For example, the “Money Heist” series sometimes features an unreliable narrator. But what about unreliable heroes? Dan Stevens, who was just cast in the lead role in Season 2 of Dexter, reprises his role as Pepper in AMC’s The Terror: Devil in Silver, which is executive produced by Scott Free’s Ridley Scott and celebrates its world premiere at Cannes Series on April 27.
Pepper is first seen teaching his girlfriend’s young daughter how to play the drums. He told his girlfriend that he planned to teach other children in the apartment complex. “I like men who hustle,” says his girlfriend. But he’s not the kind of guy to spend $4,000, all the money the couple has, on a new drum kit. No guy, like Pepper, flies off the handle when he catches his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend manhandling her and punches him in a fit of rage.
Pepper is arrested and, instead of being taken to the police station, is admitted to New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital. Something is wrong with the New Hyde, a malevolent demon or monster that attacks patients, including Pepper. But something is wrong with Pepper himself, and he can’t heal until he confronts not only the monsters of New Hyde, but his own inner demons.
The role of Pepper demands a quality performance from Stevens (Downton Abbey, Legion), who mixes righteous, sometimes verbally violent anger, medicated stupor, blinding fear, and a malaise still tied to her traumatic past. He also experiences a second major character arc, going from indifference to gratitude towards his fellow patients.
“The Terror: The Silver Devil” stars Scott Free’s David W. Zucker’s Ridley Scott, as well as showrunner Chris Cantwell (“Halt and Catch Fire”) and author of the novel on which the season is based. Packed with an acclaimed executive producer, Victor Laval (Changeling), the book was described by The Washington Post as a “dizzying tightrope walker” and by Los Angeles as “fantastical, hellish and hilarious.” times.
Emmy nominee Karyn Kusama (“Yellowjackets”) is also an executive producer and is directing the first two of the six episodes.
She intentionally hits the beat of their genre. But this is a true psychological thriller and much more than that.
Set to arrive on AMC+ and Shudder on May 7th, The Terror: The Silver Devil is also the third installment in the acclaimed horror anthology that began with Season 1 of AMC’s 2018 supernatural survival thriller The Terror, run by David Kajganich and Sue Hugh, chronicling Sir John Franklin’s doomed Arctic naval expedition from 1845 to 1848. 2019’s “The Terror: Infamy” depicts the horrors of Japanese American internment during World War II.
AMC already has a vast universe in its flagship series The Walking Dead and The Immortals of Anne Rice series. The anthology “The Terror” “speaks to the DNA of a shared audience,” notes David W. Zucker. “Now under Dan McDermott, AMC is very excited to be entering a market with the kind of psychological horror and supernatural elements that have defined each cycle we’ve done so far,” he added. “The Terror: Infamy” “still preys on the insider threats and vulnerabilities that emerge from our personal belief systems and perceptions.”
“Devil in Silver” is led by Judith Light (“Transparent,” “Before,” “Out of My Mind”), who plays a veteran New Hyde patient, and includes CCH Pounder (“Rustin,” “NCIS”) The cast includes Aasif Mandvi (Evil, This Way Up), John Benjamin Hickey (The Big C, Lily), and Stephen Root. (“Barry,” “Heads of State”) and Michael Aronoff (“The Americans,” “Operation Finale”).
Dan Stevens and Judith Light in The Terror: Devil in Silver
Variety interviewed Stevens and Zucker as The Terror: Devil in Silver celebrated its world premiere at the Cannes Series.
A sense of vulnerability runs through the anthology “Terror”….
Zucker: Yes. ‘Devil in Silver’ is the first cycle set in modern times and similarly explores our personal responsibility with Dan Stevens’ character. He feels trapped in an environment with people he cannot empathize with and in a place where he believes he has no place, only to be confronted by something that exploits his deepest truths.
That shows that The Devil in Silver is something else as a genre piece…
Zucker: Victor LaValle’s suspense novel was the basis for “The Devil in Silver,” which he adapted with Chris Cantwell. When Karin Kusama came on board as director, she felt that not only was the script appealing, but ultimately the trajectory of Dan’s character was very unique and unusual for a story in this genre. This isn’t just a story about defeating demons or delving into traditional narrative territory. It takes a completely different approach in terms of what the main character ultimately discovers about himself.
