Series can have unreliable narrators, “Money Heist,” for example. But what about unreliable heroes? Just cast in a lead role in “Dexter Resurrection” Season 2, Dan Stevens delivers one, playing Pepper in AMC’s “The Terror: Devil in Silver,” executive produced by Ridley Scott at Scott Free and celebrating its world premiere at Canneseries April 27.
Pepper is first seen teaching his girlfriend’s young daughter how to play drums. He has plans, he tells his girlfriend, to teach other kids in the apartment block. “I like a man who hustles,” says his girlfriend. But not a man who splashes $4,000 on a new drum kit, all the money the couple have. Nor a man like Pepper, who flies off the handle when he catches his girlfriend’s ex manhandling her, pummelling the man in rage.
Pepper is arrested and committed to New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital rather than being taken down to a police station. Something is wrong at New Hyde, a malevolent devil or monster which attacks patients, including Pepper. But something is wrong with Pepper himself, and he’ll only heal if he confronts not only New Hyde’s monster but his own inner demons.
The role of Pepper demands a high-caliber performance from Stevens, (“Downton Abbey,” “Legion”), mixing righteous and sometimes verbally violent rage, medication-induced stupor and boggle-eyed horror – as well as discomfort as he connects to his still traumatic past. He also experiences a second broad character arc moving from indifference to appreciation for his fellow patients.
“The Terror: Devil in Silver” packs a prestige executive producer package apart from Ridley Scott of David W. Zucker at Scott Free, showrunners Chris Cantwell (“Halt and Catch Fire”) and Victor LaValle (“The Changeling”), author of the novel on which the season is based, the book being rated “a dizzying high-wire act” by the Washington Post and “fantastical, hellish, and hilarious” by the Los Angeles Times.
Emmy nominee Karyn Kusama (“Yellowjackets”), also an executive producer, directs the first two of six episodes.
She knowingly hitting their genre beats. But this is a true-blue psychological thriller and much more.
Set to bow on AMC+ and Shudder on May 7, “The Terror: Devil in Silver” also marks the third installment in an acclaimed horror anthology begun with AMC’s 2018 supernatural survival thriller “The Terror” Season 1, showrun by David Kajganich and Soo Hugh, chronicling Sir John Franklin’s doomed Arctic naval expedition over 1845-48. 2019’s “The Terror: Infamy,”charted the devastation of WWII Japanese-American internment.
AMC already has flagship franchise “The Walking Dead” and the expansive world of the “Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe” installments. “The Terror” anthology “speaks to a common audience DNA,” David W. Zucker notes. “Now under Dan McDermott, AMC is very excited to be in that market with this kind of psychological horror and supernatural element that’s defined each of the cycles that we’ve done,” he adds. “The Terror: Infamy” “still preys on internal threats and vulnerabilities that emerge from our personal belief systems and perceptions.”
Led by Judith Light (“Transparent,” “Before,” “Out of My Mind”), playing a veteran New Hyde patient, “Devil in Silver” packs a distinguished cast: CCH Pounder (“Rustin,” “NCIS: New Orleans”), Aasif Mandvi (“Evil,” “This Way Up”), John Benjamin Hickey (“The Big C,” “Lilly”), Stephen Root (“Barry,” “Heads of State”) and Michael Aronov (“The Americans,” “Operation Finale”).
Dan Stevens and Judith Light in ‘The Terror: Devil in Silver’
Variety chatted to Stevens and Zucker as “The Terror: Devil in Silver” celebrated its world premiere at Canneseries.
A sense of vulnerability runs through the whole “Terror” anthology….
Zucker: Yes. “Devil in Silver” is the first cycle set in modern times and similarly explores our individual culpabilities with Dan Stevens’ character. He feels quite trapped in an environment with people to whom he cannot relate and in a place where he thinks he doesn’t belong, only to be confronted by something there that exploits a truth which resides deeply within him.
That marks “The Devil in Silver” apart as a genre piece….
Zucker: Victor LaValle’s suspenseful novel was the foundation for “Devil in Silver,” which he adapted with Chris Cantwell. When Karyn Kusama came aboard as director, it was the lure of the writing but ultimately the trajectory of Dan’s character that she found really quite unique and unusual for a story in this genre space. It’s not a tale about simply vanquishing the devil or delving into what the conventional realm of that story would be. It takes quite a different approach in terms of our protagonist’s ultimate discovery about himself.
