Closing out our From Season 3 coverage (which you can find here), in the second part of my conversation with Scott McCord, we talk about Victor’s new friendship with Sara, reconnecting with Tabitha, and what might be next for Victor when Season 4 returns in 2026.
As we’ve talked about before, series creator and showrunner John Griffin is astute about keeping his plans on lockdown, so every script is a surprise for the cast. McCord was delighted to discover this season would allow him to play with Avery Konrad across a multi-episode arc as Victor finds an ally in Sara on his quest for answers.
“I would’ve never seen that coming, necessarily. And the resurrection of Sara in a way, even from a moral standpoint. She’s there to help. I love what John did with her this season, that there’s an opportunity of redeeming herself in some way, just even for herself to feel like a good person. I think she even says that. In episode five, we have a conversation and she says, “You seem like a good person. I want to know what that’s like,'” he recalls.
“I was excited to work with Avery, of course, because we do know each other a little bit. We’re a very large cast, so we don’t see each other at work a lot. And especially for me, Victor’s rarely in crowd scenes, so I’m always excited to see who I’m gonna be paired up with, because I know that there’ll be a trajectory. It’ll lead somewhere.”
“With Sara, I liked the whole thing that John had constructed around that, which I thought had so much to do with that brother-sister aspect. I think it’s something that Victor’s yearning for, whether he’s aware of it or not, as Victor mentions in episode four, When they’re in the bedroom together getting the stuff to build the fort, and he says, ‘We used to play in this house.”
“That particular house had meaning to him, which I think drove him there, as well. And I was sort of focused on, at least from my own work, this idea of ‘Where’s the safest place I can go, with the scariest person, where we can build this sanctum?’ This was something that clearly Eloise and Victor did together, and shared secrets, and that’s sort of the angle I was going. And it really excited me to go on that path with her.”
Last season, Victor had a pivotal moment in the car graveyard with Jade, and this season, he had an equally pivotal moment with Sara. ‘This really neat thing happened. When she comes to me in the car graveyard and says Henry is probably feeling the same way he does. It was this incredibly cold day that we were shooting,” he shares.
“It’s beautiful and sunny. It looks magnificent on the screen, and it was so windy and so cold that day, the joke between Avery and I was that she was doing the whole scene kind of squinting. The wind was blowing. We could barely hear each other, but we found a way, of course, to make it work. And it’s one of my favorite scenes of the show.”
“There was this moment at the very end of the scene, a beautiful scene written by John that I loved. It was written that she makes her point about just trusting that Henry’s gonna feel this way and she comes over and sits down beside me. That was how we ended up blocking it with Alexandra La Roche, our director of that episode.”
“And on one of the takes, Avery and I just both felt it was just an improv moment. I move over beside her, and we put our heads together and I put my head on her shoulder. And that wasn’t written in the script. So what was developing, which I loved, was this brother sister relationship. Clearly there was a trust. The scariest person in town and maybe the most misunderstood guy in town end up forming this relationship.”
At the end of Season 3, Victor sent Tabitha off into the bottle tree, and with this season’s developments, we learned just how deep their bond goes. Since its outset, McCord says he came to that relationship from the POV of a mother-son dynamic. “I can speak from the perspective of the work I was always doing. If we go all the way back to Season 1 when I waited for her in the tunnels, and the boy in white told me to wait for her. Immediately in my notes, I was always writing, “mother,” because she’s a mother to Ethan,” he explains.
“And it was the first time that I was taking charge of something. I had an opportunity to make up for a lifetime loss with a maternal figure. And it kind of went the other way. And she ended up taking charge. And then we ended up developing this bond. Even her being lost in those caves, that was one of the first times that John wrote where Victor completely curls up in a ball and regresses to a child at one point. So there was always a very clear dynamic between the two that was mother-son.”
“And it had so much to do with, for me, just my own [understanding] of Victor’s backstory in terms of what he could remember. And that his mother had been there with him and had died. So that bond with Tabitha, even at the beginning of the series. was interesting. He was the one that Tabitha came to in his room and said, ‘We could use your help.’ He told her, ‘Bad things are gonna happen,’ and at one point he says to her, ‘I don’t think there is a way out.'”
“And that’s really key, because Victor is so caught between these two things, like he said to Jade, ‘If you go down this path right, bad things will happen. People die here.’ This is the conflict. And not only that, but he doesn’t think there is a way out. Another aspect of it too, to complicate him even more is the fact that, as John described him to me at the beginning of the whole series, he’s an unreliable narrator to himself because he’s taken certain memories and compartmentalized certain things. He thought they were dreams. And then of course he himself knows that his memory isn’t that reliable. Eloise is a great example of that, or Jasper is a great example of that.”
McCord says Victor reaching his breaking point at the start of Season 3 keyed off Victor’s own repeating losses, and his questioning of himself. “A lot of the stuff that I was working on from the beginning of the season had to do with the fact that when we started this season, Tabitha had been gone into the tree and there was even discussion about her being dead,” he recalls.
“And with Tian Chen, another maternal figure in a way, passing away, Victor was feeling immense guilt. I think this is also what got him on his plight of finally going, ‘I gotta figure this out. I have to figure this out.’ When he threw the bag down and said, ‘People die here,’ and he blasted at Ethan, he was coming from that place.”
Griffin gifted McCord with scenes between Victor, Sara, and Tabitha, and he enjoyed having those arcs intersect. “Another scene that really stands out to me is the one that’s in the basement of Sara’s house where she goes and brings Tabitha down. And we have a scene together, the three of us,” he says.
“I remember being really excited to do those scenes because it was also seeing Tabitha again for the first time after going through all that, but also that John had introduced this new thing of Victor harming himself. That was another scary, challenging scene to go into. But I love working with them.”
Looking ahead, McCord is eager to see where these new revelations about Tabitha and Miranda lead, and what’s next for Victor and Henry. “It’ll be juicy to play whatever, whatever it ends up being,” he shares. One thing I have been thinking about is where Victor’s relationship with his dad goes. Because Henry’s got his struggles. I wanna see how that develops. Because there was so much emphasis on us trying to find each other and me trying to save him. And now, where does that go? I’ve been wondering.”
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.
Photos courtesy of Chris Reardon/MGM+;