Something that Pepper herself suppressed…
Zucker: Yes, it really speaks to the things that we tend to dismiss or deny in our minds, and the extent to which we need to fight against them. There’s something essential about Pepper’s nature that led him to New Hyde in the first place. It’s his belligerence and anger that really tests how he fights everything he encounters in New Hyde. There are parts of his past that are really upended and some are very painful, but undeniable for him. It matches what he’s fighting in New Hyde, so it reveals the core source of what’s plaguing him.
“Devil in Silver” also reflects the current zeitgeist… For example, COVID-19 has made people realize that they are disconnected from the necessities of life.
Zucker: I think that’s an important part. And a key element of the novel and drama is the setting itself, a true indictment of our mental health system, its history of locking up and discarding the lives that spill out onto America’s streets. Where do people who need meaningful support live and what kind of support is available? There is connection and empathy for others we have lost.
Dan, when you play Pepper, he begins the story as a seemingly outgoing American man, but he suffers an extraordinary hardship and is forced to recognize emotions and feelings that have been repressed. That seems like a very masculine thing….
Stevens: Certainly, Pepper has the problems that commonly come with being a man. It’s his inability to engage with the emotions and past traumas that will inevitably come back to haunt him, literally or figuratively. That’s definitely one of the big themes of this story. However, I don’t know if that’s all. This novel not only has strong horror elements, but is also a story of social realism and, above all, a critique of the system. So those two things are running in parallel, and I think it makes for a really interesting story. That’s certainly what got me interested in the first place. It wasn’t just a horror show with monsters. There was something more to it, an underlying social critique.
Criticism of US medical services…
Stevens: Yes. The New Hyde as an institution in our story does not exist to heal people, but rather to contain people that society deems inconvenient. Pepper has New Hyde in custody because it is more convenient for the police to keep him there than to process him through the criminal system. What’s originally interesting about Victor’s story, and what’s so present in our story, is how poverty, race, and bureaucratic indifference, not disease, determine who gets locked up. Our ward, New Hyde, thus becomes a kind of metaphor for all the ways society erases the undesirable.
How do you read “devil” in the title of a novel or series?
Stevens: Clearly, there is a “devil”, the monster of the show, that seems to be roaming our wards. But I think the monster works on multiple levels. It literalizes the violence that already exists within the institution: neglect, overmedication, and dehumanization. This series asks: Which is more monstrous: the creature in the hallway or the system that traps and turns a blind eye to vulnerable people?
Your character Pepper has quite a character arc…
Stevens: Certainly, the issues surrounding what he did bother him as much as the actual physical monster. He has some remorse for his past. However, changes can also be seen in the way they interact with other people in the ward and the relationships they form. He gets into the inner lives of these people, their history, their humanity, and he begins to notice this humor and courage and love going on. And it really kind of opens him up to looking at the demons that he has as much as this kind of literal monster in the hallway.
It’s quite rare for a monster to appear in a social realist series. Is this the kind of part you are looking for?
Stevens: Yes. I love this genre space. Because there’s a lot of creativity and playfulness there. What I’m interested in in that space is that there’s an opportunity to have parallel conversations about what we know and what we need to look at from a different perspective. As you know, the lenses already installed are clearly not working. Therefore, it is necessary to shed light on it. To consider that, we need to throw the conversation into a different paradigm. It certainly resonated with me very much on that level. Victor’s original novel is definitely in conversation with the likes of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” but it’s more explicitly concerned with race and grim about the potential for a certain kind of individual heroism against institutional power.
In most genres these days, originality is required…
Stevens: Yeah, another thing I enjoy about the genre is the conversations within the genre itself. By definition, originality is required. The filmmakers in that space are talking to each other, and they’re like, “You made a movie like this, a zombie movie, a shark movie, whatever. I’m going to make it this way.” We have very strict rules, but which rules are we going to break this time to surprise people? That’s what excites me about the genre. We always want to show you something that has never been seen before and champion its originality. The genre really invites it. That’s what the audience is learning. And eventually, distributors and networks will follow suit. You have to do that.
