Things were hectic on the day that Paul Simpson caught up with Ben Daniels to discuss the second season of The Exorcist – “I’ve descended back into reality, which was a bit of a shock,” Daniels admits – and it’s not helped by a cab despatcher somehow managing to break into the recording of the conversation. (Last year our interview with Hannah Kasulka had to be repeated because something went screwy with a different recorder…!) The second year of the show saw production move to Vancouver with Daniels’ character Marcus and Alfonso Herrera’s Father Tomas trying to assist John Cho’s character Andy…

NB There are spoilers throughout this interview for the whole of the second season.

 

I hate [executive producer] Jeremy [Slater] for that cliff-hanger at the end of the season [which saw Marcus hear God speaking to him again].

I know. I just watched it myself.

The last three episodes were all strong, but the ending slotted stuff into place perfectly. How far in advance did you know that Tomas and Marcus were going to split up at the end of the season?

I knew quite early on – in fact, thinking about it now, I was told way before we even started filming that that’s what they wanted to do. I think Fox were saying “no, we’ve got to keep them together”, so it was touch and go. They wanted a happy ending for them but in the end they said, “no, that’s a better version”. So we always knew they were going to split up – or I certainly knew. I don’t know if Alfonso knew; I think he probably did because I can never keep a secret! I would have been on the phone immediately.

So one assumes that when the third series gets greenlit (he says confidently!) that there will be a way that the two of you get back together because that’s at the heart of the show.

It is. That relationship seems to be a hook for people; that’s what people write about and what they love. It’s one of those weird things: we have chemistry as actors and as people and that’s not always the case where you get both. We get on so well off set as well as on set that every little flicker seems very nuanced, so they kind of get it for nothing. You put us two together and those two characters together and it just seems to come alive.

The clue to me in episode 8 that Tomas was still within the “dream” was when you came in smiling at him!

I know.

To get like that, Marcus hadn’t just gone off for a quick sleep, he’d had God knows how much to drink and four or five good shags!

It was funny. Alfonso and I were on a plane somewhere doing publicity – I think we’d been to New York – and I’d started reading the script before he had. I’d got to that scene and I knew it was a fake. Alfonso was sitting on another part of the plane and he texted me to say, “you’re going to hate scene 40”, and I texted  back – “just you wait!”

So there was no indication in the script that it wasn’t real?

No – but there was a stage direction that said “hold on a minute, didn’t we just see Marcus asleep downstairs?” after the scene. So it was kind of clear, but not until after you’d read it.

So you got the chance to have the same reaction the rest of us did?

Yes completely. I was like, wow… and in my head I was going, “Where did that come from? That can’t be real” as I read further and further down the scene.

But what it did do – and assuming the demon was reading what Tomas did desire – was show how much he needed that affirmation.

Completely. Oh, he’s sneaky that demon! (laughs)

And he gets [season 1’s Casey Rance] Hannah [Kasulka] to wander across country to do it as well…

It was great to have her back for a couple of weeks.

I wish that they hadn’t listed her in the opening credits.

I know it was such a shame they did that. They could have saved it for the end – maybe it was an agent’s thing. Who knows?

Going back to the beginning of the season, it was clear from our brief chats on Twitter that you were excited to be going back to the show – but what did you expect from this season? Had you had much contact with Jeremy and [fellow executive producer] Sean [Crouch] about what would happen with Marcus if and when you came back?

I knew the rough outline. I knew about Grace, I knew that there was a young child who wasn’t real, and that that child was a demon. And I knew that there would be a lot of stuff about Marcus and his relationship with God, which we chased around a lot, even when we were filming.

I’m a great one for waking up at 3 a.m. and sending a 20 page email to Sean and Jeremy – I’m the bane of their lives, I really am. I’ll fixate on something and keep grinding away at it until it becomes that something I can logically play. The whole relationship with God and God not speaking to him: it’s a very easy thing to say that he’s lost his faith and what I found more interesting, as I said in season 1, is if he hasn’t lost his faith but he can’t feel the same presence that he felt for his entire life – which is a subtle difference really.

