu. In the miniseries, a tech CEO named Forest (Nick Offerman) has built a quantum computer that may give him the power to peer into the future—an invention that raises the possibility that we may not control our fate. When this results in a murder, the implications get scarier, the science gets trickier, and by the end, you're left with a tangle of big, knotty thoughts that can leave you totally unmoored should you spend a significant amount of time thinking about them.

That's Alex Garland's signature move: Wrapping enormous ideas in genre thrillers that you can't look away from and letting those thoughts unsettle you long after the credits stop rolling, before ultimately, hopefully, enlightening you. His previous films, Ex Machina and Annihilation, are bold, striking stories about people in over their heads in the face of nightmares brought about by artificial intelligence and ecological disaster, respectively. With Devs, Garland's canvas is wider than ever, and he uses it to dive into a deeper range of ideas than ever before, including but not limited to: quantum physics, the villainy of tech companies, and the question of whether any of us has free will (he's skeptical).

GQ: So, how does one even get interested in quantum physics? Just, casually?

Alex Garland: Quantum physics is an attempt to really accurately describe the world we live in. The ideas contained within it are nuanced and provocative. They are an attempt to consider something fundamental and then produce these incredibly counterintuitive states. And that, to me, is just inherently interesting.

Does that factor into your worldview?

I'm particularly interested in science, and philosophy that flows directly from the implications of science rather than broader, more general sorts of philosophy—which are about, I don't know, the nature of what it is to be alive in more emotional terms. Generally speaking, I'm never really in any way offering up ideas that are mine. I'm saying something closer to: “Here are some amazing ideas that have been proposed by other people, and I'm gonna try to relay them via stories.”

In Devs, a lot of questions about differing interpretations of quantum physics come up, but there are very few concrete answers. Are you worried about viewers being frustrated?

One of the funny things about science is that people often think what science does is provide answers in a slightly cold and arrogant way. And I think science actually often has a lot of humility about it. And it doesn't say this is what's happening; it says this might be what's happening.

So why explore all this through a story like Devs?

I think the reason is just that I write stories, probably just by compulsion, and there's nothing more complicated about it. Stories are a good way of exploring these things, because explicitly lecturing on a particular position invites people to immediately say, "Well, I think this," and then listen to the rest of the lecture either in a position of agreement or a position of disagreement. Stories make those arguments more gently, and I like that more oblique way of approaching these ideas—via human experience.