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Invasion Creator Simon Kinberg on Writing Season 3, Trevante/Mitsuki

Invasion creator Simon Kinberg spoke with Bleeding Cool about the creative process behind Season 3, the Trevante/Mitsuki dynamic, and more.

Invasion creator Simon Kinberg has never shied away from playing the long game with his sci-fi epic series for AppleTV+ alongside co-creator David Weil. The show's premise about how humanity deals with a looming extraterrestrial threat is global in scope, with characters speaking in English, Japanese, and Pashto, with its multicultural characters and cast, each with a major piece of the puzzle. The series' central characters are Aneesha Malik (Golshifteh Farahani, a mother whose life is upended as the onset of the alien threat emerges; Mitsuki Yamato (Shioli Kutsuna), a communications specialist with the Japanese space program who struggles socially and tries to investigate her love's death; Capsar Morrow (Billy Barratt), a scrappy nerdy kid with epilepsy who tries to get out of his shell; and Trevante Cole (Shamier Anderson), a soldier from a small-town in Florida who seeks adventure and gets far more than he bargains for with the alien threat. Kinberg spoke with Bleeding Cool about the processes between Invasion seasons two and three, the growth of Anderson's Trevante and Kutsuna's Mitsuki, and if he feels any different creatively when it comes to an original project or existing IP.

Invasion Creator Simon Kinberg on Crafting Season Three Journey with Characters Finally Coming Together

What was the difference between the process of writing 'Invasion' season three from the previous second season?

The process was not that different. I sat down, had some thoughts about where to take the season, and then got into it with the writing staff of some talented folks, some of whom were writers going back to the first season, some came in the second season, and some were brand new to this season. That process was, from a practical standpoint, pretty similar. The challenges of writing at the creative process were different in that it's a fundamentally different season from the previous two, mostly in that the other seasons were about these different characters spread out all over the world, parallel storylines, rarely ever touching each other. In this season, we take all those main characters, and we smash them together, so it's a completely different way of telling a story. They're on a mission that's a forward-driving mission, and so there's a different kind of propulsion to this season. From a practical standpoint, it was me in my pajamas and then me in normal clothes with a writing room.

Can you tell me about Shamier and Shioli's growth as Trevante and Mitsuki, and their paths going into the season?

I was excited about putting Shamier and Shioli together, not just because they're extraordinary actors, but because the characters seem like they're totally different characters. He is this big physical soldier, and she is a much more cerebral, physically smaller, but an absolute genius. They share the fact that they both are living with a lot of loss. He lost his child, then he lost Caspar (Billy Barratt), and that is what he's carrying with him as his emotional trauma. She lost the love of her life (Hanata Murai, played by Rinko Kikuchi) in the first season and so these two characters, who seem like they and are in fact from completely different sides of the world share something emotional and so it was an interesting for me journey to, even unconsciously, to take these characters, put them on emotionally parallel tracks and then have them collide in this season.

Creatively speaking, how do you compare your work on something original like 'Invasion' with some more well-known IPs that you've done over the years? Do you find it less constricting as far as your perception of what you could do, or does it feel about the same?

It's different. There's wide open terrain, and I'm not basing it on anything. I don't know it would be "constricting versus not constricting," but it's a different process when I have no source material and I am constructing stuff from whole cloth. When I have source material, I similarly fall in love with the characters and the process of plotting things out, and constructing characters is similar except I am importing "Sherlock Holmes," or "Professor Xavier" (from X-Men) or a lot of the other IPs I've worked on over the years. The process is a little bit different, but to properly adapt something, you do have to fall in love with it the same way you did originally. You do have to take some emotional and creative ownership over it, even if didn't you didn't originate it.

Season three of Invasion, which also stars Azhy Robertson and Tara Moayedi, premieres on August 22nd on AppleTV+.

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