“I am hell bent on bringing Leland down,” says Katja Herbers, speaking as psychologist, mom, and sometime exorcist Dr. Kristen Bouchard, as the philosophical horror/comedy/drama Evil approaches its final two intense—and scary—episodes. Who can blame her? Leland (a mesmerizing Michael Emerson), a former “Friend of the Vatican” turned Devil’s disciple, destroyed Kristen’s marriage, killed her mother (and his onetime acolyte) Sheryl (Christine Lahti), tried to murder one of her daughters, and after fertilizing Kristen’s stolen egg, created a possible baby Antichrist!
Despite her anger and worries, Kristen eventually took in baby Timothy, whom she never believed was the Antichrist, after he was secretly baptized by, of all people, the unbeliever Sheryl. So far, her natural mothering instinct seem to be winning. “She can’t help but probably love the child,” the actress says, as do her adoring four daughters.
TV Insider was lucky to visit Evil’s Brooklyn set a few days before the production shut down. Life was imitating art as the sets were being deconstructed around us just as the same was happening on screen with the soon to be deconsecrate parish church that housed Father David Acosta (Mike Colter) and his helper, demon killer Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin). The fictional New York diocese was out of money after paying off sexual abuse lawsuits and needed to sell the property to an Amazon type company to pay for its many lawsuits. “I like how meta these episodes are,” Herbers adds with a chuckle.
I was able to observe several scenes being shot in the midst of the set breakdowns, each illustrating different sides of the show. The first: an amusing encounter between the hunky priest and the bedevilingly sexy Catholic school uniform-clad Demon Kristen. “It’s so fun to be able to play this exaggerated cartoon side of Kristen,” says Herbers, “somebody with no filters.”
Elizabeth Fisher/Paramount+
The second: a harrowing confrontation between an enraged Leland and Kristen. Besides Herbers, Colter, and Emerson, Aasif Mandvi (tech expert Ben Shakir) was also on set that day. The feeling on set was both joyful and wistful, since every actor would have liked more seasons, but their pride in the show was also evident.
I caught up in the next few days with Herbers, Mandvi, and the show’s creators Robert and Michelle King over the phone and Zoom to glean a bit more info about the final stories. They shared teasers, but no real spoilers.
If Leland is the threat, David is the rock that Kristen turns to for both solace and help, especially since her addled husband Andy (Patrick Brammall) seems to be out of her and their daughters’ lives, as he ran away with an equally disturbed woman. “David has really been struggling with his attraction to Kristen,” says Robert King. “Now that the [exorcism] assessor program that he and Kristen worked together on is gone, how will they deal with their friendship when he’s reassigned? I hope people appreciate the chemistry of not only them,” he adds, “but also Ben and Sister Andrea. To break them up will leave some melancholy attached to it.”
David doesn’t just have conflicts with his feelings for Kristen, of course. In the final episodes, says King, “David is also struggling with his work for The Entity—the Vatican’s Secret Service organization, which attacks evil forces but through pragmatic and militaristic means that seem like the evils they fight.” Look for David’s crisis of faith.
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Ben, too, says Mandvi, “has had a tough year after his head was hit by a particle beam with some repercussions. Being haunted by a djinn in his periphery literally all the time was like a disability.” Luckily, he’s been able to banish the taunting being, and “there’s an acceptance that’s starting to come over him in the last episodes,” he notes. The lifelong scientist and unbeliever now “understands that there are some things that we cannot explain yet. Through a doppelgänger app, “he sees how he might be living a different life as a family man and that brings a kind of introspection that he doesn’t usually have.”
Now that the trio are jobless, “there will be some nice bumps, twists, and surprises along the way that I think the audience will really appreciate,” Mandvi predicts. For example, he says, “There’s a way in which all the cases that that they’ve been tracking over the course of the show exist under a kind of an interesting kind of umbrella that they realize is all sort of connected.”
While we await the resolution—if there is one—between the 60 demonic families that Leland tries to manage and the Entity, there’s the biggest question: Will Hell bring down agnostic Kristen, David, torn between commitment to the Church and to Kristen, and atheist Ben Shakir before they can beat the Devil? (Even the Prince of Darkness couldn’t shake the faith of demon-killing Sister Andrea!)
“As to how everybody ends up,” says King, “you’ll have to see what happens!”
Evil, Thursdays, Paramount+
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