[Warning: Includes spoilers for the Season 3 finale.]
How are you doing, FROMily? That finale was A LOT. Thankfully we know we’re going to get more of this story, and you have a year and change to work on your Venn diagram deciphering the OMG WTFery of it all. Last week, before the news of the renewal dropped, I jumped on a call with Big Daddy Boyd, Harold Perrineau for a lovely, long conversation about the season and what might be next. Settle in with the beverage of your choosing and enjoy!
While one of the hats that Perrineau wears is executive producer, he’s in the dark about plot developments until he sits down with the script. “I am literally like the audience is now. When we saw that Julie dropped the rope, we were like, ‘Oh my God, that is so cool. That was not on the bingo card,” he laughs.
“One of the coolest things that the show is gonna produce, and John’s made it up, when Ethan says to her, ‘You’re a story walker.’ I thought that was so cool. I’ve never heard of a story walker. I don’t totally know what it means, but I can’t wait to see where that goes.”
“Even in the first episode, I was really shocked about what was gonna happen to Tian Chen. And then Jack Bender said, ‘Oh, and here’s how we’re gonna film it. We are gonna just handcuff you up, and then we’re just gonna zoom in on your face. And I was like, ‘Oh, yeah. Okay. Great.”
With such a large cast of characters, it’s sometimes surprising when two characters share intel with each other that the viewers have had all along. Perrineau is like the audience in that regard, too, with the added complexity of keeping track of the real-life interactions with the cast. “I keep a little notebook as I’m dealing with the relationships in each episode. I kind of have to make sure I remind myself of the relationships that I have with Donna, with Kristy, with Kenny,” he explains.
“Because what’ll happen is inevitably we’re all hanging out and we’re in Halifax and we’re having a great time, and then we go back to work. And I remember, ‘Oh, right. Kenny’s probably still pretty pissed at me. So, okay, alright, erase. Forget that [Ricky He] and I just had beers. Now he’s mad. So we’re not doing that.”
Perrineau loves working with He, and has even hatched a theory about Kenny. “It’s really fun to play with him. But what I’m having a lot more fun with is contemplating, because we all think this could be Kenny’s bad guy origin story. He lost his mom and his dad in this place. And he’s angry. He’s holding it together and he’s being really thoughtful when he can. But like any human being, where does all of this lead? It can go either way,” he shares.
“This place has taken a lot from him, and as human beings, you want to point fingers. And in each case, he can point at Boyd for something. It may not be directly Boyd’s fault, but he can certainly point at him and say, ‘You didn’t tell me about it, then you protected Sara. And then you told me you were in the barn, but why were you in the barn?'”
“He could point at it in so many ways. It’s a lot. But I’m having a good time because Ricky is such a good actor. We have a really good time talking about it and trying to figure out where it’s going and what stuff we kind of shade this way or that way. When he agrees to be my deputy again, that’s a tricky conversation. And I think he plays it as ‘I’m fully your friend again, but the job needs to be done.”
Perrineau butts heads with new arrival Acosta, from the moment she accidentally kills Nicky at Colony House, and then she pops off with a demand that he return her gun in a heightened scene opposite new cast member Samantha Brown that he says was a lot of fun to play.
“I’ll tell you, Sam Brown, who I think is a really great actress, she did a thing that none of us expected. When she says, “Give me my gun,” and she walked up to me, I didn’t expect that when we were rehearsing it. I try to really be in the moment. So [when she did that, I thought,] ‘Oh wow. Am I gonna have to fight her? Am I gonna have to hit her, because you can’t [do that],” he says.
“She actually put herself in a really great position to not be grabbed and thrown into a cell because she just got right there. And Boyd is a little off. I think the amount that he was yelling at her, especially when he first saw her [at Colony House], I think that’s some old, residual stuff from when he was home, with a police officer or something, I don’t know what.”
“So I think what she did was she put herself in a really great position. She’s like, ‘You’re either gonna fight me or you’re gonna give me my gun. And the only thing to do was hand the young lady a gun, get some space and let her know that this is not gonna happen.”
