It is early November in Los Angeles, almost one month to the day since the Harvey Weinstein stories broke, and I am standing outside the office of writer-director-producer Lisa Joy. Joy and Jonathan Nolan, her husband and creative partner, are the brain trust behind HBO’s big-budget drama Westworld, whose second season premieres April 22. The show is about an immersive adult theme park with a Wild West setting, where androids, known as “hosts,” fulfill the basest fantasies of visiting guests, most of them men. Not surprisingly, the role of women in Hollywood, onscreen and off, is on my mind as I press a nondescript silver buzzer labeled simply “Westworld.” It seems quietly, almost eerily, incongruous with the elaborate, violent world Joy and Nolan have created.

I am thinking of an early scene in the show’s pilot where Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), a blandly pretty android—a damsel in distress made to gratify the lust or hero complexes of male guests—is violently pulled by her dress into a hay-filled barn. There, it is heavily implied, a character known as the “Man in Black” (Ed Harris) rapes her. We don’t see it, but we don’t need to: We hear her screams.

Evan Rachel Wood, Ed Harris John P. Johnson/HBO

It’s a scene that efficiently establishes the terms of the show: In a theme park where patrons maraud with impunity (the hosts can’t hurt the guests, and their memories of abuse are routinely erased), viewers witness plenty of dark fantasies of the shooting/raping/pillaging variety. While many play on benign Western-movie tropes, like knocking back whiskey shots in a saloon, a disturbing number involve violence, much of it toward women. This is not the only time that Dolores is savagely abused, and the show’s other main female character, a madam named Maeve played with glorious sharpness by Thandie Newton, also experiences her share of sexual brutality. She has the butt of a gun shoved into her pelvis; she’s choked to death during sex.

James Marsden as Teddy and Wood as Dolores. John P. Johnson/HBO

Such scenarios, though they reliably provoked outrage among critics, were not always morally tidy. In the latter instance, for example, Maeve goads the patron into throttling her so she will be sent back for repairs at the lab, where she can do some spying. The qualms raised by such scenes are also complicated by the fact that Dolores and Maeve emerge as the show’s most powerful, complex characters. And by the fact that Westworld is cowritten by a woman.

Joy’s imagination conjures at least one-half of the show’s sex and violence and its sci-fi details, but also its memorable characters and their uniquely Westworldian dialogue—earnest soliloquies that touch on big, heady metaphysical concepts. Nolan calls the show “equal parts pulp, action, philosophy, emotion, and head-trippy ideas.” Its tone is as distinctive as anything by David Milch or Aaron Sorkin. “The language and the ideas they’re playing with stretch the bounds of what we’ve seen in pop culture,” says Jeffrey Wright, who plays Bernard, an employee of the park who discovers that he and the hosts he programs have more in common than he previously thought.

“Westworld is a meditation on women... navigating a world in which terrible things routinely happen."

In Joy’s office lobby, twentysomethings click away on laptops. They work for a woman who has the power to create resonant female characters, cast mature actresses, and sculpt onscreen narratives about women that could influence offscreen reality. And yet, as I rewatched the first season, the line between enacting violence and endorsing it, between critiquing “violent delights”—to quote the Shakespearean phrase the show employs—and fetishizing them, also seemed disconcertingly fine.

“It's one of the things that drew me to Westworld,” Joy says from the carpeted floor of her office, where she is sitting cross-legged and barefoot. The idea for a remake of Michael Crichton’s campy 1973 film of the same name was brought to her and Nolan by Felicity and Lost creator J. J. Abrams. Joy convinced Nolan they should do it. “It was a meditation on so many things that I was thinking about at the time: navigating the world as a woman, as a human. Navigating a world in which terrible things routinely happen,” she says. She is dressed simply, in a black tank top and pants. A long corkboard pinned with photos of her two children hangs behind her blond-wood desk, and a turquoise silk kimono—her writing uniform on chilly days—is draped over an elliptical machine by the door.

Joy, who is 40, was raised in a hardworking immigrant family (her dad is from England; her mom is from Taiwan) in suburban New Jersey. She gets misty-eyed talking about her parents, who sold belts for a living and whose lives revolved around seeing that Joy and her younger sister got a first-rate education. (For gifts, they’d splurge on college sweatshirts from Harvard or Oxford.) “The biggest thing my parents gave me was this feeling of, not ‘dream big,’ but strive big,” she says. “Don’t just sit there dreaming; dreaming is the luxury of the rich. Strive big. Nothing is off-limits.” That’s not to say they encouraged her love of writing or her decision to study English and Chinese at Stanford. As she puts it, “The humanities are not something that get you a pension and health insurance.”

