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The television series of The Exorcist heads into the home straight this week on Fox, with the eighth (of ten) episodes. The show has turned out to be rather different from what many originally expected, with a dramatic twist at the end of episode five that tied the TV show in far more closely with the William Peter Blatty novel and William Friedkin’s movie from 1973. Filming wrapped on the first season less than a week before the show’s deviser and executive producer Jeremy Slater chatted with Paul Simpson…

Spoiler alert: If you’ve not seen episode 5 of The Exorcist, then be warned, there are major spoilers ahead!

How did you get involved with this new version of The Exorcist?

The rights holders were looking to turn The Exorcist property into a TV show because everyone is looking to turn every existing piece of IP into a television show these days.

The original plan, I think, was to do a pretty literal adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel. I was one of the writers they reached out to and I told my representation, “That’s a terrible idea, I don’t want to do that, no one else should do that either. You’re never going to tell that story better than William Friedkin did in the film, you’re only going to make a longer inferior version of something that’s pretty damn close to perfect.”

So I came in and pitched very aggressively that this approach was a mistake “but if you guys were willing to at least consider a new approach, I think that there’s merit to telling a new contemporary story set in the same basic universe but with a brand new cast of characters, and really explore what is demonic possession and what does the rite of exorcism look like in 2016? How have things changed in the last 40 years?”

Obviously anyone who’s been keeping up with the show knows that that’s not necessarily where we wound up. We kind of managed to be a secret sequel to the original film, but that was always a secret that I held very close to my chest. I didn’t tell any of the producers, I didn’t any of the rights holders, I didn’t tell the studio; I didn’t tell the network. Basically the only people who knew that Angela Rance was actually Regan McNeil was four people – me, my showrunner Rolin Jones, our director Rupert Wyatt, and Geena Davis, because that’s how we got her.

We tried to protect that secret as much as possible because the process of making a pilot and shooting it, and putting it out around town, and letting people read scripts… I knew that if I let that cat out of the bag too early, we would have an entire year where the secret could get spoiled, or disseminated or passed around.

I was probably overly paranoid about protecting it but my reasoning was twofold. I wanted to make sure that it worked as a genuinely earned surprise for the audience – I wanted it to be a twist that was fair but also one that hopefully most of the audience didn’t see coming – but at the same time I did think it was really important to give audiences a couple of episodes to fall in love with these characters and to be really invested in their story because they liked the actors and they liked the characters, not because you’re coming out of the gate with The Continuing Adventures of Regan McNeil! I think if we had done that in the pilot episode and planted that flag early on, we would never have gotten the chance to get to know and hopefully care about this family in the way that I think audiences have. We had to really posit this as a brand new experience with brand new characters.

That unfortunately involved quite a bit of lying to the press in every interview that we did over the last year, but Geena and everyone else were really game to play ball and really preserve our twists and our spoilers and give the audience the best experience possible.

Was the idea that Angela was Regan at the back of your mind from the start? Or were you starting from the “how would we do this in 2016”?

Not from the start, because initially my instinct was very strongly was that you needed to create something that stands on its own two feet. You can’t create something that’s just beholden to this existing story. I came up with the Regan twist fairly early on in the process but I never told anyone, and talked myself out of it, because to be honest I wasn’t 100 percent sure we were going to pull this off: there was a chance that I got to make the show I wanted to make, and it was a level of quality that I was proud of, and there was also a chance that I didn’t have any sort of quality control over the show, and that at the end of the day it wasn’t necessarily what I was hoping for. I just knew that if the show didn’t at least come close to living up to the benchmarks set by the film then it would feel really disrespectful to take these characters and take these stories and try to claim that you’re part of the same universe, part of the same world.

Luckily my fears were totally unfounded: I think the level of talent we have in our writers’ room, our cast, our crew, everything, it far surpassed my dreams of what this show could be. But at the very beginning it was a very legitimate concern: if we bring Regan McNeil into this show and we screw it up, fans are going to be crying out for our heads.

So I talked myself out of it and we went down a very different path of making the Rance family totally unrelated to this larger mythology – and then at some point we started having serious talks about casting.

I was pretty adamant from the start that I wanted Marcus and Tomas to both be discoveries to audiences, particularly American audiences: Alfonoso Herrera is obviously a giant star in Latin America, Ben Daniels is a titan of the stage in the UK, and is very familiar to audiences there from Law & Order [UK] but he hadn’t really broken through in America yet. I really wanted discoveries who weren’t bringing real previous baggage to the roles – they just inhabit those characters and bring them to life.

