Said Taghmaoui, who you may recognise from Wonder Woman, has joined the second season of Legion as Amahl Farouk, or, “a villain with a thousand faces”.
The news was unveiled at San Diego Comic-Con, where the cast and crew gathered to recap season one and tease what’s to come when the show returns for a longer ten-episode run.
On Farouk, FX said: “In his real form, he is always nattily dressed. Dapper with a thin Clark Gable-style mustache. His eyes forever hidden behind a pair of ornate sunglasses. He was hip long before there was such an idea. He can seductively hold court on any topic and in any language, but his true passion lies in the singular timeless notion of power and amassing as much of it as possible.
“It is rumoured he is the spawn of the first nightmare, which is fitting because fear is his weapon of choice in exposing weakness in others. To Farouk, fear equals weakness and he fears nothing. Which is why he takes such delight in seeing others squirm – a reminder he is more powerful than them.”
Speaking with TVLine, creator Noah Hawley touched on the often confusing nature of the show, and how the cast don’t even know what’s going on most of the time.
He said: “Part of the fun of making an ensemble where everyone’s in their own storyline is that when you you finally show the cast, they don’t really know what it all is together. Dan knows the show he’s in, but often Jean’s in a different show, and Rachel… So when you put it all together and see how it cuts with music, obviously there’s a very hypnotic pattern to the cutting style. So that script doesn’t really indicate what the show’s going to be.”
And what happens to David know that he’s free of the Shadow King parasite? Is this his happy ending?
“[It’s about] the identity of illness,” Dan Stevens said. “People’s attachment to something that may be living inside them – a bad entity. It’s an interesting story to look at illness that way and how people do sometimes identify an illness and give it a persona.”
Hawley continued: “What’s interesting is you have a character who can blame every bad thought or thing he’s ever done on an entity that’s now gone. Is he thinking ‘well I’m purely a good person and every thought I have a good thought?’, and there’s a hubris to that.
“It’s the idea of what’s normal and what reality is that we continue to play with. I want to continue to make this a parable about mental illness and not just have that have been a gimmick to get us into a superhero show.”
Legion will return early next year. Watch the cast interview with TVLine below.