Add Kaos to your watchlist. It was spectacular, like a dream.” Nabhaan Rizwan is recalling swimming with Kaos co-stars Jeff Goldblum and Janet McTeer in the waters off Istria in the Adriatic at the start of a filming schedule that, for those playing gods, featured luxury yachts and five-star hotels.
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I’m working on this incredible show, making beautiful friends, doing beautiful things’. It felt like a fitting meeting place for gods.” The 27-year-old actor and comedian, who plays Zeus’s son Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy, evokes an idyllic scene, but Charlie Covell’s reinvention of the Greek myths pumps humour and horror into the Olympian idyll.
“Everyone’s rotten in this show,” Rizwan says approvingly. “It’s kind of punk in that way. Everyone cocks it up on a cosmic scale and feels the consequences.
Just when you think everything’s fine and dandy, something terrible happens, some heinous act is committed and it flips the hourglass in our world.” Dionysus’s usual duties require him to enjoy a relentless schedule of physical pleasure and indulgence, but it’s not enough any more; he wants a new challenge. “That’s where Dionysus is at when we meet him.
He’s been partying, enjoying good times and wild frenzies; living out many of people’s greatest aspirations every night of the week, and he’s incredibly bored. Dionysus doesn’t know who he is, or how deep or shallow he is. He can’t place himself among any.