Dan Stevens, David. W. Zucker unpacks ‘The Terror: Devil in Silver’

Series can have unreliable narrators, for example ‘Money Heist’. But what about unreliable heroes? Dan Stevens just starred in Season 2 of ‘Dexter Resurrection’ and delivers one. He plays Pepper in AMC’s ‘The Terror: Devil in Silver’, executive produced by Ridley Scott at Scott Free and celebrating its world premiere at Canneseries on April 27.

Pepper is first seen teaching his girlfriend’s young daughter to play the drums. He has plans, he tells his girlfriend, to teach other children in the apartment building. “I like a man who is busy,” says his girlfriend. But no man spends $4,000 on a new drum kit, all the money the couple has. Nor a man like Pepper, who is thrown off when he catches his girlfriend’s ex abusing her and beats the man up in a rage.

Pepper is arrested and taken to New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital instead of being taken to a police station. Something is wrong with New Hyde, an evil devil or monster that attacks patients, including Pepper. But there is something wrong with Pepper himself, and he will only heal if he confronts not only the New Hyde monster, but also his own inner demons.

The role of Pepper requires a high-caliber performance from Stevens (“Downton Abbey,” “Legion”), combining righteous and sometimes verbally violent rage, drug-induced numbness and stunned horror – as well as discomfort as he connects to his still-traumatic past. He also experiences a second broad character arc that moves from indifference to appreciation for his fellow patients.

“The Terror: Devil in Silver” features a prestige executive producer package, aside from Ridley Scott from 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 has been reviewed by the Washington Post as “a dazzling high-wire act” and by the Los Angeles Times as “fantastic, hellish and hilarious.”

Emmy nominee Karyn Kusama (“Yellowjackets”), also executive producer, directs the first two of six episodes.

She knowingly hits their genre beats. But this is a real psychological thriller and much more.

“The Terror: Devil in Silver” will debut May 7 on AMC+ and Shudder and also marks the third installment in a critically acclaimed horror anthology that began with AMC’s 2018 supernatural survival thriller “The Terror” Season 1, directed by David Kajganich and Soo Hugh, which chronicles Sir John Franklin’s doomed Arctic naval expedition from 1845 to 1848. 2019’s “The Terror: Infamy” charted the devastation of World War II Japanese-American internment.

AMC already has the flagship franchise “The Walking Dead” and the expanded world of “Anne Rice’s Immortal Universe” episodes. “The Terror” anthology “speaks to the DNA of a common audience,” notes David W. Zucker. “Now under Dan McDermott, AMC is very excited to get into that market with these kinds of psychological horror and supernatural elements that have defined each of the cycles that we’ve been through,” he adds. “The Terror: Infamy” “still preys on internal threats and vulnerabilities that arise from our personal belief systems and perceptions.”

Led by Judith Light (“Transparent,” “Before,” “Out of My Mind”), who plays a veteran New Hyde patient, “Devil in Silver” features 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”) Final”).

Variety chatted with Stevens and Zucker as “The Terror: Devil in Silver” celebrated its world premiere at Canneseries.

A sense of vulnerability runs through the entire “Terror” anthology….

Zucker: Yes. “Devil in Silver” is the first cycle set in modern times and similarly explores our individual culprits with the character of Dan Stevens. He feels quite trapped in an environment with people he cannot identify with and in a place where he thinks he does not belong, only to be confronted with something that takes advantage of a truth that is deep within him.

That marks “The Devil in Silver” apart as a genre piece….

Zucker: Victor LaValle’s exciting novel formed the basis for ‘Devil in Silver’, which he adapted into a film with Chris Cantwell. When Karyn Kusama came on board as director, it was the appeal of the writing, but ultimately the trajectory of Dan’s character, that she really found quite unique and unusual for a story in this genre. It is not a story about simply conquering the devil or exploring what would be the conventional domain of that story. A completely different approach is needed when it comes to our protagonist’s ultimate discovery about himself.

What Pepper himself has suppressed….