Growing up biracial in America, in a home that was “culturally very Chinese,” instilled in her a feeling of being the other, and she says this has helped her writing: “You see sides of people that others wouldn’t, because they’ve underestimated you; they’ve put you in a bucket. And there’s a power to that, and there’s a horror to that.” When she speaks so philosophically, she sounds, at times, uncannily like her character Ford, the eccentric genius who created the park.

Jacket, Levi’s, $90. Proenza Schouler dress from Saks Fifth Avenue, $1,350. Vintage Cartier pinkie ring from Beladora, $750. Her own boots. Ture Lillegraven

Our conversation finds its way to Hollywood’s enduring misogyny. Joy was a consultant at McKinsey & Company, worked in corporate strategy at Universal Studios, and earned a Harvard law degree before submitting a Veronica Mars spec script that got her staffed on Pushing Daisies, so she takes a broad view. “News flash: This isn’t a problem that’s exclusive to Hollywood. Wall Street? Silicon Valley? I’ve worked in those industries. This is not some niche thing.”

Westworld and its beastly human guests can be viewed as an allegory for the way men have long treated women, or, more universally, the way those with power have regarded those without: as less than human. “What has kept me fascinated,” says Newton, who initially had reservations about her role’s nudity and violence, “are the metaphors. These robots represent the oppressed, the silenced of the world.”

Joy's days begin at 7 a.m., when she feeds and dresses her children, a preschool-age daughter and infant son, before heading to the office. Most nights, she gets home around 6:30, puts her kids to bed, and settles in to write until 2 or 3 a.m. But it’s when the show is filming that her schedule really gets “cuckoo,” Joy says, with a wave of her hand. “They seem to be working 25-hour days,” Wright says. “In the midst of all that, of course, she’s a mom. She’s doing FaceTime with her kids. I heard her the other day telling her daughter a bedtime story between takes.”

The afternoon we meet, the show is in production, and Nolan—Joy calls him Jonah—appears in her office doorway to tell her he’s headed to set. Dressed in jeans, a gray T-shirt, and motorcycle boots, he is blond and boyishly handsome, with a vaguely 1950s aura.

“I love you,” he says. “I’ll see you later.”

“Maybe we can have a last date—wait, that sounds bad,” she says, correcting herself the way she often does, as though her brain is moving more quickly than her mouth can accommodate. “A last date before the weekend.” The weekend, she tells me after he leaves, is when they are without child care.

The couple has been married since 2009; they met in 2000 at the premiere of the film Memento, which was based on a short story Nolan had written and was directed by his brother Christopher. Joy and Nolan were introduced by a mutual friend, Joy jokes, because they both wrote lengthy, effusive emails, “like, three-page-long pontifications.” Joy was working at Universal Studios at the time, and Nolan, who’d already had some success as a writer, was traveling the world. The pair kept up an epistolary friendship that blossomed into romance a year later.

Joy and Nolan at the Emmys. David Livingston/Getty Images

Throughout their relationship, Nolan has been Joy’s biggest supporter. Before she left for Harvard Law School, he gave her a tiny gift-wrapped box—she thought it was an engagement ring—that contained the brass brads that hold script pages together and a gift certificate for screenwriting software. This season, he encouraged her to direct, a longtime goal of hers, promising to care for the kids while she did.

Joy filmed Westworld’s pilot while pregnant with her daughter, and she wrote most of the second season while pregnant with her son. During her first pregnancy, she also penned Reminiscence, a sci-fi thriller she calls “an updated noir.” Legendary Pictures bought it at auction for a reported $1.75 million. “A lot of times, people say, ‘My work didn’t suffer with family.’ I would go a step further: My career only flourished upon having children. It got better.” That’s not to say it’s easy. “I’m tired. I’m tired!” she says. She pops a Nicorette from a blister pack—her form of fuel. “Don’t tell my mom. I don’t even smoke.”

One could argue that it’s easier to balance family and career when you work with your husband. Or not. “It’s wonderful. It’s difficult. It’s brutal. It’s amazing. It’s all the things you’d imagine,” Nolan says. Do they fight­—who wouldn’t wonder? “We definitely argued more first season as we were figuring out how to work together,” Joy says. “But Jonah and I always agree on what’s good.”