The reality of doing a network show is that if you don’t have a star, if you don’t have a marketable name, it’s hard to get on the air. It became apparent early on that if we were going to look for discoveries for these two main roles, we really needed a movie star for the role of Angela Rance. That was the third part of our triangle: she’s by far the largest female role and we knew that we wanted a gigantic star…

…but the problem was this story that I had originally conceived and pitched and sold to Fox, Angela didn’t have a lot to do in it. She was kind of reduced to the same role that Chris McNeil gets reduced to in the original film – she is very proactive in the very beginning of the story where she is noticing that something is wrong and bringing the priest in to help, but then we fell into the self same trap that the movie does. Once the men show up on the scene, they push Chris out of the room and lock the door and she’s reduced to sitting downstairs in the living room, looking out of the window and looking concerned while the men save the day.

We knew that a role like that would be a waste of Geena Davis’ talent, we knew it was hard for the filmmakers for find enough for Chris McNeil to do over the space of a two hour movie much less a ten hour television series. We knew we were going to be spinning our wheels and that was the point where I went back and I said “Maybe I need to reconsider this Regan McNeil twist, because this obviously gives so many new dimensions and shades to play with that character.”

I’m so thankful that I did, and as audiences are going to see in this back of this season, it does become the spine of this entire first season: we really are building up to a rematch between Captain Howdy and Regan McNeil and trying to fulfil forty years’ worth of expectations. I don’t know what the show would have been if we didn’t have that twist but I’m positive that it wouldn’t be half as much fun or half as exciting.

There’s always been something clear that there’s been something underlying the demon’s actions – it’s not just been pure nastiness…

Sure, and there were moments in the first couple of episodes where we were planting clues and fans were picking up on them and saying, “This makes no sense, why is this businesswoman who runs a hotel so convinced that there’s a demon inside her daughter after hearing a couple of weird sounds coming from her wall? It’s nonsense.” It’s one of those things where you have to just bite your tongue and hope audiences go along with it for a couple more episodes. We were sitting there saying, “We promise you there’s a reason, she’s not just jumping to conclusions; this lady has some actual experience in the field.”

Of course, the show is called The Exorcist – it’s not about the exorcised but the exorcist: you’ve taken time to build the characters far more, which was obviously a conscious decision. What made you go down the routes you have with the two priests?

It was definitely a conscious decision. A large part of is just knowing that if the show is lucky enough to get future seasons and gets to run for a couple of years you can’t drag out a single case of possession for seven seasons. We had to do quite a bit of wheel-spinning this first year to find ways to keep it fresh and keep it surprising. You can’t do an entire show where every season is just getting Casey Rance a little bit closer to the finish line of being saved.

We always knew from the beginning that this wasn’t going to be an anthology show but it was going to be a show where every season has its one central case, its one possession, its one person we are going to save. That means that by necessity the weight of carrying that show falls on Fr. Tomas and Fr. Marcus going forward because you can’t tell seven seasons’ worth of story about Casey Rance being possessed, but you can tell seven seasons’ worth of story of these two very different men who have been brought together for a very specific reason. Although their story starts very focused and contained and it’s just saving this one girl, as this season progresses I think you’ve seen that we’re trying to expand the boundaries of our world quite a bit. We’re trying to bring a lot of mythology and say, look at the end of the day, this show isn’t just about one teenage girl with a demon inside her, it’s about a much larger mythology and conspiracy that’s taking place all around us.

That’s why you see Mrs Walters and Brother Simon and some of these other characters lurking on the periphery, who all have their own agendas and they’re all building towards something that’s going to happen in episode 10.

We’re trying to seed in a mythology that will give this show legs for years to come so it’s not always just a “case of the week” show where every season our heroes are moving to a different area of Chicago and finding another family that’s in trouble. I think a show like that would become very limiting both from a creative perspective and from an audience perspective.

You want a show that’s always going to be surprising you and zigging when you expect it to zag, and always feels one step ahead of the viewers, because those are the shows that I become passionate about as a fan and those are the shows that you remember at the end of the day.

As long as you as the showrunner have the answers!

It’s scary to plan things out too far in advance to the point where you’re creatively boxed into a corner, but it’s also really dangerous to just throw a bunch of darts at the wall and hope that a few of them stick. You have to have that balance of having a general idea of where your show is ultimately going and where you want it to end up but not so specific that it ties your hands behind your back creatively. It’s been a challenge.

How much creatively do you feel bound by the reality of exorcism? There must be elements that you want to expand for the sake of drama…

Absolutely – it’s a balancing act because you’re dealing with a mythology here that genuinely matters to audiences. It’s a part of a lot of people’s faith and that’s something you can’t necessarily be glib about.

At the same time, if you were true to the letter of what an exorcism actually is, it would make for an incredibly boring, repetitive show. Every single case would spool in exactly the same way: the priest would make the same preparations, they would recite from the same rites. A lot of exorcism is about repetition, about saying the same thing over and over again and kind of beating the demon into submission, which makes for incredibly boring television.

