From creator Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead) and showrunner Chris Black, the Cinemax suspense-horror series Outcast is back for a 10-episode second season that continues to explore the mystery of what lies beneath the supernatural manifestations in the town of Rome and why they are drawn to Kyle Barnes (Patrick Fugit). While Reverend Anderson (Philip Glenister) believes that they are in a holy war against the forces of evil, Kyle just wants to protect those he loves, as he learns just how much greater in scope this otherworldly threat truly is.

At a press day for the new season, Collider participated in a small roundtable interview with Robert Kirkman and Chris Black, who talked about the faster pace of Season 2, going bigger and scarier with the story, breaking new ground outside of the comics, their concern about the long break since Season 1 (the series debuted in May 2016), whether anyone on Outcast is safe from possession, what keeps driving Kyle as a character, the tremendous work Reg E. Cathey did on this series before his passing, and just how many seasons they could see telling this story for.

outcast-poster
Image via Cinemax

Collider:  What can you tease about the direction of the series, for Season 2?

ROBERT KIRKMAN:  Well, overall, it’s a little bit faster-paced. The characters have been built and the world has been established. There are not as many introductions to get to, although we are introducing some new characters. More than anything, I think we established the problem of demonic possession, in the first season, and what’s going on in West Virginia. In Season 2, we get deeper into just how widespread the threat is, how entrenched within the community it is, and just how many people are involved, which hopefully will be somewhat of a shock.

How much of what you wanted to do in Season 2 did you actually get to do in Season 2?

KIRKMAN:  All of it.

CHRIS BLACK:  I think so. I don’t feel like we left anything on the field.

KIRKMAN:  I wanted that giant gorilla in there, and you wouldn’t let me do it.

BLACK:  We can do that in Season 3. Well no, I don't know what the expectations really were from us, creatively, for the second season. For the first season, the template had really been set. We knew what the first dozen issues or so of the comic were, we knew what the set up was, and we knew the characters we needed to introduce. I won’t say it was easy, but we really knew what the parameters of that season were. For the second season, all we really knew was that it needs to get bigger and scarier. There wasn’t a sense of having to accomplish this, that and this, and, “Oh, we didn’t get to that.” To me, at least, everything was new. That was the fun of discovery, going into the writers’ room. By the end of the first season, we had caught up to where Robert was, in writing the comics. There was much more parity, so we felt like, in partnership with Robert, we were venturing more into uncharted waters, which was what was exciting about.

Did you step up the fear and scares for Season 2?

KIRKMAN:  I hope so! Part of the intent was to do a show that was actually scarier. As much as I love The Walking Dead, I feel like it’s more of a survival show. It’s more of an adventure thing. There are some great intense moments in Season 1, and I think we’ve got more of the same coming in Season 2, and possibly a little bit more.

BLACK:  It’s hard, sometimes, when you’re so inside of it. You’re there for the genesis of the stories and you know where they came from. You were there for the whole birthing process, and then through production. Sometimes you get wrapped up in the frustrations of producing a TV show, like how hard it is, how they don’t have the money to do something you wanted to do, or you’re just running hour to hour in the day. So, it’s refreshing when people see it, for the first time, and they go, “Wow, that was scary!,” ‘cause I forgot that it was supposed to be scary. We certainly hope so, but it’s up to [the audience] to let us know if we succeeded.

outcast-patrick-fugit-hoon-lee
Image via Cinemax

Because you’re so locked in when you’re making this show, what do you do to cleanse your palette and come back to it, and look at it through new eyes?

BLACK:  It’s very intense, the process of getting into it. Sitting down with the writers and dealing with all of the players, not only creatively, from a storytelling point of view, but collaborating with Robert, running things by the studio and the network, getting everyone on board and bringing the actors up to speed, and then just the mechanics of the production. It’s exhausting. It’s running a marathon. Just being able to take a break from it, at the end, is my palette cleanser.

KIRKMAN:  For me, everything evolves from getting the script, and then the actors do it a certain way, and then the director comes in, and then, in the edit, you’re doing different things. You’re almost experiencing different iterations of the story, every single time. You’re like, “Oh, this is new to me, how this is. I’d forgotten that. I didn’t expect the actor to say that. That shot is really not what I pictured. It’s way better.” That’s my side of things, sitting back and watching it come together and going, “Look at that! That’s neat!”