I have stories, too.… The most important thing is to have more women, more minorities, in positions of power, in positions of creative authority, financial authority—as the architects of their own futures.

“I come from the what-would-James-Cameron-do perspective, and she comes from what-would-Gertrude-Stein-do, and somewhere in the middle is our show,” Nolan says. They view themselves as equal co-creators, and neither wanted to break down their Westworld duties along gendered lines. “Jonah has written some of the most beautiful scenes for women, some of the most emotional,” Joy says, “and I’ve done a ton of fight scenes—I love action.”

Later that afternoon, after a long, traffic-clogged drive, we are on set, where Joy is directing. Westworld is filmed at the 6,500-acre Big Sky Ranch in Simi Valley, California; on location in Utah; and here, at the cavernous Delfino Studios. The day I visit, the show is in a “new kind of secret terrain,” as Joy puts it, and focused on a “new kind of creature.” I can’t say much, but the gist is that Joy is tinkering with a stunt sequence that requires a padded-up dancer, playing a character, to fall to his faux death repeatedly.

Now in a black leather jacket and towering heels, Joy is a commanding, elegant presence. Except for the choreographer, she is also, at the moment, the only woman present. The dancer, her director of photography, a flock of camera guys, a makeup and effects person—all male. She and the choreographer discuss the possibility of falling backward versus to the side. The latter, Joy tells her (spoiler alert if you haven’t finished season one), would nicely echo Dolores’s fall in the finale: “You know how she shot herself and fell to the side? Kind of on her knees: thunk, thunk.”

John P. Johnson/HBO

“That was beautiful,” the choreographer says. The dancer attempts it.

“Do you need knee pads?” Joy asks, concerned. “I heard knees strike the floor, sir.”

It’s clear that despite the long hours, Joy and Nolan have created a culture of mutual respect—a sentiment echoed by all the actors I spoke to. “It is a show that deals with subject matter that is not safe,” Joy tells me later, “but I wanted a safe place for my crew and my cast. There’s almost, like, a wordless understanding: I know what this industry can be, and I’m not going to do that to you, and you’re not going to do that to me.”

“It’s been a revelation, actually,” Newton says. “As an actress of color in my forties, I was shown how an actor, a person, should be treated in this industry. I came to realize from working on Westworld that my expectations had sunk to a very low place.”

Both she and Wood are thrilled to play such complex female characters. “Dolores is not one-dimensional whatsoever,” Wood says. “She’s sometimes more human than the humans.”

Back on set, talk turns to a graphic special effect: “It’s like, bam—it’s just supergross, and we get a little bit of spinal column,” Joy says.

“A little bit of esophagus-getting-pulled- out kind of thing?” the makeup and effects guy asks.

“You’d see a piece in his hands. How do we do that? Would we do a prosthetic?”

In early January, Joy and I speak by phone. The California wildfires had shut down production for several days, and the show is behind schedule. She’s excited to wrap the second season; she tells me it will delve into the ways the park, which is owned by a shadowy company called Delos, “is more than just a Disneyland of sin. There are layers to what the corporation is doing.”

Simon Quarterman, Thandie Newton John P. Johnson/HBO

It’s been three long months of skeleton-exhuming in Hollywood, from Harvey Weinstein to Kevin Spacey to Louis C.K. Will the show reflect that? She answers with her typically thoughtful tumble of words: “The movement is starting now, but creatively speaking, it’s not like I’m trying to pivot to capture it. The simple fact is I’ve been living in this. I have stories, too.… The most important thing is to have more women, more minorities, in positions of power, in positions of creative authority, financial authority—as the architects of their own futures.”

But like all successful art, Westworld comments on our current society without explicitly mirroring it. By the end of the first season, the female characters are free, a timely metaphor if there ever was one, and in this next season, the show will continue to explore the fundamental, and now urgent, question it poses: How does power behave when it thinks no one is looking?

Top Photo: Sweater, Dôen, $268. Vintage Cartier pinkie ring from Beladora, $750. Her own Helmut Lang pants, Converse sneakers, and necklace.

Hair and makeup by Ruth Quevedo for Tom Ford Beauty. Styled by Sarah Schussheim.

This article originally appears in the April 2018 issue of ELLE.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io