How Preacher's Dominic Cooper Pulls Off Jesse Custer's 'Dark Stillness'

Having already seen the pilot episode of AMC's new series, Preacher, something striking about the episode is how subdued Dominic Cooper's performance as Jesse Custer is throughout most of the episode. While he certainly has his moments, Cooper's downtrodden preacher is mundane when compared to his treasure-hunting ex-flame, Tulip, and his new best friend, Cassidy the Vampire.

Cooper says that restrained performance is intentional, and was a unique challenge to pull off.

"I think that that was my biggest hurdle, believing that was going to maintain interest," Cooper said while speaking to reporters visiting the show's set in Albuquerque, N.M. "As you say, I'm surrounded by the most wonderful, elaborate, colorful and brilliantly formed characters that are an absolute joy to watch, and are so vibrant for the audience and to work opposite, but I kept going back to the comics, and I kept looking at them, and I kept thinking about who this man is, and how far removed he is from the world I grew up in.

"There are so many different phases of his life and his situation that do happen quite quickly," Cooper explained. "It meant that I just had to maintain a sort of dark stillness that had to center everything in a way. It's been really hard. I haven't done that before, really. You want to come in and shake everything up, and be the person, but that's not Jesse's job in this."

That may not be Jesse Custer's job in the pilot, but Cooper says fans should expect Jesse's demeanor to change in a hurry.

"It changes very quickly into the second one," Cooper says. "He's in a very different place, even at the beginning of the next episode, and then the next one. They're all very large transitions emotionally. He has this thing that he's dealing with, and how he deals with it, it's transformative, and that's why it needed to stay, in the beginning, at quite a low, small place so it had somewhere to go."

While Cooper did use Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's original Preacher comics as a point of reference, he wasn't slavishly devoted to them, hoping to mix his own take on the character with the original depiction for a special and unique take on TV's Jesse Custer.

"I hope it's a mix of everything, and myself, and my take on who he is," Cooper explained. "Because I think it's always an impossibility to try and impersonate an idea of someone. It had to have an element of me. It's funny what can be revealed in the process of actually filming, when you make a discovery of the character.

"It's an absolute process," Cooper continues. "I don't know whether I've found him completely yet. I'm still working him out. As I said before, episode by episode, he's so interchangeable. He changes. Huge shifts in his life take place, and that's been hard as well. The person who he was, the person that I had to find in that first one - lost, alone, dark, drunk, fighting against something he wasn't, transforms into someone who's extraordinarily comfortable with his idea of himself that he now has. Having this thing, this power, and then the complexities of dealing with a power that strong and actually how you crave good from that. That changes again immediately, going from joy and thinking that this is the best thing to becoming possibly the worst."

Preacher premiers Sunday, May 22 at 10 p.m. ET on AMC.