BLACK:  Sometimes you have your own set of expectations for what you want it to be, and then you’re disappointed ‘cause it wasn’t exactly what you had in your head, when it was first pitched, conceived, designed, planned and executed. Sometimes you see something, and all you can see is what it wasn’t. And then, someone who doesn’t know all of that stuff watches it and goes, “That was great!”

KIRKMAN:  Season 2 has a lot of different subplots and different side characters. There's a lot of new stuff with Kyle (Patrick Fugit) and with Megan (Wrenn Schmidt). We didn’t kill Mark (David Denman) in the comic book series. He was just handicapped. There’s a huge arc for Megan in the second season that’s completely original from the comics. There’s a lot of new ground broken, which is great. I love the fact that people can read the comic book series and get a general sense of what the world is, and they know Kyle Barnes, and they know what’s going on, but they get the same level of surprise from the comic, as they do from the show. You never really know what to expect, or what direction we’re gonna go in.

 

outcast-madeleine-mcgraw-callie-mcclincy
Image via Cinemax

There’s something like 500 shows on TV now. When you take a break between seasons, for as long as this break has been, do you worry about reminding people that you’re still out there?

KIRKMAN:  Oh, yeah, that’s definitely a concern. Because there are so many television shows, I think that we are also at a point where people are like, “Oh, yeah, I remember Outcast. Was that six months ago? Two months ago? One week ago?” I know that I have as much trouble getting back into a show, when the season comes back, because I’m like, “Wait what happened there?” It’s hard to keep track ‘cause everybody is watching so much television. I think that every show has an uphill battle to reacquaint themselves. It’s something that we deal with on The Walking Dead, every year. You have to get people back into the show, reacquaint them with what the characters are doing, and then hit the ground running, and I think we do that really well. I think that we’re telling great stories in the second season. Even if you haven’t watched the first season, you could come in and follow things along and enjoy the story, but efforts will be made to get everybody back up to speed.

BLACK:  It certainly was frustrating for us. We wanted people to be able to see the show, and there’s been such a delay in getting it back out there in front of everybody. Our hope is that the fans who did embrace the show, in the first season, will be eager to see it and ready to come back.

Do you take the longview on that? Someone might not watch Season 1 or Season 2, but then come to it, in five years, and be the biggest fan of the show. How do you approach that?

KIRKMAN:  It’s a lot more like comics, in that respect, in that there’s a certain audience for that monthly comic, but your comics are gonna get collected into books and those books are gonna sit on book shelves where people can go into a book store, 15 years from now, and go, “Oh, there’s this whole array of books that I can start reading.” They’re not gonna know that there was a delay in this issue, or that issue, or that this thing happened. When it’s all said and done, Outcast will be a number of seasons that someone can stream on some kind of an outlet. This will be living on MaxGo, for years to come, and people can come in and enjoy the show.

BLACK:  The first season is still on iTunes. It’s nice. It’s a comfort to know that it’ll always be there for people to discover it. It doesn’t really help us, in terms of keeping it alive, from season to season, if someone comes to it, 10 years from now, but it’s the new reality of the business.

KIRKMAN:  Yeah, and networks are even looking at it that way. It’s not necessarily a ratings game, as it is a building content game and stocking those digital shelves for those people that will be there, 15 years from now. They’re looking at the bigger picture much more, in that respect, which gives creators a lot of leeway, as far as building an audience and getting ratings, and things like that. If you pay attention to just how low the ratings are on some cable series, it’s staggering. You’re like, “Oh, my god, I can’t believe that show is going.” Well, that’s because that’s not what the business is anymore. The business has evolved.

outcast-patrick-fugit-wrenn-schmidt
Image via Cinemax

That must be more creatively pleasing, as creators.

BLACK:  Yeah. Any show can find its niche. That’s the great thing about 500 shows on television. It didn’t used to be that way. You could have a show that got 30 million viewers and it would get canceled because it was the third place show out of three networks. Now, it can survive with a cable network or streaming.

