New Stargate Series Lands Oscar-Winning Production Designer and Emmy-Winning VFX Supervisor
The new Stargate series just made two announcements that signal Amazon MGM Studios is treating this franchise as a genuine tentpole production rather than a modest streaming experiment.
Showrunner Martin Gero revealed in a joint livestream with GateWorld and Dial the Gate that Nathan Crowley has joined as production designer and Mohen Leo will serve as visual effects supervisor. For fans who’ve been waiting fifteen years for Stargate’s return, these names add a lot of gravitas to the new production.
Nathan Crowley: The Man Who Built Gotham and Oz
Nathan Crowley is one of the most decorated production designers working in film. His long creative partnership with Christopher Nolan produced some of cinema’s most visually distinctive work—Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and Tenet. He earned seven Academy Award nominations across that run before finally taking home the Oscar for Jon M. Chu’s Wicked in 2025.
His television work includes an Emmy nomination for the pilot of Westworld. But according to Gero, this Stargate series represents something different for Crowley: his first television project where he’s designing an entire season from the ground up.
“I couldn’t be more excited,” Gero said during the livestream. “Like, it’s I can’t believe it when I say it out loud even now.”
Crowley himself spoke about his approach to the franchise’s visual legacy in a pre-recorded segment shown during the stream. His philosophy balances reverence with innovation.
“My idea of design is you have to bring—you have to respect the world it lives in and thus the fan bases,” Crowley said. “So you have to keep one foot in. But as we’re now launching onto something new, we have to put the other foot as far out as we can.”
He described the challenge as finding a middle ground where the design feels simultaneously new and familiar. “I think people have a nostalgic view on things. And if you just copy what you think everyone loves, I think you’re going to fall into a trap. You really have to try and produce something that appears new but isn’t. And I think there lies the challenge.”
Gero confirmed that Crowley and his wife and concept designer Phyllis have been embedded with the production since the writers’ room began. “Nathan started the day the writers started,” Gero said. “Our room is just propagated with all this incredible art as it starts to grow.”
The collaboration has already produced results that surprised even Gero. He described showing Crowley a ship design he’d developed during pre-sales and being immediately won over by Crowley’s alternative. “The first image he ever showed me—I just show everyone that is involved with the show and they’re just like—and I was like yeah, that the old idea was gone like the second I saw it.”
On the question of the Stargate itself, Crowley acknowledged it’s being approached carefully. “I’ve parked the Stargate because I know that is a slightly untouchable element,” he said. “You have to go through the process of finding everything around the Stargate to then feed it back into it.”
Gero clarified that the gate’s design may see some iteration. “It may change a little. We’ll all land upon the right tweak of the design for the Stargate.” But he emphasized the approach is holistic with designing the world around the gate before returning to the gate itself.
Mohen Leo: From ILM to Andor to Stargate
Mohen Leo’s credentials are equally formidable. He joined Industrial Light & Magic in 1996 as a technical director, contributing to Star Wars: Episode I, Pearl Harbor, and The Perfect Storm before leaving to work on The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. He returned to ILM and went on to serve as visual effects supervisor on films including The Martian, Ant-Man, and Deepwater Horizon.
His Oscar nomination came for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, where his team accomplished approximately 1,700 VFX shots. His Emmy win came for Season 2 of Andor—widely considered the gold standard for visual effects in prestige streaming television.
Gero was direct about why Leo was the first choice. “What makes Mohen stand out from the pack outside of his incredible credits is he just has an innate creativity there. This is somebody that we feel a great confidence giving a sequence and saying go run with this and let’s see what you come back with.”
Leo spoke about his approach to grounding visual effects in practical reality. “One of the things that I always try to find is what are the things in reality, in the real world, that we can draw on as both inspiration and reference so that even if you create something that is fantastic, you can always reference back to something that feels relatable and that feels familiar to the audience.”
He emphasized the importance of shooting practically wherever possible. “Ideally have every shot be grounded in something real. As much as you can, when you can shoot a real location, a real set, that becomes the foundation of what you then build visual effects on top of.”
On the question of honoring Stargate’s visual legacy while updating it for modern audiences, Leo offered a perspective that will resonate with longtime fans. “What’s often a good way to think about is not necessarily what exactly did it look like 20 or 30 years ago, but how do you remember it? In your head you have a memory of what that was, and you’re just trying to hit that with now the most advanced technology, the best quality that you can.”
Gero echoed this. “Capturing the feeling of Stargate is more important than capturing the exact aesthetic look. How you imagined it when you were watching it is what we want to try to get closer to.”
ILM is confirmed to be providing VFX services for the series, the same studio behind the effects on Fallout and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power for Prime Video.
The Kitchen Sink Approach
Both Crowley and Leo emphasized a philosophy of using every available tool rather than committing to a single methodology. Crowley described technology as something to investigate and deploy in the service of the image rather than as an end in itself. “If you rely on one thing only, the illusion will be given up. We are illusionists, and we have to edit between technologies.”
Leo described the approach as a “kitchen sink” philosophy. “We want to use everything—the oldest tricks from the early 1900s to the most advanced stuff right now. Where shows like this start to get a little trapped is if they get locked into one methodology.”
Gero connected this to the show’s budget and ambition. “The scope of this show is the one we had the ambition for in the last version of the show, but didn’t have the means. And now we have the means and quite frankly the time.”
Where Things Stand
The series, currently carrying the working title Stargate, is in the scriptwriting stage with a writers’ room that includes franchise veteran Joe Mallozzi, who confirmed he’ll be writing at least one episode. Brad Wright has also been involved in reviewing outlines and providing notes. Principal photography is targeting London this fall.
Gero confirmed the show is in preliminary casting stages, with announcements expected as deals close. A composer has been hired and is already writing music—with the goal of having four hours of original score completed before the cameras roll.
GateWorld has become an unexpected resource for the production. Gero revealed the team uses the site daily for reference material, including sending Crowley photographs of the original Stargate prop when official blueprints couldn’t be located through MGM’s archives.
“You guys have been—I swear to God we use GateWorld every day,” Gero told hosts Darren Sumner and David Read. “That really is the gold standard right now as far as what exists for where information is and who has what.”
For fans who’ve been waiting since Stargate Universe ended in 2011, these announcements represent the clearest signal yet that the new series is being built with the resources and talent to do the franchise justice.
What do you think? Do Nathan Crowley and Mohen Leo’s involvement give you confidence that the new Stargate series will deliver on its potential?
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