Shogun - Official Trailer (Disney+)
“I don’t even know how many people there are in the world,” muses Cosmo Jarvis, when I tell him about the viewing figures for the first episode of his new television series, Shōgun. Some context then: there are around eight billion people on Earth, and the premiere of the historical epic clocked nine million views, meaning it was more popular in its first week than Disney+ stablemates The Kardashians and The Bear.
“There is that sense of when you wash up in a strange land, and there’s no way back, you are faced with an acceptance of that situation.” That set a theme for Jarvis’s preparation, which sounds as immersive as the show. “My father used to be a merchant seaman, so I was able to ask him a lot of questions about Blackthorne’s occupation,” he tells me.