Sterling K. Brown Goes Inside ‘Paradise’ End of the World Episode

[This story contains major spoilers from the seventh episode of Paradise, “The Day.”]

Paradise viewers have been imagining how the show’s world ended ever since they began watching the Sterling K. Brown-starring Hulu series. But nothing could have prepared them for the episode that actually showed how it happened.

The seventh episode in Dan Fogelman‘s drama, “The Day,” written by John Hoberg and directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, flashed back to the day of the extinction-level event that preceded the beginning of the series. Paradise had opened up in a post-apocalyptic world, where 25,000 people were saved from a catastrophic climate event that wiped out civilization. The survivors, led by star Brown’s Secret Service agent Xavier Collins, are now living in a bunker deep in the Colorado mountains that was built by a billionaire (Julianne Nicholson) who had the wherewithal to see that the end of the world was coming.

“The Day” took viewers inside the White House’s top-secret conversations as President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) navigated what to tell the country amid the unprecedented crisis. They had been prepping for the event, but the catastrophe happened faster than any of their worst-case scenario modeling when a super volcano erupted in the arctic, shattering the ice shelf and instantly melting trillions of gallons of water. That triggered a tsunami traveling 600 miles per hour with a wave as high as 300 feet. The coastal cities went first, as the world watches in horror; newscasters are wiped out on live feeds and aerial cameras show global devastation. The president and his hand-picked survivors are left with little time to escape, as the rest of the world reels and prepares for the worst.

Left behind, as viewers know, was Xavier’s wife and the mother of his two children, Teri (Enuka Okuma). This episode fills in the gaps as to why she never made it to the bunker in an explosive scene between Sterling and Marsden that explains why their relationship remained shattered up until Cal’s murder in present day. There wasn’t enough warning, so Teri was left in Atlanta, and Xavier blamed Cal. The end of the episode brings viewers back to present day, as Sinatra (Nicholson) plays a recording for Xavier to hear: His wife is alive, as last episode revealed, but now the billionaire creator of the bunker has taken Xavier’s daughter (Aliyah Mastin) captive amid his rebellion. Sinatra needs Xavier to calm the chaos he instigated and find Cal’s killer, and then she will reunite him with the women in his life.

Brown spoke with THR about the episode — an acting tour de force from the star and executive producer on the series — on the day the show was renewed for a second season, perfectly setting up the chat below for what’s sure to be a twisty season finale that will launch further exploration ahead.

***

First of all, congrats on season two.

There will be a season two, I couldn’t be happier about that.

I spoke with Dan Fogelman at the start of the season. After This Is Us ended, you both were asked about a political spinoff for your character, Randall Pearson, because his storyline ended with White House aspirations. I asked Dan if that was the seed to Paradise, but he explained how long Paradise has actually been in the works. When you first got this pitch from Dan, did you think about Randall?

No, because he actually had a legitimate pitch for how that [Randall idea] could happen. He had this whole idea of, “Maybe me and [Aaron] Sorkin [West Wing creator] could get together and if they reboot The West Wing, find a way to put Randall in there and it goes from one to the other.” I was like, “That’s a big swing!” Dan takes nothing but big swings, so god bless his grandeur on the whole thing. But when he came with Paradise, I knew it had nothing to do with that original pitch because he’d actually given me the original pitch before.

Dan said he was nervous to pitch you because he didn’t know if you would want to go back into TV. But hours after he sent you the pitch, you were in. What made you jump at playing Xavier?

So full disclosure, he had pitched me on something right after This Is Us, which was really, really cool. It was a great concept. He comes to me with fantastic ideas. But I just finished doing six years of This Is Us and I wanted a little space to explore whatever opportunities could come up with film, theater or anything else. I just wanted to explore opportunities. He was like, “I completely understand, it’s all good.”

