Evil Stars Katja Herbers, Mike Colter & Aasif Mandvi Talk Season 4 Cases, New Demons, And The Antichrist

Warning: Mild SPOILERS lie ahead for Evil season 4!

Summary

• The world of
  Evil
  is building to a potentially apocalyptic end in season 4 as Leland continues his plan to birth the Antichrist, all while Kristen, David, and Ben deal with their own demons and new cases.
• Katja Herbers, Mike Colter, and Aasif Mandvi tease the major arcs to come from their characters, including Kristen’s family life, the return of the Entity for David, and Ben’s confrontation with the supernatural.
• The trio also share what their favorite cases are in the new season, all of which connect to some terrifying real-world themes.

The end is night for Paramount+’s Evil heading into season 4. Hailing from The Good Wife duo Robert and Michelle King and originally airing on CBS before making the leap to streaming, the horror-drama show revolves around forensic psychologist Dr. Kristen Bouchard, Catholic seminarian-turned-priest David Acosta, and skeptic technology expert Ben Shakir as they’re tasked with investigating various cases for the Church to determine whether they’re truly supernatural events or something human-driven. All the while, Kristen and David find themselves menaced by the presence of Dr. Leland Townsend, a forensic psychologist with ties to a demonic organization.

Evil season 4 picks up right where the previous season left off, with Kristen having learned that Leland was behind her missing frozen egg and fertilized it himself in order to bring the birth of the Antichrist. Though initially dismissive of his claims, she slowly learns of the dangerous grip Leland holds on some of her family. Meanwhile, David finds himself revisited by The Entity with a new task and new representative, played by Peacemaker‘s Chukwudi Iwuji, though he also begins to question what the Church’s true purpose is for his visions.

Katja Herbers, Mike Colter, and Aasif Mandvi return to lead the ensemble Evil season 4 cast alongside Michael Emerson, Christine Lahti, Kurt Fuller, Andrea Martin, Patrick Brammall, Brooklyn Shuck, Skylar Gray, Maddy Crocco, and Dalya Knapp. The newest season of the show serves as its penultimate chapter, with a shortened season 5 closing out the show and releasing the week after season 4’s finale.

In anticipation of the show’s return, Screen Rant interviewed Katja Herbers, Mike Colter, and Aasif Mandvi to discuss Evil season 4, what to expect from their character arcs in the new episodes — including Ben’s haunting and the impending birth of the Antichrist — and their favorite cases from the season.

“The S–t Never Stops Hitting The Fan” For Kristen In Evil Season 4

Despite holding a shocked expression in the Evil season 3 ending, the season 4 finale picks up with Kristen mocking Leland for having to now raise a baby while going on to focus on other things in her life. However, Herbers teases that “the s–t never stops hitting the fan” for her character, teasing that the Antichrist arc will come back to haunt her as the season progresses:

Katja Herbers: Well, it seems like with Kristen, the s–t never stops hitting the fan. There’s so much that has happened to her, and just when you think it can’t possibly get any crazier — the missing egg was crazy enough, and has now been fertilized by the person who’s been out to kill her and her family the entire time. So yeah, a lot going on there, and how we will see her deal with that is trying to take care of her daughters in the best way she can, and trying to keep this other baby, let that be something that she doesn’t think about until she has to think about it.

Colter Loved Working With His New Enclave Representative

One of the best-kept secrets throughout Evil season 4’s production is the casting of Chukwudi Iwuji, best known for his turns as Murn in Peacemaker and the High Evolutionary in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, as a mysterious priest sent by the Vatican to be David’s new Entity handler. Though Colter is careful not to share too much about this new character or the storyline, he does share his delight about getting to work with Iwuji:

Mike Colter: You know, I love working with the individual you’re referring to. I probably can’t say that, because I don’t think we’ve revealed the guest stars. But just in case, I love working with that actor, and he was really fun.

Katja Herbers: You’ve gotta elaborate on this actor that we can’t name. [Laughs]

Mike Colter: Yeah, I’m gonna tease you, I’m gonna disguise him. [Chuckles] When you hear who he is, you’re gonna be like, “Oh, man, that’s great.” He was so good, and honestly, so well-prepared. I’ve seen his work for years, I think I talked to Katja about this. And I thought the storyline that carried on with The Entity and what that was about, it just becomes more ominous. It’s always like, “What layer is this? Who are you and what were the other people that I’ve been dealing with before?” It feels like you’re a special agent within the Church, and it goes all the way up to the Pope.