You would exhaust your audience very quickly if you try to present factually accurate exorcisms every single week. You’d run out of storytelling possibilities as a creator: there are only so many times that you can hear someone read from the same couple of paragraphs out of a book and splash holy water on someone’s face before you shrug your shoulders and you say, I’ve seen everything this show has to offer.

We are being aggressive in terms of trying to plant our own flag and come up with ways to make exorcisms exciting and fresh. You saw a little bit of that in episode 4 with Mother Bernadette and the Sisters of Mercy…

Was that based on research, or was that out of pure cloth?

We definitely did some research about nuns who claim to have performed exorcisms, and things like that, but it was really an invention of the writers’ room and wanting to challenge this traditional Catholic notion that exorcisms can only be performed by priests – especially because once you start looking at different faiths you see that the demon myth crosses boundaries of faith. Jewish folklore has its own demons, there are demons in Buddhism, there are demons in basically every major religion, and they all have their own different ways for combating those evils and challenging them.

We wanted to expand the scope a little bit and we also wanted to expand what an exorcism actually looks like: I think once you’ve actually watched episode 5, you see that our battles are becoming very psychological. They involve a lot of hallucination, they involve the demon worming its way into your head and showing you things. I think that going forward, episode 5 is charting a path for what this show will become, what we can ultimately be. It’s an attempt to plant our flag on what an exorcism should look like in 2016 as opposed to slavishly trying to recreate what William Friedkin did in 1973.

Can you see the show dealing with other religions’ exorcism rites?

Yeah. Yes, my ultimate plan is that if we get more seasons it gives us a chance to expand this world and expand this mythology and to me that means bringing in characters from different faiths and different religions, and continuing to challenge the notion of what is a demon and what does an exorcism look like? I think it would be fascinating to show a Jewish exorcism, I would love to see what a Southern Baptist exorcism looks like as opposed to a traditional Roman Catholic version?

Would you involve Tomas and Marcus in combat with a demon that doesn’t recognise their god or have other exorcists?

No, I think the heart of the show is always going to be Tomas and Marcus. I think Ben and Alfonso are the reason a lot of people are tuning in week after week because they feel a real emotional connection to these guys and they’re emotionally invested in their stories and the arc of where they’re going.

I would never be able to write an anthology show like American Horror Story that hits the reset button every season and introduce a brand new set of characters. That doesn’t really hold any interest to me. What is interesting is taking these characters, especially someone like Marcus or Tomas who has spent his entire life in the church and the boundaries of his Catholic faith and suddenly confronting him with a Jewish exorcism, forcing him to enter a world he’s never experienced before, and to adapt to that and see how that changes him as a character.

One of the great threads in this season has been Tomas’ eyes being opened to the world, in front of him and behind him – the exorcism world, and real life, and the parallels in his relationship have been strong scenes.

Thanks.

Where did you find Hannah? You’ve put her through the mill!

She’s pretty phenomenal, right? We had open casting calls. We saw hundreds and hundreds of actors over a very short period of time. Some of those actors came in and blew us away and it was a very easy casting process. I think the second we saw Ben Daniels’ audition tape and got on the phone and talked to him and heard how passionate and excited he was, it clicked for Rolin Jones and I immediately that this was our guy, this was Father Marcus.

But it was a giant challenge finding an actor who could portray Casey, because she really has to play so many different characters. She has to be the innocent virginal naïve nineteen year old girl, and she has to be this ancient cunning malevolent force of evil. She has to play sexy, she has to play traumatised, she has to be terrifying – and she has to give these performances while she’s strapped into a really uncomfortable flying harness and wearing several pounds of prosthetic makeup and painful contact lenses.

It’s a gigantic acting challenge, and we saw hundreds of girls and most of them didn’t get it. We saw a lot of girls giving very stereotypical possession performances – sneering and snarling and just playing it like Hannibal Lector in a blond wig. Hannah came in and blew us away – she gave us a great performance.

She’s obviously a sweet adorable girl who looks like the girl next door but she has an innate ability to flip a switch and become very frightening in a short amount of time. She really embodied the feral intensity that she brought to the role that was exactly what I was looking for – and she is just a pretty phenomenal actor.

I think we’re incredibly lucky to have her because I don’t think the season would have worked if we didn’t have the right Casey. I think she was probably the pivotal piece: it doesn’t matter how great the family is, doesn’t matter how compelling the priests are, if you didn’t care about saving this girl, if you weren’t scared of this girl then I don’t think this show would have worked.

The Exorcist continues on FOX in the US on Fridays at 9/8C, and on Syfy UK on Wednesdays at 10

Thanks to Erin Moody for her help in arranging this interview