So a couple years go by, he hits me up saying, “I’ve been writing this thing and as I’m writing it, I realize I’ve been writing it with you in mind. Would you take a look at it? Let me know what you think.” I was like, “Of course I’ll take a look, I’ve read 108 of your scripts and they’re all pretty damn good, let me take a look at one more.” I read it and it was immediate. It was like: oh shit, this is the next project. To the point where you hit your managers and agents up and say, “Let’s pause on everything else, this is the thing that we’re going to do next.”

There was no reticence because I recognize Dan as a man of extraordinary talent who can write anything. The thing I first fell in love with [of his] was Crazy, Stupid Love. Then you realize he wrote Tangled, Cars and this show I used to watch on ABC called Galavant. This dude is really talented. And part of the pitch for Paradise was that it’s nothing like This Is Us. It was us knowing that we wouldn’t be trying to recreate the wheel, but would be trying to do something different that was as exciting as being in partnership with him again.

You are also an executive producer on Paradise. I understand Dan and the writers did an immense amount of research in terms of who they spoke with to plot out not only the creation of a new civilization, but also end-of-the-world global and nuclear fallout. How much of that process were you involved in?

The writers would invite people in to talk to them about end-of-the-world scenarios. I’m not in on that part of it, but I do come into the writers room and they fill me in on what they found out, how they want to create this world and all of that. I think the tsunami and the melting of the ice caps is presented in such a way where you say: Oh, shit, this doesn’t feel far-fetched. It doesn’t feel like The Day After Tomorrow; it feels like this is something that could happen. That makes for intriguing drama, but it also makes you ask, should we be doing more right now? Like, I don’t know if we’re doing enough to make sure our kids don’t get flooded!

Totally, it’s eerie. So are you building a bunker after all of this?

Fun fact: I actually have a bunker in my house. Because it’s a mid-century modern home, there’s a bunker underneath. We don’t go or use it very often, but it’s there, and that makes my wife very happy.

I’m always fascinated by the level of research that they do and that Dan does on any production. On This Is Us, he researched adoption and transracial adoption, brought in people when they were exploring Jack and Kevin’s exploration of dependency on things like alcoholism, and the importance of silk and Black women’s haircare for Beth’s hair. Dan is a nerd who sort of hides his nerdiness with his sense of humor and affableness. But when he commits to doing something, he knows what he knows, and he knows when he doesn’t know enough to bring in people who know more than he does so he gets it right.

I spoke with writer/executive producer John Hoberg about this episode. He said the White House scenes were filmed in several different places, so a challenge was keeping the energy up for its propulsive pace. Scenes were also filmed without as many cuts, so as to not chop up the minute-by-minute timeline. What was it like filming this episode?

Shit was dope! It’s the kind of thing you look forward to when you get into this business, when you are a young kid thinking about acting; high stakes, propulsive. It was fairly easy in that it was exciting. Anytime you are block shooting something — because we would shoot two episodes at a time —  you always have to remind yourself where you are in the script, where you are in the story, what came before, what comes after. But you get used to that after you do it for a certain period of time. And then when you realize this is seven, that penultimate joint. The same way they used to do it with Game of Thrones‘ penultimate episodes. It was like, “Oh, this is our opportunity to do that GOT shit?!” (Laughs) There was not anything that you had to twist my arm for. I know what the assignment is: LFG.

When things aren’t cut up so much and there’s an opportunity to follow the natural momentum of the scene and the writing is as good as it is, you get a chance to play it from beginning to end. There is a propulsion that naturally happens just by doing the scene. So all you have to do is trust that it will take you from one point to the other if you stay in the moment, from moment to moment to moment.

You have two scenes with Sinatra that are heartbreaking to watch. I asked Sarah Shahi, as your show’s resident therapist, to analyze the psychological toll on Xavier in these moments where his brain is digesting hearing that his wife is actually alive, and then hearing that Sinatra is now blackmailing him with his wife and daughter’s lives. You have a range of emotions across your face. Did you film these scenes with Sinatra as one scene?