This season, Boyd and Ellis finally connected as father and son, and Perrineau nudged that into fruition. “[Series creator] John [Griffin] and I had a little conversation in Season 2 about how every time Ellis comes to talk to him, Boyd says, ‘I know, I gotta go, I’ll be right back,'” he recalls.
“And John asked, ‘Oh, does that happen all the time?’ I said, ‘Every time. Yeah.’ And so then, we had to take a look at it and he said, ‘Okay, we’ll use it when we need it, but you are right. We have to get back to establishing this is his son. That’s his father. We have to get back to establishing it.'”
“Which is a thing that I feel really strongly about. My own parental vibes feel really strong that, when you’re a parent, you have to always be a parent. Unless the character is written as a terrible parent. But I don’t think this character is, and so it’s been really good to take him in and then to have this real obstacle with Fatima having committed this thing.”
“Boyd is really aware of what the town can do to you. With Sara, with himself. He’s really aware of how the town, or something [about the town] can get in you and cause you to do the thing. And so to have to now protect her in that same way… With Abby being gone, it’s almost a reconstruction of his family. There were three of them before, and there are three of them again.”
“He really has to play that. And I really like to get to play that out because I think that’s what helps connect the audience. These characters love each other. He loves his son, Ellis loves his dad. He might be really mad. This is a terrible place, but they really do love each other. And so I like to play that out because I think that then connects with the audience. If either one of them were to go, and as we know, that’s always possible, the loss of it would be devastating. And that’s the thing I think is really interesting about this show.”
While Boyd has had a very full plate helping Ellis and Fatima, he’s also wrestled with the lingering guilt about leaving Randall in the street the night Tabitha returned, and Perrineau credits Griffin with crafting that haunting, split-second decision. “Again, I think this is the brilliance of John Griffin. The writing is so spectacular. I love that we as the audience get this, ‘Oh, if that was me,’ Monday morning quarterback view of it. But what he does to the characters is he gives them a split second to make a life or death situation. And that’s really compelling writing,” he points out.
“In playing it, if I set them all up really correctly in my head, then it makes the moments really, really great. When Boyd sees that Tabitha is back, he’s already having a hard time. The last time he was out at night was with Tian Chen. He’s already outside, and so then Tabitha is back and they’re like, ‘Okay, we’ve got to save her.’ And it really is just a split second.”
“He reaches for that gun. He really does wanna shoot that thing into smithereens. But nothing’s gonna happen. And so if I set myself up like that, all those things are happening really quickly. And then I have to make a choice, and then I’ve got to go, which is why he jumped in the ambulance and just screams that the monster made him make that choice.”
“And then the audience gets to live with Boyd knowing that he’s made that choice, but Randall having no idea. It’s really compelling drama. For Boyd, this is the second torture in as many nights that he’s somehow been a part of. This town is playing really dirty with Boyd. And, I, Harold, really wonder why.
This season has added layers to how Boyd and Donna relate to and confide in each other, and Perrineau has enjoyed that evolution, and building it with Elizabeth Saunders. “When we first met them, they actually had some time to establish their two areas and say, ‘You just keep them safe there and I’ll keep them safe there.’ And it looked like they were doing a great job, until the Matthews family showed up and it has not stopped since they’ve been there. It’s not a clue, but we’ve never seen that board again for ‘days without incident,'” he says.
“What better partner to have. I am really excited and proud about our whole cast. And of course Liz being one of our crown jewels, it’s just a great thing to have to play with her. All of those ups and downs and those moments where they are together and they’re not together and Donna is rock solid until she’s not, and then she’s rock solid again.”
The season finale finds Boyd unleashing a torturous interrogation on Elgin to reveal where he’s hidden Fatima, but Perrineau says that while no doubt an awful thing, Boyd doing it doesn’t mean the town has broken him. “In my mind, he is not broken. I’ve spoken to people who have done really tough military service, because I think that’s what Boyd has had to do. And without being explicit, there are times you do things that as a human being you wouldn’t do, but as a soldier have to be done,” he explains.
