“We almost end where the comic starts,” star Dominic Cooper reveals. “And it’s so necessary because you need to get to know characters. The shows that are flawed and that haven’t continued, however good they’ve been, have been when there’s a kind of chaos of people that we can’t, as an audience, get to know or understand, and therefore care about.
“I think what we have done is establish the roots of these people,” Cooper continues. “This is their home, this is the world in which they inhabit, this is where they’ve come from, this is the reason they go on this journey, which we learn throughout the comic with flashbacks and things like that. But you need to make a success of something to show. It’s such a good environment anyway, such an interesting physical environment. This is their town, this is where we are, this is the beginning of the story. I think that was definitely an essential decision that was made, to ground something that can become extraordinarily flamboyant and all over the place.”
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But Cooper is quick to assure fans that the sense of realism in the show’s early episodes won’t hold it back later on.
“I’m sure we’ll end up, in some series down the road, in Hell or somewhere, or maybe in Heaven,” he speculates. “It’ll become more and more extraordinary. I think it has to be embedded in something at the moment that people can grasp.”
Cooper goes on the say that the intention of everyone involved in the creation of AMC’s Preacher has always been to stay true to the spirit of the source material more than its letters.
“When I first met the guys, creatively, who were behind it, they said, ‘Look, we’ve got these beautiful, wonderfully well drawn-out characters, but we need to now make a world for it, and we need to be able to take it in any direction,’” Cooper recalls. “They’re going to stick to the idea – the journey, the search – because they have to. I think that’s essential”
Preacher premieres Sunday, May 22 at 10 p.m. ET on AMC.
