There are no trailers on a boat. This is the logistical reality that Toby Stephens found himself confronting somewhere in the middle of shooting “The Season,” Hulu‘s new drama about the bad behavior of Hong Kong’s sailing elite – a show that, almost by design, offered its cast nowhere to hide.

“Normally when you’re filming, you can go back there, and at lunchtime you can have a little snoozy,” Stephens says, with the weary affection of a man who has made his peace with it. Instead, he meditated on deck. His castmates photographed him doing it. There was, apparently, a sitar soundtrack.

Six episodes. Fifty days. Humid, floating, relentless. And by all accounts, a genuinely wonderful time.

“Because we had such a fun cast,” says Karina Lam, who plays Fiona Hext, “all that just became so much easier.” Jessie Mei Li, who plays the American Cola despite being resolutely English, agrees. “You just have each other to get through it. And we had so many belly laughs with the crew.”

The warmth is real, but so is the craft that went into making “The Season” – a show that arrives on Hulu on June 17 with all six episodes at once, produced by PCCW Media and SK Global, shot almost entirely on real Hong Kong locations, and built around a cast that spent most of production at sea.

For Lam, the challenge was language. She has spent 25 years acting in Cantonese and Mandarin – launched her career in Hong Kong, built a parallel life as a singer in Taiwan, was born and raised in Canada – and describes herself as a hybrid in the most literal sense. “I dream in Chinese,” she says. English fluency and English acting, it turns out, are different muscles entirely. “There are certain things you can only express in Cantonese,” she says. The ambiguity of Chinese, the way meaning pools in the spaces between words, resists translation.

Mei Li had the opposite problem. Playing an American in a production staffed by Australians, Brits, a Chilean director and a Hispanic DP, her brain kept mutinying. “Because I like to assimilate when I’m talking to someone, I can’t help but copy them,” she says. The accent kept slipping. “There were just some times where my accent was coming up. I’ll be talking to Chris, and I then suddenly say something in a scene that just sounded Australian.”

Chris Pang, for his part, was wrestling with something thornier than phonetics. His character, Andrew Fung, is written to be obnoxious – cartoonishly, gleefully, exhaustingly so. The question was whether audiences would stick with him. “Andrew is unabashedly and unapologetically an asshole,” Pang says. “He just says the most outlandish, most horrible things. And it’s going to be a mission to find that balance, where you say these things but you still like this guy.” The goal, as he frames it: “an asshole, but one that you can’t help but love.” Director Marialy Rivas, he says, encouraged him to push further than he thought wise. He pushed too far, regularly. “Marialy would give me a take and just be like, just go all out, and I’d go way too far. Like, okay, we’re not using that.”

Stephens, playing Christopher Hext – patriarch, power broker, the kind of man who wears his wealth like armor – was after something quieter. The danger with characters like this, he says, is that they flatten into archetype. “Characters can come across as sort of one-dimensional, kind of evil rich people who are just sort of sociopathic.” What interested him was the gap between the performance of power and whatever lives underneath it. “They’re all masking. They’re all throwing up these things about, I’m rich, I’m powerful, I’ve got this status, but underneath it, they’re all human beings who are all terrified. They feel all of these other things.”

It is, perhaps, also a description of Hong Kong itself – a city that presents one face and contains multitudes. All four cast members return, unprompted, to the idea of the city as something more than backdrop. “Hong Kong seems like a character on its own,” Lam says. She has shot dozens of films here and found herself, through this production’s use of real locations and an outsider’s lens, seeing it differently. “I’ve shot so many Hong Kong produced films here, and it’s never been this way, in this kind of lens.”

Mei Li goes further. The show moves between worlds – the gleaming marina set of the ultra-wealthy and the more grounded lives of characters outside that orbit – and the city absorbs both. “It’s not just we filmed it in Hong Kong. It’s like, this show is about Hong Kong in so many ways.” Stephens, characteristically, cuts to it: “This show could only take place in Hong Kong.”

The series is created and showrun by Yalun Tu, with Marialy Rivas serving as lead director and executive producer. It is produced by PCCW Media in partnership with SK Global, the company behind “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Thai Cave Rescue” and “Delhi Crime.” International sales are handled by Fremantle with support from De Maio Entertainment. Beyond Hulu, the series will stream on Viu across Asia, the Middle East and South Africa, and on Now TV in Hong Kong.

As for what comes next: Stephens is returning to the U.K. for a period film about two nuns on the run during the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII – “Thelma and Louise in Tudor times,” he calls it – titled “The Reformation of Mother Agnes.” Pang has written a crime thriller, currently titled “Brother Gangster” (“I think it needs to change,” he says), with director Jane Woo attached to helm. Mei Li heads to the Soho Theatre in London this summer for “Tender,” a four-person comedy by Dave Harris – only her second time on stage. “It’s something a bit different,” she says. Lam is due to begin filming in September on a project with a Malaysian director, details undisclosed.

