Fans were on tenterhooks at the end of last year when it took some time for Fox to give the green light to a second season of The Exorcist, starring Ben Daniels and Alfonso Herrera as the two priests. Show creator and executive producer Jeremy Slater took a few minutes away from shooting the finale to discuss the season so far with Paul Simpson.

NB There are spoilers in this interview up to the end of episode 5 (aired in the US November 3, in the UK November 8) and a new section, currently at the end, for episode 6 (aired US November 10; airs UK November 15)

When we talked at the end of season 1, you were suggesting that season 2 might look at exorcisms in difficult cultures, but you’ve gone a different route. What was the catalyst to go with this particular story?

That was the part of the intention, the goal going in, but we also knew that we needed a strong central family storyline for the possession case that would get you hooked and emotionally invested. That was really nebulous at the end of last year.

I had some ideas about a foster parent and a group of kids. It was up in the ether. All I knew was that I didn’t want to do another white woman getting possessed – we’re very aware of the misogyny that’s built into the exorcism genre as a whole, and we had to lean into that trope in the first year just because we had this twist of Regan MacNeil, so that dictated the central characters that we used.

Coming into year two, I didn’t want to do another season where we had another young woman tied to a bed with a couple of men standing over her trying to save her. The goal was always to find a strong central male character that we could put through the wringer because I thought that was something that hadn’t been explored as much from a possession standpoint. We also wanted to do a season about family bonds and parenthood and how the love you can have for your children is one of the strongest forces out there which then makes it one of the ripest targets for a demon to prey upon. There’s almost no greater sacrilege than forcing a loving parent to turn on their own family and children.

All of those things were there and we got a writers’ room together and fell in love with the character of Andy Kim and all of these kids in the foster home and that really dictated the course of the season.

At different times we had detours and side routes. In different versions of pitching up the season, it took Marcus and Tomas much longer to arrive in Seattle, they had much more adventures on the road, and those were going to be our opportunities to check in with some other cultures and see the way other faiths handled exorcism and demonic possession. And unfortunately when it came down to breaking down the season and figuring out how long you could successfully stall bringing these two worlds together and having our two main storylines collide, it became very apparent that we needed to get Marcus and Tomas into Seattle as quickly as possible.

The one thing I was really cognisant of was, if you’re going to bring in other faiths and other religions, you have to do them justice. We didn’t want to do a B plot, which kind of was “Ok, here’s a Jewish rabbi who needs help exorcising a dybbuk”. That would feel like surface level and inadvertently dismissive of an entire faith.

We wrestled a long time trying to keep that idea and the reality is we just didn’t have the real estate – we had a ten hour story and there was so much we wanted to do in those ten hours that I made the decision, “You know what? Let’s keep that in our back pocket.” It’s always going to be  there, but when it starts to become time to bring in other religions and start building a larger resistance against this secret war that’s going on, I want to make sure we can do justice to that idea and treat it with respect and give it the time it deserves.

The first season very successfully conquered the idea that some people had when the show was announced that it would be a rip-off of The Exorcist, and I suspect if you had done it that way, it could have seemed like “the seventh sequel – what ideas have we got?” and cheapening it.

James Earl Jones in a voodoo headdress?

The season started with three plotlines – Marcus and Tomas, Andy and the kids, and Bennett and Mouse – which have dovetailed into two; without spoiling what’s coming, are we going to see that dovetail into one?

Absolutely. The goal has always been to reunite our characters by the end of the season and we drop a few clues as we go along that there may be more to this story than what we’re telling you – there may be some connections or some motivations that haven’t necessarily been revealed; we haven’t turned up all our cards yet.

We’re using Bennett and Mouse’s storyline to keep our larger mythology alive in this season so that we don’t have to resort to scenes where we cut around to a bunch of rich people standing around in a circle talking about being evil. That was one of my goals coming into season two was to find a way to present this mythology, the conspiracy stuff, in a way that is hopefully more engaging or suspenseful to the audience, and Bennett seemed like the most natural character to pick up that torch.

We knew we wanted to bring Mouse into the orbit of this show because we need a female presence on a show about exorcism – it can very easily become a boys’ club where the only females that you are allowed to bring in serve as concerned family members or potential victims. We knew we wanted a strong dynamic female character so it made narrative sense to pair a wild card character like Mouse with a very straight-laced bureaucrat like Bennett. We thought we would get some fun sparks out of that pairing, and I think we did.

But by the end of the season, they will definitely intersect.

Marcus and Tomas’ relationship has clearly moved on in the six months between seasons; are we going to see flashbacks to that period, or are we basically moving on with Marcus helping Tomas with his visions etc.?

