'Westworld' Season 4: Trailer, Release Date, Cast, and Everything We Know So Far (2025)

Among all the popular shows coming out in 2022, one of the more anticipated is the long-awaited return of HBO's beloved sci-fi series Westworld. Based on the 1973 movie by future Jurassic Park writer Michael Crichton, Westworld initially revolves around a futuristic amusement park inhabited by human-like androids known as "hosts" where high-paying guests can indulge in their deepest, darkest desires without having to worry about the consequences. However, the show's third season moves from the park to the real world while still containing themes of artificial intelligence and how we as humans let machines control our lives.

Ever since the show first premiered in 2016, it has received both critical and awards acclaim with one of its stars, Thandiwe Newton, winning a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. Now that the series is finally returning after its usual two-year hiatus in-between seasons, here's everything we know so far about Westworld Season 4 including who's in the cast, when it will be released, and if the show will continue past this season.

Related:How the Original 'Westworld' Film Influenced ’Halloween’ and ‘The Terminator’

Watch the Westworld Season 4 Trailer

The first teaser for Westworld Season 4 was released on May 10, 2022. This two-minute trailer not only shows some familiar faces but also depicts some crazy images, which include a giant tree on fire and a swarm of flies coming out of a cracked host's mouth.

When Will Westworld Season 4 Premiere?

Westworld Season 4 will premiere on HBO and HBO Max Sunday, June 26, 2022, presumably at 9 PM EST like the previous three seasons. Subsequent episodes will be released weekly until August 14, 2022, when the season finale is set to drop.

How Many Episodes Are in Westworld Season 4?

Westworld Season 4 is similar to Season 3 in that both consist of eight episodes whereas the first two seasons each consist of ten episodes.

Related:10 Trippy TV Episodes of the Last Decade That Made Us Question Our Reality

Who Is in the Cast of Westworld Season 4?

In addition to Newton, many other actors who appeared in Season 3 are expected to return for this new season, including Evan Rachel Wood, Jeffrey Wright, Ed Harris, Luke Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Angela Sarafyan, and Aaron Paul.

Ariana DeBose from 2021's West Side Story will also appear in a currently undisclosed guest role.

For those who are wondering how Wood's character Delores is still alive even though all her memories are wiped at the end of Westworld Season 3, co-showrunner Jonathan Nolan elaborated on this shocking death in May 2020:

"I think it’s important with a show in which death can be impermanent — these are robots, after all — to mark the occasion with Dolores. That version of that character is gone. We love Evan Rachel Wood and we haven’t [sighs] started talking publicly about exactly what the show looks like going forward. But it looks very different.”

Based on this quote, the Delores in the Season 4 trailer is most likely a new version of the character that viewers have yet to meet--hence why her hair is brown instead of blonde.

Nolan also said that the actors will play "several roles" in Season 4:

“Part of the fun of the show from the beginning is that one actor can play several roles and that the story shifts underneath them — shift genres, shifts time. One of the ideas of the show from the beginning is this idea of agency. The formal quality of what a person looks like versus who are they underneath is something very slippery in this world, something very complicated. We love that and we love the challenge. Obviously, it’s an astonishing cast, and giving all of them something extremely challenging is part of the fun of it. So I think we would anticipate seeing some or many of these faces in very different circumstances, and very different relationships.”

While the co-showrunner wasn't specific on which actors will play multiple roles, this quote further emphasizes that the Dolores seen in the Season 4 teaser is not the same Dolores viewers have known for the last three seasons.

Nolan may also be referring to Ed Harris' William, who was seemingly killed off and replaced with a host version of his more nefarious persona the Man in Black. Is this William the same one from the Season 2 post-credits scene? We'll just have to wait and find out.

Related:The Best TV Westerns of the 21st Century

When Did Westworld Season 4 Film?

On June 15, 2021, Jeffrey Wright shared a picture of his on-set chair with his character name "Bernard" alongside the familiar tagline "Good morning...old friend" to indicate that filming on Westworld Season 4 had officially begun.

On February 14, 2022, Wright told Deadline that filming had wrapped last December.

What Is the Westworld Season 4 Plot?

Not much is known about the plot of Westworld Season 4 as of this writing. However, Nolan did say that he and co-showrunner Lisa Joy always wanted each season to feel completely different:

“One of the fun things about me for the show, when Lisa and I were talking about it way back when, was the ability of this show to shift genres every season, and the invitation to do it. This season, we had an episode called ‘Genre.’ We had a movie in [the original Westworld film] in which Crichton was very deliberately playing with the notion of genre. We felt we had an open invitation to play around, especially in this moment where TV is reinventing itself constantly, to have a show that reinvents itself season after season. It essentially takes advantage of the established parameters of a genre. You have a western, you have a samurai movie, you have war movies, you have science-fiction. There are all of the different versions of the future you have seen over the years in movies. We get to play around with all of that, and make text of all of that. So the idea that next season will feel different and distinct in genre from the previous seasons? Yes, that's absolutely part of the structure of the show.”

It will be interesting to learn how this season will differ from its predecessors.

Will There Be a Westworld Season 5?

Although it was originally reported that Nolan and Joy would exit their deal with Warner Bros. deal and begin a new one with Amazon Studios after finishing the sixth season of Westworld, Nolan clarified that they didn't map out how many seasons the show would last:

“I just want to clarify, you know, Lisa and I have never actually talked about a number of seasons. James Marsden mentioned five [seasons] in the first season when we were on hiatus, and more recently there’s been reporting about deals and other stuff like that. But we’ve never actually talked out loud about how many seasons we imagine this thing going, because I think you’d be foolish to. Things change, circumstances change. I think when we sat down to do the show, we didn’t quite realize how difficult it would be to make this show — [laughing] how many years it would take per season. So we’ve never actually talked about how many seasons that plan was, and indeed I think when we had the plan it didn’t actually map out to a specific number of seasons, exactly. It was a beginning, a middle and an end.”

So even though Nolan and Joy don't know how many seasons this show will last, they do know that it will end at some point. Hopefully, if Westworld does last beyond six seasons, the co-showrunner can work on it while also working on the Fallout series for Amazon.