SFX clusive: Bigger, darker, more adult, but at the same time funnier…

The cast of Merlin is bigging up series three of the show in the : “It’s war. Full-blown war,” says Anhony Head with the kind of zeal his character, Uther, saves for burning witches “It’s huge. I have to say, some ꩵof the effects are amazing. When you see a huge, flaming catapult shot rolling down the street, it’s like, ‘Oh my god!’ Big, big stuff.”

Colin Morgan adds: “Bad things are happening. There are some big things coming up. The third series is set a year in the future. We get straight into the action and we don’t really hold back on a lot of the confrontations, and the changes in the characters are evi🌸dent right from the very beginning. Friendships are being forged and broken and reborn and burned again. And that’s within the first couple of episodes; really within eight pages of the first script.”

But it’s not all doom and gloom. “It’s still a family show. Kids can still watch it,” says producer Julian Murphy. “We’re careful about what we do. People watch it on different levels… We also keep a lot of humour. We still 🐈do episodic comedy stories. There’s a fantastic story where a goblin appears – played by Mark Williams &ndas🧔h; which is probably the funniest episode we’ve ever made. But we are a little bit darker than when we started, without a shadow of doubt.”

Read loads more of this four-page feature on series three of Merlin (and see some fabulous images we’re▨ allowed🌠 to put online yet) in , out next Wednesday.