Resident Evil featurette goes behind the scenes of the upcoming Netflix series

Yesterday, we shared a batch of new images from the upcoming live-action series based on the Resident Evil video games, which will be premiering on the Netflix streaming service on July 14th. Now we’ve gotten our hands on a featurette that offers a glimpse behind the scenes. In the video embedded above, writer/executive producer Mary Leah Sutton, showrunner/executive producer Andrew Dabb, VFX supervisor Kevin Lingenfelser, and cast members Ella Balinska, Lance Reddick, Paola Nuñez, Siena Agudong, and Tamara Smart discuss the characters, the show’s approach to the concept of Resident Evil, the characters, and even some Easter eggs.

This Resident Evil series will show events playing out in two different timelines:

In the first timeline, fourteen-year-old sisters Jade and Billie Wesker are moved to New Raccoon City. A manufactured, corporate town, forced on them right as adolescence is in full swing. But the more time they spend there, the more they come to realize that the town is more than it seems and their father may be concealing dark secrets. Secrets that could destroy the world.

Cut to the second timeline, well over a decade into the future: there are less than fifteen million people left on Earth. And more than six billion monsters — people and animals infected with the T-virus. Jade, now thirty, struggles to survive in this New World, while the secrets from her past – about her sister, her father and herself – continue to haunt her.

Showrunner Andrew Dabb told Entertainment Weekly this take on Resident Evil is meant to feel like they “took all the games and shuffled them together.” Rather than make a direct adaptation of any of the games, he and the writing team “treated the events and mythology of all the games as if they were the backstory for their show to launch a brand new story for the franchise.” This means that the events of the show take place after many of the video games. Dabb has even seemed to suggest that the series will give some kind of explanation for how the Albert Wesker character is alive in present day, when the Resident Evil 5 game showed him being killed in 2009.

Resident Evil stars Lance Reddick (The Guest) as Albert Wesker, Ella Balinska (Charlie’s Angels) as the adult Jade Wesker, Tamara Smart (Artemis Fowl) as teenage Jade Wesker, Siena Agudong (Upside-Down Magic) as Billie Wesker, Paola Nuñez (Bad Boys for Life) as Albert Wesker’s associate Evelyn Marcus, Ahad Raza Mir (Hum Tum) as Jade’s husband Arj, Connor Gosatti (3rd Night) as teenager Simon, and Adeline Rudolph (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) in an unspecified role.

Will you be watching Netflix’s Resident Evil series? What did you think of the featurette? Let us know by leaving a comment below.