Right now, Dr. Robert Ford seems to be a man with no immediate family on Westworld, but it’s possible at one point he had a human, non-host, wife.
Viewers who watched “The Adversary” got a load of possibly insane Westworld mastermind Robert Ford’s own robotic family when Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) waltzed into the very off-limits Sector 17, but a deleted scene from an earlier episode would have revealed that the enigmatic and reclusive Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins) had some flesh and blood relations as well. At one point, we would have learned that Ford was unhappily married.
The scene would have occurred when Ford corners Theresa at the agave plantation in “Dissonance Theory” to deliver his still creepy “please, don’t get in my way” monologue about essentially being the god of the park.
Series creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy chatted about the deleted moment with Entertainment Weekly, telling them they essentially ditched it because of the episodes runtime:
In the beginning of the scene when Ford sits down with Theresa, and introduces the facility they’re in its where the agave comes from, it’s where they make the house tequila. And he explains a little more about his personal life. He had been married but his wife expected to have children. But he already had children — the park was the world he wanted to build, and it was incompatible with the intimacy of a marriage and his own relationship. So he’s built company for himself here.
It’s bizarre that this moment was simply cut for time since such a backstory would complicate Ford’s increasingly unhinged identity. If he left his wife to create the hosts in the park instead of having kids of his own then we’d have some meaning behind all his sinister machinations so far. Instead, Nolan decided to cut this bit to keep his motivations grandiose and vague, at least until the remaining episodes reveal what he’s really doing with all this reverie business.
Also, it’s weird that they make tequila in-house in Westworld itself. Props to them for trying to be self-sustaining. But then again, they lose points for the whole evil robot consciousness problem.
