Evil Cast Reveal the Most Surprising Evolution of Their Characters Across the Series

The Evil TV series has taken its principal characters on quite a ride. When the series began in 2019, it followed journalist-turned-priest David Acosta (Mike Colter), forensic psychologist Dr. Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers), and tech expert atheist Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi), three strong-willed people who were each rigid in their respective views on religion, medicine and skepticism. However, as Evil exposed the team to more and more cases of supposed supernatural phenomena, each of them was challenged to open their mind to the possibilities of more. 

Behind the scenes, different episodes of Evil have seen Colter, Herbers, and Mandvi each take some big performance leaps playing versions of their characters that have been attacked, drugged, bewitched, seduced, cursed, or even impersonated by demonic forces. During press interviews for Evil Season 4, ComicBook had to ask each of the principal stars of the show what the most surprising character twists were for each of them. 

Short answer: each of the cast members agreed that Evil creators Robert and Michelle King, as well as their team of writers, kept the surprises coming so often that it became standard to change it up:

“Oh, there’s just so much,” Herbers admitted. “Every episode that I read it’s like ‘Oh there’s another turn that I didn’t expect for these characters.’” 

“Yeah it’s hard to say on the macro,” Mandvi said in agreement. “There are so many micro-turns that happen throughout [a] whole season. When I get the script, I’m like super excited to read every page… because there are so many unexpected things that happen every episode.”

The Stars of Evil also indicated that this final season will have some of the biggest twists and character turns yet – turns on turns on turns… 

“There’s one [in the final episodes] that literally blew my mind; I was like ‘I can’t believe we’re going there! This is unbelievable! Then of course it takes another turn and goes somewhere else.” Mandvi teased. “So I really think that rather than a macro thing, it’s the constant surprises that we get along the way.” 

“And I think that’s what makes it so gratifying to play these characters over a long period of time,” Herbers continued. “We’ve been doing this for five years and the reason we’re still as excited as we were on day one is that our characters seem to be changing and our dynamic keeps evolving; whereas other shows you’re more stuck to ‘This is who I am, and this is what I’m playing. And I feel like we get to play a lot of different instruments within the same character.”  

Evil Seasons 1-4 are now streaming exclusively on Paramount+.