We talked a lot about that because that was his driving force. And his relationship with Peter: before we started shooting, it was much longer, something that was going to happen over something like five episodes. But in the end, I don’t know if it was the network or the studio, but [the feeling] was: the meat is when Tomas and Marcus are together so to separate them seems crazy. We separated them a lot in the first season. So that became very condensed, even though I still think it was a fantastic little journey for Marcus within the whole landscape of the show.

I had hoped there’d be a little bit more with them showing before Marcus left the island.

There wasn’t time; they have to cram so much into those forty-something minutes so we left it that when Marcus said goodbye in the Jeep, that should feel [complete]… I don’t know. Who knows? He may come back in season 3 if we do it. Marcus is still definitely around that area – I don’t think he’s moved far from that northwest Pacific area.

I hope so, because I absolutely loved working with Christopher [Cousins] and I thought it was also a really good thing for Marcus for him to have that little tiny bit of happiness.

That’s interesting – did you see that as him being happy?

I saw it as there was an opportunity for him to have a life away from the awfulness that his life has been – even though he’s working for God, which is always a pleasure for him. But the heartache that comes along with that is huge and it was great for the first time in his life, since Mouse, that his heart opened to someone else.

I thought he was maybe not necessarily happy, but there was a choice for him that there wasn’t with Mouse. He chose to go, “No, this is what I want my life to be”, and nip that in the bud before it gets potentially dangerous. It got so dangerous with Mouse and she nearly died. I think after that relationship with her – where he felt that he had had sinful thoughts and that’s what let the demon in, and that’s why he couldn’t save her because his love for her got in the way – the walls went up for him from that moment on as far as getting too close to people.

When we spoke before, we talked about walls going up during his childhood; what was it about Mouse, do you think, that made him let the barriers down for her?

I think he fell in love – for the first time. He’d been with the church since he was a twelve year old. God saved him and he was working for God for all those years, and with Mouse, he’s like a rock star exorcist. He’s never had a failure and then he meets this girl who’s kind of his equal: there’s a lot about her. She hasn’t heard the voice of God, but there’s a drive and a passion in her that unlocks something with him. He behaved irresponsibly with her and it’s a mistake he’ll never make again – which is why he sticks with Tomas, and is on and on at Tomas not to make those same mistakes.

His look in the flashback sequences – did you have fun with that, by any chance?

Yeah it was fun because there were lots of different versions. I said, “This is what I looked like at that age” – I’d done a few things in a row which it’s very easy to get photographs from. There was one movie called Passion in the Desert which had a very strong long blond-haired look, and Beautiful Thing was another movie I did round about that same time. They had something very definite to work with.

It was great fun – but that beard took three hours to put on. They stick it on hair by hair: it wasn’t a wig. And then they digitise all your wrinkles away, which is fantastic – why can’t they do that all the time!

Because it doesn’t always work.

I know. They showed me a couple of different versions, and I said, “No it’s not that one, I look like a piece of wax.” There was a fine line in the middle where you can still see my face, it didn’t look like a big plastic blob.

And of course it’s got to be established so quickly in a scene like that, you can’t afford to have anything that pulls you out.

Absolutely.

What was the biggest challenge for you this season?

(pause) The biggest challenge? For me it was working out exactly where he was with God at all times, so it fitted in with what we had done last year, and also slotting the Mouse storyline into the very definite backstory that we’d given Marcus. I don’t know if they had had conversations about Mouse during season 1 as something that was in his distant past, but it was juggling and slotting those things around. At what point did God stop speaking to him, or he stopped hearing God’s voice? How does that make him feel towards Tomas? It was keeping on top of that really for me, I found the most challenging. And they probably did too, because I didn’t shut up about it!

The monologue on the boat was some of the most powerful television I’ve seen this year.

That was interesting. It was very different originally. I’d seen a version of the script that was very tender, the prequel to a lovemaking scene with him and Peter, and then that went and it became just a kiss.