Zucker: Yes, it’s basically about the things that we tend to shut down and deny in our psyche, and the extent to which we have to deal with them. There’s something inherent in Pepper’s nature that lands him in New Hyde in the first place: a fighting spirit and anger that will truly test the way he deals with everything he encounters in New Hyde. There are parts of his past that he has really undermined, some quite painful but undeniably on his part. It reveals the core source of what’s haunting him, because it matches what he’s fighting in New Hyde.

‘Devil in Silver’ also responds to the current spirit of the times…. For example, COVID-19 made people realize that they had been disconnected from the essentials in their lives.

Zucker: I would say this is an essential part. And an important part of the novel and the show is the setting itself, which is a real impeachment of our mental health system, this history of locking up and throwing away lives that has invaded the streets of America. Where do those who need meaningful help find, where can they stay and what support is available to them? There is a connectivity and empathy for another that we have lost.

As you play Pepper, Dan, he begins the story as a seemingly outgoing American man who finds himself in an extraordinary situation that forces him to recognize emotions and feelings that he has suppressed. That seems like a very masculine thing….

Stevens: Sure, Dan has a problem often associated with masculinity: an inability to deal with emotions and past traumas that will inevitably come back to haunt him, literally or figuratively. That’s definitely one of the big themes of the story. However, I don’t know if this is the whole thing. The novel not only contains strong horror elements, but is also a social realist story, but above all institutional criticism. So these two things run parallel, which I think makes for a pretty interesting story. That was certainly what concerned me at first: it wasn’t just some horror show with a monster. There was more to it, there was social criticism underneath.

A criticism of American health care…

Stevens: Yes. New Hyde as an institution in our story does not exist to heal people, but to control people that society finds uncomfortable. Pepper is committed to New Hyde because it is more convenient for the police to lock him up there rather than deal with him through the criminal system. What is originally interesting about Victor’s story, and very present in our story, is how poverty, race, and bureaucratic indifference, not disease, determine who is incarcerated. And so our neighborhood, New Hyde, becomes a kind of metaphor for all the ways in which society makes its undesirable aspects disappear.

How would you read the ‘devil’ in the title of the novel and the series?

Stevens: It’s clear there’s a “devil” wandering around our neighborhood, the monster of the show. But I think that monster functions on multiple levels. It makes literal the violence that is already present in the institution, in the form of neglect, overmedication and dehumanization. The series asks: What is more monstrous: the creature in the hall or the system that traps these vulnerable people and simply looks the other way?

The Pepper you play has a significant character arc….

Stevens: Certainly, the issues surrounding what he did haunted him as much as any physical, factual monster. He has some kind of reckoning with that past. But there is also a change in the way he interacts with other people in the neighborhood and the relationships he develops. He delves into the inner lives of these people, their history and humanity and begins to see this humor, courage and love going on there. And it actually kind of opens him up to staring at the demon he’s carrying around, as much as these kind of literal monsters in the hallways.

It’s quite unusual to have a social realist series with a monster. Are these the kind of parts you are looking for?

Stevens: Yes. I love the genre space because it offers a lot of creativity and playfulness. What interests me in that space is the opportunity to simultaneously have a conversation about something you know and that needs a different lens. You know, it’s clear that the lens we have on it is already broken. So we need to shine some light on it. We need to put the conversation in a different paradigm to look at it. Absolutely, it really appealed to me on that level. Victor’s original novel is certainly in conversation with something like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” but it’s more explicitly about race and grimmer about the possibilities of a kind of individual heroism against institutional power.

Genre nowadays almost demands originality…

Stevens: Yes, another thing I like about the genre is the dialogue within the genre itself. By definition, there is a drive for originality. Filmmakers in the room are in dialogue with each other: ‘You made your zombie movie, your shark movie, whatever it is, a movie like this, I’m going to do it in a moment.’ There’s a very strict set of rules, but it’s like, which one are you going to break this time to surprise people? That’s something that fascinates me about the genre. We constantly want to show you things you haven’t seen before and champion originality. Genre really invites that. The public learns that. And eventually distributors and networks will follow. They have to.