Which Pepper himself has suppressed….
Zucker: Yes, it’s really speaking to the things that we tend to cut off and deny in our psyches, and the degree to which we need to contend with them. There’s something inherent to Pepper’s nature which lands him in New Hyde in the first place: a belligerence and anger that will really test how he contends with all he encounters at New Hyde. There are parts of his past that he’s really subverted, some quite painful but undeniable on his part. It’s revealing the core source of what haunts him, as it corresponds to what he battles at New Hyde.
“Devil in Silver” also taps into the current Zeitgeist…. COVID-19, for instance, made people realize that they had not been connecting with the essential things in their lives.
Zucker: I’d say that’s an essential part of it. And a key component of the novel and the show is the setting itself, which is a real impeachment of our mental health system, this history of confining and discarding lives that has spilled out into the streets of America. Where do those who need meaningful assistance, where can they reside and what support is available to them? There’s a connectivity and empathy for another that we’ve lost.
The way you play Pepper, Dan, he begins the tale as a seemingly outgoing American male who, suffers an extraordinary predicament which forces him to recognize emotions and feelings which he’s suppressed. That seems a very male thing….
Stevens: Certainly, Dan has a problem commonly associated with maleness – an inability to engage with emotion and past trauma that will inevitably come back to haunt him, either literally or metaphorically. That’s definitely one of the story’s big themes. I don’t know, however if it’s the entirety of it. The novel, as well as having strong horror elements and is a social realist tale, an institutional critique as much as anything. So it’s got these two things running in parallel, which I think makes for quite an interesting narrative. That was certainly what engaged me to begin with: It wasn’t just a straight up horror show with a monster. There was something more to it, a social critique going on underneath.
A critique of the U.S. health service…
Stevens: Yes. New Hyde as an institution in our story exists not to heal people but to contain those that society finds inconvenient. Pepper is committed to New Hyde because it’s convenient for the cops to put him there rather than process him through the criminal system. What’s interesting about Victor’s story originally, and is very present in our story, is how, poverty, race and bureaucratic indifference, not illness, determines who gets locked away. And so our ward, New Hyde, becomes a sort of metaphor for all the ways in which society disappears its undesirables.
How would you read the “devil” in the title of the novel and the series?
Stevens: Obviously there is a “devil” that is sort of roaming our ward, the monster of the show. But I think that monster sort of functions on multiple levels. It literalizes the violence that’s already present in the institution in its neglect, overmedication and dehumanization. The series is asking: What’s more monstrous: the creature in the hall or the system that’s trapping these vulnerable people and just looking the other way?
The Pepper you play has a considerable character arc….
Stevens: Certainly, the issues surrounding what he did haunt him as much as any physical, actual monster. He has a sort of reckoning with that past. But there’s also change in the way he relates to other people in the ward and the relationships that he develops. He gets into the inner lives of these people, their history and humanity and starts to see that this humor and courage and this love that’s going on. And it really actually sort of opens him up to stare down the demon that he’s carrying as much as this sort of literal monster in the hallways.
It’s quite unusual to have a social realist series with a monster. Are these the kind of parts that you’re looking for?
Stevens: Yes. I love the genre space because it affords a great deal of creativity and playfulness. What interests me within that space is the opportunity to, in parallel, have a conversation about something that you know, that needs a different lens on it. You know, that clearly the lens we have on it already isn’t working. So we need to shed some light on it. We need to throw the conversation into a different paradigm in order to to look at it. Definitely, it spoke to me on that level very, very much. Victor’s original novel definitely is in conversation with something like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” but it’s more explicitly concerned with race and is grimmer about the possibilities of sort of individual heroism against institutional power.
Genre these days almost demands originality…
Stevens: Yes, another thing I enjoy about genre is the dialogue within the genre itself. There’s a push for originality by definition. Filmmakers within the space are in dialogue with each other: like, ‘You did your zombie movie, your shark movie, your whatever it is movie like this, I’m going to do it like this.’ There is a very strict set of rules, but it’s like, which ones are you going to break this time in order to surprise people? That’s something that excites me about about genre. We want to be constantly showing you things that you haven’t seen before and championing that originality. Genre really invites that. Audiences are learning that. And ultimately, distributors, networks will follow. They have to.
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