James Marsden, who plays the loyal and honest gunfighter Teddy Flood in Westworld, was in the studio to talk fan theories, the second season and how he maintains some level of chill working on such a heavy show.

The second season just started and if you haven’t seen it before, it’s essentially a theme park set in the Old West that is staffed by perfectly human-looking robots. You can basically do whatever you want to them or with them or have them do it to you.

So, James Marsden, is it strange to have to, as Sir Anthony Hopkins says in the show, die “at least a thousand times”?

Yeah, it is actually. I guess I didn’t anticipate that he would be collecting bullets as much as he did in the first season but yeah, it’s an acting exercise for sure. The first season I was definitely going home cleaning blood out of parts of my body that I didn’t know existed.

Did you get to learn any other cowboy skills?

It took till the end of the first season to get proficient in firing the pistol quickly and actually just not falling off the horse. If you go back and watch the first episodes all of it is pretty much Evan and I trying to just stay on the damn thing. When they were teaching us, we had to walk them around the studio backlot and wear a white bicycle helmet. So it was really, a humiliating process. We were never actually riding the horses anything over a trot but we looked like we had suffered from strokes and were trying to regain our mobility by helping with some horse love. And then we’d get on set and they’d go ‘Action! Sprint over the hill as fast as you can and jump over the trench’. Anyway, now second season we got a little better at it and we feel a little safer.

Sandwiched between the philosophical elements and things about the show that make you question the nature of humanity, is a great deal of casual nudity. And not even in a sexy way, there are just human bodies all over the place. Does it feel like that in real life?

You kind of look around and go, 'wow, I’ve never seen so many naked bodies and thought less of it.' It’s just so Westworld. I don’t know. The clip you just played* of my dialogue with Anthony Hopkins, all I could think about was that that scene was shot with me butt naked in a chair sitting opposite Sir Anthony Hopkins. When they yell cut they run in with a robe and cover you up, but after a take or two you’re like ‘nah, I don’t need the robe. I’m fine.’ It’s tremendously liberating actually.

I guess that’s part of the show. I mean, there’s a cruelty to it. You look at the stories being told from the host’s perspective and how they’re treated like nothing. They’re treated like robots, they’re not treated like human beings and yet they accrue memories and experiences and have very human-like feelings and emotions, which makes them human. That’s what the show does: it asks those questions, like what is it to be human? What is a soul? What is consciousness?

The show does address some of those huge philosophical themes but at times it is incredibly crushing and very cruel. How do you deal with that bleakness as a day job? How do you decompress from that?

That’s a good question. I mean, it’s not a show for the faint of heart to watch and also, to make. It’s a difficult show to produce and being on set — I mean, no one wants to hear an actor complain about being an actor — but it can be sort of soul-wrenching at times. I spend a lot of time with Evan Rachel Wood and she’s got a great light about her and an awesome sharp sense of humour. So, in between takes we just make it as ridiculous as possible. Because we are very frequently in these perverse situations [laughs] and scenarios, and we turn it into a musical. We dance around with fake dead bodies [laughs]. I mean, not in a disrespectful way to the prosthetic dead bodies but we do this thing when we rehearse our lines — because we don’t want to give the performance, we’re just doing it for memorisation — we’ll do all the lines as Ron Burgundy. Evan came up with it. She was like, ‘These lines that we say are so in his lexicon’ and I was like ‘What do you mean?’ [Evan Rachel Wood as Will Ferrel as Ron Burgundy voice] ‘It doesn’t look like anything to me, Dolores.’ So that became a theme.

"We would just rehearse as Ron Burgundy."

We’re always trying to keep it light and keep it goofy. You have to, otherwise you’ll lose your mind on that show.

Listen to the full chat and more of James Marsden doing Will Ferrell up top.

What are your thoughts on all the fan theories floating around?

You’re excited that people are just out there digging it. And it was so masterfully executed in the first season — not to my credit, but to the showrunners and the writers and all the other performers. So, I guess you’re happy people are out there wanting to try and figure it out. There’s no right way to do it or watch the show but Westworld is such an experience. If you had the ability to get ten episodes of Westworld and just watch it over a weekend, it would sort of take half the wind out of the sails. It would just be like, ‘well, now I’ve gotta wait another 19 months for another weekend of watching Westworld.’ Whereas, if you just let the show come to you in its own time, and not try to figure it out…

"It’s by design that you’re off balance and you don’t necessarily know where all the paths lead and how all the puzzle pieces are put together. You’re supposed to be confused."

So if you sit in that and allow yourself to enjoy being confused and still be entertained, that’s when the show really works and pays off down the line and you really get the rewards. I’m not saying that Reddit is a bad thing and that the people trying to figure it out are doing a bad thing but I just get a little protective when they’re spoiling it for everyone else (if they do get to that point). The people who really care about the show are usually the ones who don’t want to hear anything and don’t want to know. With Westworld I feel like just let the show come to you in its own organic time, that’s when it’s gonna really impact you in a good way.

We’re only two episodes in but how long do you think this show can go? Are there many more seasons in it?

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot smarter people out there that have a better answer than I do about that — I feel like when you have a show that questions things like 'What is now? What is time? What is history? What is past? What is existing? What is consciousness?' the laws of cause and effect have been turned upside down and anything can happen. We can go back we can go forward, we can go to another park, we can come out of the park.

So, I kind of feel like they can take it as far as they want to take it. I know that there’s great discipline in their story telling and I feel like, if I were to guess, that they would probably go five, six, seven seasons. Somewhere around there. But again [laughs] everything that comes out of my mouth on this show is pure speculation because we don’t know sometimes as much as the audience doesn’t know. But I feel like there’s enough really rich content and thematically [there are] roads to go down and journeys to take that they could stretch it out, for sure.

*Ed note: can't find video of that scene, so here's Sir Anthony Hopkins dancing instead.