As season two launches on HBO, the stars of the show tell us what they think about the show’s relevance in 2018.

October 2016: a more innocent time. The television series Westworld was just launching on our screens, the word “gaslighting” was barely part of our vernacular, and the past participle “woke” was not yet imbued with pointed and political overtones.

Some 18 months later, however, that autumn feels like a lifetime ago. And, with the return of the high-concept HBO drama later this month – about a park full of robots who, after years of suffering violence and sexual abuse, develop consciousness and turn rogue – its creation might now appear to have been the work of soothsayers. (Brace yourself for spoilers.)

“I had an existential crisis after filming season two,” admits Ms Evan Rachel Wood, who, as the show’s heroine Dolores Abernathy, has gone from naive prairie girl to gunslinging avenger. “I was driving my car, looking around, wondering: what the f*** are we? What is this world? None of this is real.”

“You realise, everything is programming, it’s all learned,” continues Ms Wood. “And we’re not free. We’re fed what we’re supposed to be fed, and you really have to search for the truth – especially now.”

Existential crisis aside, Ms Wood attests that playing Dolores “fundamentally changed” her. “I think everybody relates to Westworld in different ways, but, for me, it was finding a power that I’ve possessed all along, but that I didn’t know I had access to. She made me believe in myself more. She made me ask more questions.”

That’s inevitable, believes Mr James Marsden, who plays Dolores’ cowboy love interest, Teddy Flood – it’s a show that asks us to consider the nature of consciousness, the artificiality of free will, and the consequences of indulging our basest human desires. “Those are the deep, fundamental questions that this show asks: Who are you? Who do you want to be when you have free will? Are you making the right decision when no one’s looking?”

For Ms Thandie Newton, whose saloon bar madame, Maeve Millay, is at the forefront of the android resistance, the show’s themes echo the darkest realities of the human existence. “It conjures up my experience with women in Congo who have suffered such horrific sexual violence that psychologically, emotionally, it leaves them shattered,” says Ms Newton, who is a longtime campaigner with the V-Day charity. “A lot of the time, the female characters I play are written by men, and they are underwritten, sexist and misogynistic and racist. Playing Maeve feels different – it’s reflecting the harrowing truth of what people go through in the world, and it has real value.”

Reactions from fans of the show have been no less affecting, if more hopeful. In San Francisco, a married gay couple approached Mr Jeffrey Wright, who plays the cerebral programmer Bernard Lowe. For most of season one (and if you haven’t seen it, look away now), Bernard believed himself to be a human, when he is actually an android “host”. “The older gentleman told me: ‘Your character really resonated with me as someone who, for many years, had lived a dual life before I eventually came out,’” reports Mr Wright. “He really identified with this idea of having to be one thing, externally, but understanding that, at his core, he was something very different. It made me think about the performative nature of his interactions day to day, wearing a social mask to hide his true self. That was really moving.”

Westworld season two starts on 22 April on HBO (US) and Sky Atlantic (UK)