I don’t think [we will have flashbacks]. One of the reasons I initially decided on starting this season with a six month time gap was to progress Tomas’ skills so that we could change up their dynamic a little bit. There’s nothing narratively interesting for me in doing another season where Tomas is a bumbling apprentice and Marcus is the wise mentor who has all the answers. I wanted to place them on a little bit more even footing so we could add a new dimension to their relationship.

I think they probably had some adventures when they were on the road together, but nothing that was important enough necessarily to flash back to. It’s the Yoda training montage from The Empire Strikes Back where you see Luke lifting some rocks, or balancing on one hand. Marcus had him out in the swamp, levitating some X-Wings for a couple of months and Tomas became much more capable.

You can imagine Ben sitting there, that half-smile on his face, pint of beer in hand going, “Lift the f***ing thing up!”

Or riding around on Tomas’ back in a little backpack!

The scene with Marcus on the boat and that monologue is incredibly powerful – as I watched it I got shivers up my spine. The raw passion from Ben was incredible and felt like one take.

Ben Daniels is such a phenomenal actor that he nails all of his scenes on the first take and then we sit around and make him do several more takes just so we feel like we’re doing our jobs.

He’s very protective of the character. When we have those big moments – the monologue in episode two [of last season], the monologue in episode ten, the monologue in episode five this season – we try to keep Ben involved in those. We will write drafts and pass them to him under the table, and he will come back with great suggestions and ideas – “this is more what I think Marcus is wrestling with”, “this is where I want to go really hard, this is where I want to pull back” – and we really try to tailor those scenes on the page to get it where it feels incredibly natural and his understanding of the character so he really can live in that moment. By the time the cameras start rolling, he’s been working on and prepping those scenes in his head for a long time, and he comes out guns blazing.

That performance you see is cutting between two cameras but that’s essentially a single uninterrupted take of him and I think that was either the first or second take we did. That’s the joy of working with Ben Daniels. You don’t have to build a performance out of bits and pieces or steal a bunch of cutaways – he brings it every single take.

Were you expecting or surprised by any backlash over the male/male kiss between Marcus and Peter Morrow in that episode?

I don’t think there was that much of a backlash. I saw a couple of homophobes on Twitter and my response is, “Good, fuck you. I’m glad you didn’t like it, I’m glad it ruined the show for you. You shouldn’t have good things in your life.” If a homophobe can’t watch the show any more because one of the characters is gay, then I’m glad something good has come out of it. This is 2017 and we still have people throwing temper tantrums on line because they don’t want to see gay characters. I think it’s the last gasp of a certain breed of dinosaur that’s on the way out, and let them kick and scream as they go.

The response to that moment was 99% positive, from what I saw, and I think the moment meant a lot to a lot of viewers, particularly viewers who aren’t necessarily used to seeing gay representation on TV with older characters that’s treated with the sensitivity that Ben and Christopher [Cousins] both brought to that performance. They did such a lovely job and really sold it so I do think it was earned as a character moment, and a natural culmination.

We’ve said from the beginning that Marcus is a bisexual character, which is pretty rare on television in general and certainly on network television, where everyone has binary definitions of gay or straight. Getting to explore all facets of his sexuality and character is really something that we didn’t get a chance to do in season 1, not because we didn’t want to, but because we didn’t have the time to do it. By the time we had introduced the character and brought him into the orb of Tomas and kickstarted everything that was happening and desperately trying to save Casey Rance, we never had that opportunity to go out and introduce a love interest for the character.

We had little moments of flirting, a little flirty glance in a bar, to clue the audience that this thing that you think you’re seeing is actually there but I knew coming back to season 2 that it was very important and we had to work this into the plot in a natural way and do justice to it. We didn’t want to be coy and just dance around his sexuality for another season.

Talking of seeing things, after the reveal that Andy is the one who’s possessed I went back and rewatched the scenes where he is with Grace and other characters. Did everyone have to know that Grace wasn’t actually there?

Actually I think that John was the only cast member who was aware of it initially. I think Li Jun Li had questions about why wouldn’t her social worker character be checking in on this particular kid, so we had to clue her in.

We tried to keep the kids a little bit in the dark, but I think they all figured it out pretty quickly. I think we originally tried to block that big dinner table scene in the first episode while having Grace sitting at her own little table in the corner, apart from the family but we wound up cutting that entirely out of the episode, because we were giving it away by shining too much of a spotlight on it – but I think that’s when the kids started to figure it out. We were having hushed conversations under our breaths, “make sure none of the kids are making eye contact with her”. We’ve got a bunch of very smart actors on our sets and it didn’t take too long for them to start putting the pieces together.