KIRKMAN:  And it’s not that the audiences are as small as the ratings would sometimes indicate. It’s just that the ratings don’t capture what the overall audience is, in this fractured television viewing space that we all live in. No one knows what show I’m watching on my phone.

Is anyone safe from possession, on this show?

KIRKMAN:  That would be spoiling things, a little bit. No, not really. Maybe. We’ll see. Pay attention.

BLACK:  I would say no. I think that’s also part of the new creative landscape thing. I take it back to when they killed Sean Bean’s character on Game of Thrones. That was such a game-changer, in the way that you could write television. The Walking Dead was the same way. Suddenly, no one was safe anymore and it just liberated you, as a writer. I had worked on a lot of network television shows, prior to that, where you had this really rigid set of rules, that your heroes needed to be treated in a certain way and there were certain things that you couldn’t do. Suddenly, the handcuffs were off. You could do anything you wanted. You could kill number one on the call sheet. I would say that we’ve embraced that, on our show. We’ve created a world with a very real supernatural menace to it. And going into the second season, that will be expanded and deepened, and we hope that increases the stakes in it. The reality is that, the more you care about these characters, and the more you’re drawn into them, personally, and there’s the realization that none of them are safe. We have a couple of big moments, coming up in the second season, that illustrate that.

outcast-robert-kirkman-patrick-fugit-adam-wingard
Image via Cinemax

Robert, what’s it been like for you to go from creating a comic like The Walking Dead, to then having a hand in the TV show and see the effect that it’s had on television, but then also see it brought to life through mazes and rides?

KIRKMAN:  It’s bizarre! I don’t really have a frame of reference with which to use to describe it. It’s weird. It’s almost like you did a puppet show when you were a kid, and then you went to work one day and the puppet was being played by Andrew Lincoln and you’re like, “That’s strange! That’s that dumb puppet I played with, as a kid, and this guy is walking around pretending to be him. I’m talking to him and I’m in his world, but it’s fake, and I’m standing in it, but I remember it, from when I was a kid.” I don’t know. It’s weird. It never becomes normal to me. It’s been a great experience, obviously, and it’s changed my life, in really positive ways. There are really no negatives to speak of. I really love it and value it because I think it’s making me a better writer. Seeing how actors deal with dialogue, and seeing how different the mediums are and what the mediums need from a writer, is improving me, which I needed. In that respect, I love the process, but it’s never gonna be normal. Every time they do a new big set on The Walking Dead, I walk in and I’m like, “All right, this is really weird. I don’t know what to say about this.”

BLACK:  It’s surreal. I don’t work on The Walking Dead, which is this phenomenal, amazing hit that’s a cultural phenomenon, in its own way. At anytime you walk on a set, there are hundreds of people standing around who are spending millions of dollars to do something with the idea that you thought up in a room full of people and that you thought was funny. It’s a responsibility that you take seriously.

KIRKMAN:  Oh, for sure, yeah!

BLACK:  People at home who watch it, invest in it. They invest in those characters, and you have to have respect for that.

KIRKMAN:  Yeah, on Season 2 of Outcast, I actually took my dad to set one time. I didn’t want to work while I was on set, so I brought my dad with me and said, “Well I gotta go with my dad, sorry don’t expect me to do anything."

BLACK:  It’s okay, we never did. The hard work is the writing of the story. When that’s done and it goes to production, you get to go and watch them pull out all the big toys. That’s the reward. That’s the pay off for all of it.

outcast-philip-glenister-02
Image via Cinemax

A lot of this show relies on the performance of the actors, especially for the possession. Chris, what’s it like to work with the actors, in those moments, and get those performances?

