‘Deadly Class’: Liam James On What’s Next For Billy After “Saudade”

Tonight’s game-changing trip to Las Vegas on Deadly Class was ostensibly done for one reason: to kill Billy’s abusive father. When you drag four of your best friends on an inter-state road trip to do something like that, things will never be the same, whether or not you are successful.

Doubly so when things go sideways and people end up dead that you didn’t even plan on. So…what’s next?

Spoilers ahead for “Saudade,” tonight’s episode of Deadly Class.

Ultimately, while he was not the only one to go, Billy and Marcus did succeed in killing Billy’s father. This means that, theoretically at least, his father’s debts will stop being a liability to Billy’s mother and brother, preventing Billy’s little brother from being sold into mob service at Kings Dominion the way Billy was.

Now that he has had to use the skills he gained at Kings, though, actor Liam James said that he will view the school through a fundamentally different lens than he did before Vegas.

“I think the thing for Billy is, as we see in those first few episodes, he is reacting very strangely to the school,” James explained. “He is not taking it seriously at all, and I think this is going to be a real wake-up call for him. It’s kind of this rush forward and now, in a weird way, he is the man in this household, which is a pretty brutal way of getting to where he is, but it’s all hitting him in the head all at once. I don’t think he understood the repercussions or even really knew what he was going down there to do; he was just driven to such an extreme length that he had to do something.”

James also says — and he thinks Billy knows — that nothing will ever be the same again after getting his first kill, and helping to cover up the truth about Chico’s death.

“It’s a little bit like Stand By Me,” James said, sneaking in an ’80s reference even off-script. “Everyone’s changed forever afterwards.”

That change is something that might resonate a little strangely next week, because during our interview with Benjamin Wadsworth, he revealed that they actually filmed this episode and next week’s out of sequence, so that the students at Kings were responding to the deaths that took place in “Saudade” before they had actually filmed those scenes.

James said that while doing so was unusual, he made it work for him. Knowing what was coming, but not yet having done it, allowed him to push it down and ignore it in the same way Billy had done to his father’s flaws for years — and he said that the reality of it hit him all at once, the same way it did Billy, when he finally was preparing to shoot a scene that deals with the emotional fallout of this week’s actions.

“I don’t think even Billy understands how he feels about it after it happens,” James said. “The nature of how it all goes down and what his plan was to do to go confront his dad, and what it means to have an abusive father, it’s just unnatural, and so I think it made sense a little bit to be in that space of confusion and not really knowing how Billy would feel afterwards when I was shooting that next episode.”

Deadly Class airs at 10 p.m. ET/PT, Wednesday nights on SYFY.