Say “Amazon fantasy series starring Orlando Bloom” and your mind will probably go to that other fantasy epic the streaming service has in the works (which, for the record, will not involve Bloom). But Carnival Row is a different beast entirely.
The new trailer for Amazon’s fantasy noir drama, debuting Aug. 30, shows off the series’ steampunky aesthetic, along with the smoldering romance between Bloom’s human detective and Cara Delevingne‘s refugee faerie. It also teases the show’s social themes and central murder mystery, which seems to involve something unusually monstrous, even for a show full of creatures.
Carnival Row is set in a Victorian London-esque city where mythical creatures live as refugees, with their war-torn homeland under attack by human invaders. Bloom stars as Rycroft “Philo” Philostrate, a detective investigating a spate of grisly murders in the eponymous district. As tensions between the human and creature populations rise, Philo rekindles an affair with Vignette Stonemoss (Delevingne), a faerie with whom he has a complicated past and who harbors a dangerous secret.
“There’s secrets wrapped within secrets,” co-creator Travis Beacham teased to EW. “It’s a really massive, massive, massive world, and we’ve just started to scratch the surface of it with this season.”
Fortunately, Amazon has already granted the show a second season to continue exploring that world. You can get your own glimpse of it in the full trailer, above.
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