BLACK:  It’s a blast. We’re so lucky to have the cast of actors that we have. They’re all so great. They’re not only incredibly talented and good at that stuff, but they’re fun to be around, and fun to be on set with, hang out with and work with because they’re so engaged in the process. One thing that I found, as one of the writers on the show, going into the second season, is that we had gotten to a place of trust with the actors, where we knew what they could do, so going into the second season, we found that we could push it further and further, particularly with the younger actors. When we started out, we talked about the kids in the show, who were 7-, 8- and 9-year-old kids. You bring them on set and expose them to this intense stuff, and you’re like, “How are they gonna be able to handle this? Is this gonna be traumatizing? Are they gonna be able to convey it, dramatically, to an audience, so that it seems realistic?” And then, once you start to see them doing it, and their confidence and enthusiasm grows, and they’re having fun, you’re like, “Okay, we can give them more. We can push this further. We can put more on them.” Particularly in the second season, you’ll see the relationship between Kyle and his daughter really grows and she becomes a much bigger character, partly because that was the nature of the story we were telling, but also partly because we found out that Maddy McGraw could do it. And it was like, she was so good, just give her more stuff.

Kyle gets attacked and beaten up a lot. What drives him to keep getting up and dealing with this?

KIRKMAN:  There’s a lot resting on his shoulders. He knows that he’s the linchpin of this thing. He knows that everything is after him for a reason, and that that’s the reason that he is getting beat up so much and has this unrelenting pressure on him. He’s needed. He’s answering the call. There’s something heroic about that. You watch that, as a viewer, and you’re like, “I don’t know how I would deal with that.” The fact that he’s able to do that makes him somewhat aspirational and shows that he is not just this sullen, depressed, argumentative guy. He actually has a heart to him. There’s something good about that character that hopefully makes you wanna watch the show.

BLACK:   And it evolves. The show, the storytelling and the characters evolve. Kyle started out as a relatively selfish character. He’s not in this to save the world. He’s not in this to save other people from being possessed. He wants his family back. He wants his wife back. He wants his kid back. That’s what drives him. And as he moves through the story and discovers that this problem is bigger and that it’s effecting more people, in more dramatic ways than he ever imagined, he goes from being a selfish character to ultimately a selfless character who’s into something that he’s not doing for himself anymore. He’s doing it because it’s serving a higher purpose. That goes to the bigger arc of the show.

outcast-patrick-fugit-reg-e-cathey
Image via Cinemax

Reg E. Cathey has done some terrific work on this show. Now that we’ve lost him, what can you say about what it was like working with him and what you think he brings to the show, especially this season?

BLACK:  Reg was the best. It was devastating for us, and it happened so quickly, from his diagnosis to his passing. On a personal level, he was just a delight and an absolute pro. He was funny, smart, sweet, and just one of the nicest people that you’d ever wanna spend time on a set with. We all feel his loss, acutely. Just his skill as an actor, he brought that character to life in a way that made Chief Giles his own.

KIRKMAN:  Yeah, much like the way Carol or Daryl in The Walking Dead are brought up because those actors have been able to grow and evolve those characters into much bigger characters than we ever intended, that happened with Chief Giles. Reg’s portrayal of that character made us want to write more story for that character. It made him an integral part of the show. And on set, he was a great leader to the other actors and really just a joy to be around. No one had a bad word to say about him, ever. It’s a really tragic loss.

Chief Giles is such an interesting character because it feels like you never quite know exactly what he’s up to, how he’ll react, or what he knows.

BLACK:  In the first season, that enigmatic nature of him was very key to who he was. He’s an authority figure in town. How is he approaching this? Does he believe it? Does he not believe? He clearly has a relationship with the Reverend, but how invested is he in the supernatural component of the show? In the second season, he becomes much more pulled into that, and is a much bigger player in what Kyle and Reverend Anderson are doing. He becomes part of it. In the first season, [Patrick Fugit and Philip Glenister] were co-leads. It was really Kyle and Rev’s show. In the second season, it really is the three of them [with Reg E. Cathey].

How long do you envision the Outcast comic and the show running for?

KIRKMAN:  They’re finite. They were designed to be a contained story. I knew where Outcast was going and what the final scene was, for the most part, from minute one. I think it’s possibly a five-season show, something like Breaking Bad, with a really tight beginning, middle, and end. The comic book series, I’m not gonna say. But we’ll be revealing, at some point, what’s going on with how long that is gonna be.

Outcast returns for Season 2 on Cinemax on July 20.

outcast-philip-glenister-01
Image via Cinemax
outcast-reg-e-cathey-charmin-lee
Image via Cinemax
outcast-patrick-fugit-philip-glenister
Image via Cinemax