I think Amelie – Grace – knew from the beginning because we had to make her do “adorable kid” auditions but also come back and do “creepy kid” auditions. She had an inkling there wasn’t something quite right about her character.

It was when she turned up behind Tomas that I clicked – and then the excellent scene where Verity reacted to Andy in the garden…

We knew from the beginning going in that some people were going to get this twist, but if we could get to the reveal and 50% of the audience was still in the dark, we could live with that. We didn’t want to cheat and have fake out scenes that broke the internal logic of what was happening. We decided to play fair – even when you see pictures on the wall that show Andy with all the kids, Grace isn’t in any of those pictures. Some of the fans did pick up on that but that was intentional on our part. We felt like, if you can put the pieces together and figure the parts on your own, then good for you. You deserve that win.

How much input has John Cho had into the way Andy is portrayed in the series?

He has a lot. John is an incredibly smart, an incredibly passionate actor; he’s given us his all every single episode this season. I think his performance is going to be one of my favourite things that I take away from season two. One of those things  that we’re all collectively most proud of is how much viewers fell in love with Andy Kim and how they’re going to be incredibly invested in him for this back half of the season.

There’s big episodes coming up – episode 7 is a big departure from anything we’ve ever done before. He’s basically on camera every second of the entire episode, really having to carry everything on his shoulders in a way.

We were just fans of John’s from the beginning; we knew that it was going to be a tall order to find someone you could fall in love with in a short amount of time, and could really embody the perfect father in so many ways, and have the capability to go to these places, of despair, and to be scary and to be threatening. John comes as a total package.

We have been working with him really closely on every single script – we always give our actors a ton of input on their lines just in general, as a rule. We’re not precious about the words – if you can beat them on the day, then we will always accommodate the actors. We’ve been really collaborative with John to make sure his performance was actual and honest and make sure that we’re not cheating the audience or winking at the audience. It’s been a joy of a collaboration.

What has been the best moment of this season?

Seeing the fans’ reaction to Marcus’ kiss on Twitter was probably my happiest moment up to this point, because it is something we were very stressed about. We had to fight very hard to get it in the show, to figure out a narrative way where it didn’t feel like we were just dropping Marcus out of the larger storyline, and to do it in a way that didn’t feel exploitative or cheesy and did justice to the character. Seeing how people responded to that made me so happy.

My favourite scene that we have done so far is coming up in episode 6 – the big interrogation episode, where Marcus and Tomas sit down with Andy and Rose. It’s nine pages of phenomenal dialogue that our writers, Adam Stein and Franklin Rho, just knocked out of the park and Jason Ensler shot the hell out of. I think I’m more proud of that sequence than anything we’ve ever done on this show. It’s just four amazing actors working at the top of their game. Every time I watch it I’m on the edge of my seat and I’ve seen it 150 times by this point. I’m very excited for the fans to see it.

The Exorcist continues on Fridays at 10 on FOX in the US and on Wednesdays at 10 on SYFY in the UK

Thanks to Erin Moody for help in arranging this interview 

Spoiler alert – this section deals with events in episode 6

 

 

We have the other plotline with Bennett and Mouse. Is that going in the direction you thought it would? I was quite surprised our surviving demon from last season get knocked off quite so rapidly… I was waiting for Maria Walters to turn up and then you shot her!

Unfortunately the decision to move shooting locations from Chicago to Vancouver was not necessarily in our hands – one of the contingencies on bringing the show back was we had to find ways to make it cheaper because we are obviously not a ratings smash. We were told “you’re moving to Vancouver”, so we decided to embrace the landscape and the nature, and do these creepy cabin in the woods stories we couldn’t do in the first year. But it became very apparent in breaking the season that there weren’t enough characters left in Chicago to check back in on and also it felt a little silly to have Maria Walters hop in her limo and chase the heroes to Seattle and continue to torment them there.

We were at a bit of a loss – we had an actor that we absolutely loved but we had no real way to incorporate her into the show, but at the same time we knew the fans were invested in that storyline and we’d spent a lot of time on it. We wanted to at least give the character some sort of end to her arc, even if it is a tragic end, rather than leaving her as a loose thread, and she’s just out there.

I did think there was something nicely poetic about this craven character who had spent her life so desperate for this kind of demonic immortality that she was willing to do any terrible deed to do what she wanted, and it’s a little bit of a “Monkey’s Paw” story where she gets what she wants and it destroys her in a very real way.

I’m a great fan of the actress, Kirsten Fitzgerald, and I was determined to bring her back this year in one form or another, and we never found a way to dovetail it with the Marcus and Tomas storyline, so we said, let’s use Bennett and Mouse to keep our conspiracy storyline while at the same time giving what we hope is a creepy send-off to a fan favourite character.