All four have moved on to other projects, other cities, other worlds. But Hong Kong has a way of pulling people back.

Iran’s decision to hold a July funeral for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is a high-stakes bet that any emerging peace deal with the United States will hold, potentially creating a “target-rich” gathering of Tehran’s most isolated leaders, a counterterrorism expert warned Sunday.

The multi-day state funeral, announced by Iranian state media on June 13, is scheduled to begin in Tehran on July 4 and end with Khamenei’s burial in the holy city of Mashhad on July 9, Reuters reported.

According to Dr. Omar Mohammed, director of the Antisemitism Research Initiative at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, the timing serves as a deliberate message to America.

“A mass funeral is the most target-rich event this regime could stage, and now they would not risk one until they are confident it wouldn’t be hit,” Mohammed told Fox News Digital.

IRAN HOLDS FUNERAL FOR TOP COMMANDERS, NUCLEAR SCIENTISTS KILLED IN ISRAELI OPERATION

“But it is the staging of this funeral that is the message, and the message is aimed at America as much as at Iranians.”

The announcement also coincided with a major diplomatic breakthrough, coming as President Donald Trump announced that a peace deal with Tehran is expected to be signed Sunday.

“The regime could sign a deal that lets it keep its leverage, then bury its leader as the victor who won it,” Mohammed said.

“Announcing the funeral Saturday as Pakistan said the final text of a deal was reached and signing is close, is their bet that the ceasefire holds into July.”

Khamenei was killed on Feb. 28 during the opening salvo of U.S. and Israeli airstrikes against Iran, ending a 36-year tenure leading the Islamic Republic. He was 86.

Experts say the regime is using the four-month delay since the February strikes to completely reframe the narrative of the conflict.

“Khamenei goes into the ground as a man America murdered, so the deal becomes a tactical pause — revenge deferred, not abandoned,” Mohammed observed. “The deeper logic is that you bury the leader as a victor, not a victim.”

“They can now stage the funeral as the war’s victory monument: the martyred Imam laid to rest as the man whose resistance forced America to terms,” Mohammed added.

“The four-month delay was not only security. It was waiting for a win to bury him.”

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT AYATOLLAH ALI KHAMENEI, SUPREME LEADER OF IRAN

Following three days of public ceremonies in Tehran, the procession will move to the clerical heartland of Qom on July 7 before concluding in Mashhad on July 9.

Analysts note the dates heavily leverage deep Shia religious iconography, falling directly within the holy mourning month of Muharram.

“This is also a staged passion play, not a schedule because the dates fall within Muharram, the Shia mourning month centered on Imam Hussein’s martyrdom at Karbala, and the burial on July 9 is timed to the eve of another Imam’s martyrdom,” Mohammed said.

“The body goes into the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad — the only one of the 12 Imams buried in Iran, and the holiest site in Iranian Shiism — giving the regime a permanent martyr’s shrine and mobilization site for years.”

Mohammed noted that scheduling the opening ceremonies on the 250th anniversary of America’s Independence Day carries deliberate geopolitical signaling.

“The regime had room to choose which Muharram days and, at a minimum, it’s a message they are happy to broadcast; very possibly it’s the point — while America marks 250 years, Iran opens the funeral of the leader America killed and calls it the beginning of its victory.”

LETHAL ELITE ‘BLACK-CLAD’ KILL SQUAD GUARDS IRAN’S NEW SUPREME LEADER MOJTABA KHAMENEI

The highly public, multi-city route presents a massive security vulnerability for Iran’s new leadership.

Khamenei’s son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, has remained entirely in hiding due to targeted security threats and reported injury since the war began.

“By every tradition, the son leads the prayers and stands at the grave; it is the act that consecrates the succession,” Mohammed noted.

“But Mojtaba has not appeared in public since the war began, runs the country by courier, and is a designated target — and a funeral is a pre-announced time and place. For a man whose every confirmed sighting is a coordinate, July 9 in Mashhad is the most dangerous appointment of his rule.”

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

“The regime is boxed: It needs the son at the father’s grave to crown the dynasty, but putting him there exposes him as never before,” Mohammed concluded.

“If he appears, it’s his first sighting and a gamble; if he doesn’t, the dynasty is consecrated by an absence.”

US diplomat Alan Eyre says despite the US-Iran ceasefire announcement, there is no deal until it has been formalised – and likely Israel’s strike on Beirut pushed the US into last minute action.