A Sneak Peek at Season 3 of 'Vienna Blood' with the Actors and Crew

Vienna Blood returns with a third season on PBS and WTTW January 8 at 9:00 pm. Recap and stream previous seasons.
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Just as he was finally beginning to progress in a romance with the long-admired Amelia Lydgate, Max Liebermann ruined things by re-engaging with his one-time fiancée Clara Weiss—and that is where we left the young doctor at the end of season 2 of Vienna Blood. “Love triangles all over the place,” Matthew Beard, who plays Max, said earlier this year in a roundtable interview about the coming third season.

“The relationship that works best within the whole thing is ours, actually,” added Juergen Maurer, who plays Max’s Detective Inspector counterpart Oskar Rheinhardt. “An old couple,” he said with a laugh.

In the third season, that “old couple” once again reunites to solve three new cases, set in the distinct worlds of fashion, the Chinese antiquities trade, and the brand-new world of cinema. They have some assistance in their work, no longer from Amelia, who has returned to England, but two other women in their lives: Clara, who has become a fashion journalist, and Max’s sister Leah, who is now working in the family business under her father Mendel. Leah’s presence onscreen also grows in another way: she has a love interest. “I’ve just been wanting one for three seasons,” Charlene McKenna, who plays Leah, cracked at the roundtable.

Oskar and Max continue to evolve as well, with Oskar now becoming an expert at the kind of psychological deduction that is Max’s strength. “There’s even some moments where I’m sort of beaming at [Oskar], proud of how you seem to have worked this out,” Beard said of Max.

Beard and Maurer said that they have a kind of “effortless” chemistry on set together, and the entire cast and production team does seem to enjoy working together: in particular, McKenna and Conleth Hill, who plays Mendel, made plenty of jokes with each other during the roundtable. “The effort is not having too much fun,” McKenna said about filming. “I can say with my hand on my heart, I’d be proud to have either of them as my children,” Hill said of McKenna and Beard.

The third season was filmed in Budapest rather than Vienna, but the change of location (and the delay because of the pandemic) doesn’t seem to have fazed the cast. “I’ve never had this, where you build a relationship of years with another actor,” Beard said of Maurer. “I really, really enjoyed that.”

“When you return to set, you put on your costume, you see one of these fabulous built and decorated sets, and you have the feeling that the one and a half year between the last shoot and the current shoot seems not to exist anymore,” Maurer said. 

“The minute you put on the corset, your posture is different,” said McKenna. “It immediately changes some of my physicalities: how I move, how I walk, how I gesture. And then when you’re in these places, there’s such a grandeur. Everything’s elevated, and you don’t feel so farcical being so posh and swanky and fancy.”

“The fact that you’re filming in places that ordinarily would make you swoon,” added Amelia Bullmore, who plays Max and Leah’s mother Rachel, “these places are taken for granted by your character, so that tells you everything.”

The show’s director Robert Dornhelm also appreciates the cast and their ease of slipping into character. “It’s like sitting in a high-class BBC production,” he said. “It’s very little you have to do because every note is right on. It’s like playing on a Stradivarius or a wonderful instrument where the tones are all correct; you don’t get any wrong notes. You just have to touch a little bit and it gets even better. It doesn’t require much directorial talent.” 

Dornhelm, who has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary, was surprised when he was approached to work on Vienna Blood. “I’m the last person who is qualified for murder mystery stories,” he said. “If I would not have had the historic, literary, musical elements to play with—I accepted this because there was so much more than the whodunit. I am coming more from the Max Liebermann side: the psychology of the characters and the surrounding of the story. What’s happening in the time? Who are the artists of the period? What’s the political development, anti-Semitism?”

Steve Thompson, the writer of the series who adapted it from Frank Tallis’s Liebermann Papers novels, is also fascinated by the historical setting. “We have this fantastic producer called Andreas who seems to know more about Viennese history than the rest of the Viennese put together,” he said. “Just hanging around with him is amazing, because these jewels just sort of fall out of his mouth, and he will suddenly tell you about a whole political scandal in Vienna in 1910 that I knew nothing about, and I’m hurriedly writing it all down…The quantity of really rich, juicy detail our producers know about Vienna for me is a thrill to listen to.”

The hope is that those factual backgrounds help enliven the series and make it a thrill to watch. You’ll be able to find out for yourself starting January 8.