Yes. Hanelle Culpepper, who directed episode six, and then John and Glen [also executive producers], who directed episodes seven and eight, all three directors were there at the same time to make sure you had the continuity going from episode six to episode seven, and then to the end of episode seven. It’s all really one scene.

Let me not forget to praise our big bad, Miss Julianne Nicholson, who is an absolute monster in this show. I mean “monster” as an actor, but also monster as in Xavier wants to shoot her. She’s so good at being bad, and it’s so much fun to play with her in these scenes. That probably was one of the most intense scenes of the show, on a physical level as well as an emotional level. Because even just holding a gun, your shoulder starts to get tired! Then, the character is in a place where, after three years of being a single father and trying to be on the precipice of making peace with his partner being gone, he’s now being introduced the possibility that she’s alive.

And I say “the possibility,” because I don’t trust anything this damn woman says. But I can hear [Xavier’s wife’s] voice. And now, if there’s a possibility that she is in this world, I have to explore whatever I have to in order to figure out if it’s true or not. And you have my daughter? Sis… I’m almost having a visceral reaction reliving it. Because it’s like, you take away my wife, and now my children? Xavier’s daughter is kind of like a surrogate. They have an interesting relationship. So now you talk about life or death situations and the stakes don’t get any higher for Xavier at this point.

What does Xavier look like in the finale? He puts his gun back in its holster, but up until that last second, it could have gone either way.

He looks like someone who has to save his child by any means necessary. He has to find the killer. That’s the mandate he’s been given by Sinatra. Now he knows she didn’t do it, because she’s as invested in knowing who did it as he is, so that’s a key piece of information. Up until that point, I was convinced she killed the president. Then he has to find out who killed the president in order to get his daughter back, which is of tantamount priority. And if he does all these things, then she can tell me where his wife is. He is a man on a mission.

Everybody is asking, “Do we find out who the killer is?” Yes. You will find out who killed the president. I can’t say anything else!

Dan said he doesn’t plan to torture audiences and that he will answer the big season one questions in the finale, and then raise new questions for season two. He has a three-season plan: “a slightly different show, within the same show with the same characters,” he said. Now that we know there can be exploration of the world above, what does season two look like?

I’ve known the plan from the beginning and I would tell people it reminded me of The Wire, because The Wire was a serialized drama that was also sort of an anthology. Each season could be a self-contained thing, but they all fit into a puzzle together. I’m very excited by the structure of the show. And, if we’re talking about a season three, there’s a possibility where these worlds collide, the world of Paradise plus the world outside and, what happens when these two things come in contact with one another?

We’re not going to lose everybody we have come to know from season one. Oftentimes, historically, the brother is the first to go. It’s nice to be changing things in that way. I’m happy to be around.

This show is very of the moment, even though it was created a long time ago. What do you think it’s tapping into right now?

I just think the joint is hella entertaining. I sit and watch it like an audience member and I’m like, “I’ll be damned, this thing slaps. It frickin’ slaps.” The zeitgeist being what it is, the political change that we’ve just gone through in in the country, the eerie coincidences of proximity of tech billionaires to the executive branch… those are all easy tangents to draw. It’s also strange in terms of the presence of global warming and the fires that just transpired in California.

It is cautionary in a way that says to the world: Are we doing enough to make sure that the world that we want to live in is the world that we’re actually living in? It’s got enough space that it’s not our world, but it’s a world that looks a whole hell of a lot like our world that allows us to ask these questions.

I guess there won’t be any more shower scenes between Xavier and Gabriela (Shahi). The finale sounds like it’s going to be intense. [Note: Brown and Shahi had a steamy shower that showed him naked from the back.]

No, no juicy scenes like that! I’m usually good for one full moon in a season and so I think our full-moon quota has been reached thus far. (Laughs)

***

Paradise is now streaming its first seven episodes on Hulu. The finale releases next week on Tuesday. Follow along with THR‘s show coverage and interviews.