“I think Boyd’s been there before. I think that’s the reason he says, “I know you guys are all scared. This is not about you.” I think, for me, that looks like insight into who Boyd has had to be before. He tries really hard to do the right thing, but given the necessity, he believes it’s the right thing.”
“And one of the things that I think is really interesting, and we don’t talk about it at all ever in the show, it’s just visual. There’s this thing about young black kids, women or men, but sometimes in society in America, they’re treated like they’re adults when they’re really just kids. And something about the visual of treating Elgin that way, it makes it all feel really, really terrible. Again, this is really good writing, but you can’t tell if you hate Boyd now or if you think it’s the right thing.”
“Elgin is a giant, man-looking child. He looks like a big dude. That’s a lot to work with. But he’s just a baby. And it is a terrible line to cross. I say all that to say, I’m not sure if Boyd is broken or if the town is okay because the man in yellow shows up, and he hadn’t shown up yet. So I have a question about who’s broken. It’s a bad idea that he does it. It’s a terrible idea, but I don’t think he’s never been there.”
The closing moments of the finale deliver a one-two punch of Fatima’s maybe baby actually being a Smiley clone, which then does the From version of SORAS as Boyd watched from a distance. “That could be the beginning of his real breakdown,” laughs Perrineau. “When I saw that [in the script], one, I was super happy Jamie was coming back because he’s such a nice, nice man. But, yeah, that is a full brain explosion.”
Jim’s death is shocking and comes at the hands of a daywalking man in yellow just after a time-shifted Julie emerges from the woods. Perrineau was as floored as we were, and it’s another arc that he’s given some thought to, back to the pilot. “None of us saw that coming. I think that whole storyline of Jim and Jade and Tabitha and Henry. It made me look at all those episodes,” he shares.
“I went back and started rereading. It’s in all those scenes when they’re all together and now I’m really questioning, are they all versions of each other? I don’t even understand. That whole storyline is really striking. The man in yellow showing up like that. He’s a giant member of our cast. And it’s like, ‘Oh. So that’s what we’re doing. Okay. It’s a lot to try to figure out. I wondered whether that doesn’t happen if Julie doesn’t [show up].”
“When we start to hear the story about Jade and Tabitha having a child, it sent me right back to their two cars converging, and Victor saying then, ‘That’s never happened before.’ And it turns out that those two people are connected. That’s really cool. I think things are happening. Even though it doesn’t look like it, I think the town is losing, no matter what.”
“The way they keep turning it up. That’s what you do if you’re losing. When they were winning, they were just walking through and smiling and picking people off. But now they’re turning it up, they’re kidnapping and they’re torturing and mentally torturing people. I think they’re not winning the way that they usually win. That’s my theory.”
Perrineau and I spoke before the renewal was announced with his gleeful video on social media. That was legitimate joy. With the renewal uncertain earlier last week, he shared what he wanted to see should they get to come back, and how much the show means to him. “I hope we get to find out how these people are connected to this place and that they don’t just all expire,” he says.
“I’m super excited about the show and I sort of hate the drama of waiting for the studio to pick us up because it would be really tragic. It would break my heart, if I’m really being honest. if we didn’t get picked up. It would full break my heart. And I’ve been doing this for a long time.”
Thankfully, no broken hearts! Well, unless you were all on in Jim. If so, my condolences. From will begin production on Season 4 in 2025 and return in 2026. Before you panic, a friendly reminder that you survived 15 months between Season 2 and Season 3, so we’ve done this before.
All episodes through are available on MGM+ online and via the app and on Prime Video in the US, and on Paramount+ in Canada. ICYMI, all of our previous coverage — 40+ pieces, including new Season 3 interviews with Scott McCord, Corteon Moore, Pegah Ghafoori, Ricky He, Robert Joy, and Catalina Sandino Moreno — is here. Check back this week for the rest of my chat with Scott McCord!
Photos courtesy of Chris Reardon/MGM+; video courtesy of MGM+.
