Da Vinci’s Demons Season 2 is set to premiere on Starz this March and creator David S. Goyer (The Dark Knight trilogy, Man of Steel, the upcoming Batman vs. Superman) promises a darker and more fantastical journey.

Goyer was on hand at today's TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour, along with cast members Tom Riley (Leonardo da Vinci), Laura Haddock (Lucrezia Donati) and Blake Ritson (Count Girolamo Riario) to talk about what's next for this “untold” story of Leonardo da Vinci. Having explored political intrigue in Florence, as well as Eastern and European mysticism, Season 2 finds Da Vinci headed to the unknown realms of the New World, as his continuing quest for the Book of Leaves leads him to South America.


“We’re still in Florence,” Goyer said when asked if they’d move away from the political aspect of the series in Italy this season. “We have three or four story strands that interweave and come together in the end. The first season was set up and now the engines are running and things are getting a bit more complicated.”

The premise of the series is to bring an element of fantasy to history, and Season 2 will “definitely see the introduction of some other historical figures,” Goyer assures. Adding, “We’ll be doing our own twist. Vlad was an interesting experiment for us, and a successful one.”


The structure will be less linear this year, Goyer said, but the show will touch on the cliffhangers from the Season 1 finale. “We kind of leave Season 1 with Riario about to blow open the sacristy doors with a culverin,” Ritson said. “And we will see what happens there. We will see the aftermath. But we also get a little amuse bouche of where the series is heading.”

Ever a mix of imagined events and historical record, Goyer promises that Da Vinci’s Demons will expand its imagined exploration of the “secret history” of the artist’s lost years. “He wasn’t in Florence,” Riley says “He wasn’t in Italy. He wasn’t necessarily in Europe. People didn’t know where he was, so we postulate that he was somewhere completely insane.”

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“He also wrote during that period two letters that we have that claiming that he was in Syria working as a war engineer for the Ottoman Empire,” Goyer added, reflecting on the most interesting things he’d learned about his subject’s actual life. “One of the craziest things, surprising things about him, when we were premiering the show the first season, we were in Florence with some historical experts, and this was absolutely mad. But they said that da Vinci and Botticelli, for a brief period of time, had run a vegetarian restaurant on the Ponte Vecchio. This is real. This will be coming this is a spinoff. This was the Better Call Saul version of Da Vinci’s Demons. It was not successful because they spent too much time making the food look good, not necessarily which kind of makes sense.”

Da Vinci the restaurateur will likely not be explored in the series, but Riley says that the complex man’s journey to maturation certainly will continue to take surprising twists and turns.

“Certainly the way he’s written, he seems to be a million things at once,” Riley said. “It’s kind of tough to throw an audience a character that seems like he’s coming from a dozen different directions, and then over time, you get a chance for it to coalesce into a whole. In Season 1, he was an enfant terrible, and he behaved appallingly. In Season 2, we see him as an adolescent, and hopefully in the future we’ll see him become a man.”

Oh, and not to worry, Goyer promises that there will still be a "fair amount of romp," for fans of that aspect of the series.