It’s a really interesting part and narrative that they’ve given David, so I enjoy playing it, it just gives him a purpose that feels really important. And at first, when he had this purpose, obviously, he kept it from his colleagues, and eventually he told them about it. And it just makes it that much more interesting that they’re involved, and they’re doubting it, and they don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t understand what’s going on either. “But I gotta go, I got something to do, and you guys got to come with me.” It’s cool.

Ben Will Be “Shaken” As He’s Confronted By The Supernatural Properly

Another intriguing element of Evil season 4 comes right in the premiere episode as Ben, having been hit by an atomic ray from a proton collider, suddenly finds himself subject to being terrorized by a Djinn which, in spite his best efforts to explain away practically, continues to torment him physically and psychologically. Mandvi found it a thrill to play this new side of Ben, which he teases will leave his character “shaken“:

Aasif Mandvi: I like this season, because Ben is shaken in a really fun way. Like you said, his skepticism is really challenged, his certainty is challenged. For so long, I often played Ben as very sort of stuck to the ground and planted in the earth, he’s a very earth-bound character. In this season, he gets thrown around by all these things that he can’t explain. He’s had things that he can’t explain before, and he’s been able to let it go.

In this instance, because it’s happening to him physically, and there’s a physical thing, a medical thing, that’s happening to him, he can’t let it go, because he’s dealing with it on a personal/physical level. So, the paranormal-supernatural element of it stays with him. It’s inside either his head or his body, he has to live with it night and day. That is fun, and that’s what’s different about this season than I think previous seasons, of his being challenged. He’s challenged 24/7 on this one, so that really starts to make him go crazy, as it would for anybody, if you were seeing demons all the time, especially if you don’t believe in it.

The Trio Love The Real-World Themes Of The Show’s Cases

Even as the show builds towards its potentially apocalyptic climax, Evil season 4 still presents Ben, Kristen, and David with a variety of bizarre new cases, including reportedly possessed pigs and the spread of a potentially demonic possession causing people to forget their words. When it comes to choosing their favorite case from the new season, the trio had a few key choices, but agreed they all come from the terrifying real-world themes they each explore:

Aasif Mandvi: For me, it was the pigs, because I got to play with a demon pig.

Katja Herbers: Yeah, and I liked that storyline a lot, because it ties into the evil of something very real that is animal agriculture, and the effects on our climate. And what we see in that episode is that pigs are very kind, intelligent beings, but they’re being fed their own species, the re-feeding, and that is making them insane. And that is an actual thing that happens in our animal agriculture, that we could consider that being evil, and that it should stop. So, I love it when our show ties into some really real-world problems that we’re dealing with right now, and make some entertaining story out of that.

Mike Colter: Yeah, in the first four episodes, the werewolf-robot storyline, I do think to myself — I mean, this is actually something that’s happening. They are putting robot dogs on the streets, and I just really think that there’s a problem when you have law enforcement, and you have a dog that, I don’t know, they put guns and flamethrowers in the back of the dog. It’s actually happening.

Katja Herbers: You can buy that, with 10k, you can get a flame-throwing dog.

Mike Colter: Yeah, so I’m like, “Okay, the dog assesses you as if you’re a threat or not, and then it throws a flame at you or shoots you.” I don’t know, we’ve got a problem with humans and guns, so I thought that was an interesting storyline. And obviously, we went out — I don’t know if it’s spoilers or not — to the cemetery, and etc, etc. I do think it’s a really interesting place that we are in as a society, where we’re starting to rely more on computers.

Obviously, AI is a huge discussion, but robots and computers doing things that humans should be able to do, should do better than they do it, and they’re not doing it very well. And now, you think a computer is going to do it better? So I’m a little afraid by that kind of stuff. I don’t know if we got a deep dive on that, but I definitely was interested in that episode in terms of how we go on law enforcement, and what these dogs mean for us, as humans, walking around.

About Evil Season 4

In the upcoming season, Kristen, David, and Ben continue to assess cases that involve wayward technology, possessed pigs, demonic oppression and infestation, a dance muse conjured by alleged witches, and an evil relic. Throughout, Leland attempts to lure Kristen into raising a baby Antichrist who was conceived with her ovum. David is recruited by the Vatican’s secret service to “remote view”, a paranormal ability to see the unseen in order to detect evil. Ben is hit by an ion beam, causing him to see visions of a taunting jinn until he discovers an unusual solution to banish it. Finally, all three realize they only have a few weeks left to assess cases because the parish has decided to disband the team due to a lack of funds. This culminates in one last confrontation with Leland and the 60 families that make up Evil in the modern world.

Evil

season 4 is now streaming on Paramount+.

Source: Screen Rant Plus