Alex Garland and the Devs cast on the show's alluring world, and how tech companies can help

Known for his heady sci-fi thrillers Ex Machina and Annihilation, writer and director Alex Garland has a knack for creating worlds just a hair removed from our reality that are both alluring and t errifying. His latest, Devs, is an eight-part series with FX—launching exclusively on Hulu on March 5—that similarly invites its audience in with a sense of eerie beauty and intrigue that can be hard to resist. The series centers on a quantum computing company called Amaya, and its employee Lily Chan (frequent Garland collaborator Sonoya Mizuno) who gets tangled up in a conspiracy when her boyfriend mysteriously disappears at work. At this week’s Hollywood premiere of Devs, we spoke with Garland about Amaya’s aesthetic influences, and learned how his background in writing novels felt similar to writing a season of television. We also has time with some of Devs supporting cast who told us why they found it difficult to say no to Alex Garland, and revealed some of the real-world problems they wish tech companies would actually fix.