There was a strange monologue about God hiding behind clouds and I thought and thought and thought about it, and I said, “I think it should be like this”. Jeremy was absolutely brilliant with me: he didn’t write that episode but the conversations I was having were with Jeremy and Sean. I said, “I think Peter should talk about his time in Kosovo” – we knew he was an ex-soldier in the breakdown – and I thought he should talk about some human horror in Kosovo that then opens something up in Marcus. I said, “Marcus has had this noise of God in his head since he was a child and to me the thing that makes him realise that God is no longer with him is that the noise goes, and what fills his head is everything that he’s squashed down since he was seven years old, and he’s just got this – all the awful things about him are now swirling around in his head,” and so I sort of wrote a version of a monologue. Sometimes it’s easier to explain [things that way].

I started it off as it starts in the show and then I kept it all completely about myself – himself! I’m fusing at a molecular level with my character! – about his mum and dad, about his shooting his dad and his self-harming. Then Jeremy took that and added stuff in about all the kids. So it was a very cathartic scene.

It was much gentler [originally] and I said, “I think it needs to be really really angry and it comes pouring out of him like a machine gun” – and then Peter doesn’t reject him, and Peter helps him with that. That’s how it came about.

That’s why the team is so brilliant – they allow you to have a large amount of input so by the time you get to shooting a scene like that it feels really embedded, it’s really part of you.

This is what Jeremy was saying when we spoke – you’re so in tune with the character that it would be insane to ignore.

They’re amazing. And also, at one point they cut the kiss, and I emailed Sean and said, “I just feel it has to go back in. It feels a completely natural progression, and if he’s turning something down in episode 8,” which I knew was coming, “we have to have seen him have a moment of something he can then reject in episode 8.”

They were brilliant about that as well. They put that back in. It’s a tiny, three second kiss, but I think on a Fox network show to have two guys in their fifties sharing a very intimate moment is a pretty big step for Fox. It was brilliant they put it back in, and the majority of the responses to it were brilliantly positive, which was fantastic.

And I bet there was nothing like the reaction to the second kiss.

No of course not. But that wasn’t that weirdly intimate moment. I think people just got alarmed… no, not alarmed… by both monologues, the Kosovo monologue and then his. I felt it was a very emotional and emotive sequence – and the second one wasn’t.

That final scene on the dock where he hears God again.

Or he thinks he hears God – maybe it isn’t.

If it had sent him something other than to Bennett, I’d’ve said yes it could be, but it’s sending him where he’s needed. That scene with Bennett and the nurse does look a bit Benny Hill…

Have you seen The Exorcist III? It’s from there.

Rather like the tribute to The Shining with room 237!

I saw them changing the room number but didn’t realise.

The scene on the dock reminded me of the reality of the Garden of Gethsemane – where Christ talks to God and is told he has to go through with the crucifixion.

Marcus realizes God is talking to him, and he is forgiven for what he’s done, even though Marcus can’t ever forgive himself. He thinks he’s unworthy.

That’s why he has to split from Marcus and Mouse. They’re the two people he’s been closest to his whole life and the pair of them together would be too much for Marcus to deal with – which is why the demon hits it on the head when he says to him, “you run away from people who love you”. I think it’s true – it’s too distracting for him, and to have both those people he feels such a love for working with him when he feels unworthy in the eyes of God, I think it’s too much for him to handle.

What’s been the best part of the season for you in terms of the character development?

I think seeing him having to trust other people and listen to other people, and to open himself a little bit in order to progress – and he doesn’t know that that’s what happening until the very end. I always thought that God not speaking to him, pulling away, would freak him out, make him jealous, but as always if he sat down and really thought about it, which is what Peter gives him the ability to do, he’d see that maybe this is all part of the plan, you have to readjust your thinking. It was great to see it happening to him throughout the season, rather than when we first meet him in season 1, he is that person [already]. This season he has to change and adapt, and hopefully that will make him a stronger character – but who knows? I’ve enjoyed that.

On a personal level, it’s working with Alfonso. I absolutely love him and we have such a shorthand now. It’s great. I just feel it’s a very trusting environment when we work together and we can just throw anything at each other and see what happens. It’s fantastic, I love it!

Thanks to Erin Moody for her help in arranging this interview. No thanks to the cab dispatcher who overwrote the insight into the final scene on the dock!

The Exorcist Season 2 is available to stream online; click here for our interview with Jeremy Slater