BF: It's also about surrounding Wednesday and Shadow with a really dynamic cast of fantastic gods, played by wonderful actors, who are imbuing them with such specificity. We are telling many stories. It's like the Wednesday/Shadow story is the spine of the season—and off of that, we have meaty ribs of Mr. Nancy, and Bilquis, and Ibis and Jacquel, and Laura, and Mad Sweeney. There are a ton of characters in this show, and I think that's what gives it a little more pizzazz than two guys driving down a road.

American Gods has a devoted following, but it’s also set within a large and complicated universe, with an entire pantheon of gods to introduce. How would you explain the series to someone who has no idea what they're in for?

BF: I think it's about following an emotional story: people who are lost and searching for their place in the world. That applies to man, and that applies to gods.

MG: It's always about finding, "How would a god be a real person in the world? How would they get by? What job would they have? What would they be wearing? If you saw them on the subway, what would you think of them?" We always want to make sure that a god you see on the subway is someone you'd believe is just another person going from home to the office. They still need to have a place in the world, trying to make it in America. […] When you strip away the grandiosity of a god, you're left with the basics: Rent. Tooth decay. Jobs. Commutes. Those are still things they need to deal with, like anyone else.

BF: And each of these gods is an immigration story. They migrated to the United States from their respective countries and cultures of origins, and found themselves in a place where their religions have become less important in the mainstream religious politics of the United States. [The gods] are then left alone, without worshippers, because the main gods of Christianity and Buddhism and Islam are all scooping people up.

"It's always about finding, 'How would a god be a real person in the world? How would they get by? What job would they have?'"

The breadth of the novel's universe meant that many of the gods get relatively brief introductions before the story moved forward without them. Do you have a process for deciding when and how to give those gods a larger role in the TV series?

BF: That's where we got some of the most overwhelming support and appreciation from Neil Gaiman. When he wrote the book, he was servicing a larger piece of fiction that couldn't go to 1200 pages—though he was able to imagine 1200 pages.

While we're on the subject—you've cast Jeremy Davies as Jesus Christ, who famously never appears in the original novel. What can you tell me about the role Jesus plays in the series?

BF: Oh, Jesus Christ. [laughs] Well… We wanted to get an indication of the relationship between the old gods who have retained their power and old gods who have lost their power. Jesus Christ, being 2000 years old and some change, is a relatively "new" god of the older god category—and has done quite well for himself, in terms of worship. Bringing him in is a compare-and-contrast for how Christianity usurped and absorbed many other religious iconography. It was interesting to us to explore Christ, because if the rules of the book are to be held true—if you believe in something, you manifest it—there are many Jesus Christs in the universe, because there are many different cultural interpretations of Jesus. Jeremy Davies represents one interpretation of Jesus Christ.

MG: And for anyone who closes their eyes and imagines Jesus, there's another Jesus.

You've also cast Gillian Anderson as Media—a new god who takes the forms of pop-cultural legends like Lucille Ball and Marilyn Monroe. How are you deciding which real-life celebrities are iconic enough to appear as representative stand-ins for all of Media?

MG: We wanted to honor people we felt had been prominent in the media, but in a positive way. People who left an indelible mark, and shifted the way we look at art or culture, but in a way that we could celebrate and be proud of, rather than… well, some of the first places people might take someone like Media. And it also came in conversation with Gillian Anderson. I remember Bryan sat down for a meal with her, and came back and said, "Here's who she would be excited to step into." And it suddenly burst open the door in our own heads for how we could see it. It wasn't just a matter of her doing an impression of a famous face or voice. It was a matter of her taking on the character of Media, and Media then using the qualities of a Marilyn Monroe—and then weaponizing them, in order to make her point to whoever she's trying to seduce in a particular scene.

The book was published more than 15 years ago, and there have been multiple aborted attempts to adapt it for the screen. What makes this the right time, and the right way, to tell the story?

BF: It feels like we—as a country—are so divided in terms of what we believe in. As the show's tagline says: You are what you worship. There's something so true about that, with how we're operating as a culture in America. People believing in a wide variety of things, and rarely believing in the same thing. It gives us an opportunity to have a conversation: What is faith? What is belief? What is your personal responsibility for how you see yourself in the grander scheme of the universe, and life, and your contribution to it? It feels like when we’re writing these scripts, we have something to talk about. That there are themes that these characters—gods and humans alike—are experiencing. The world is very fluid, and they can either drown in it or swim through it.