‘From’ Star Harold Perrineau Unpacks That Devastating Season 3 Premiere

Be aware, there are spoilers for “From” Season 3, Episode 1 below.

The wait for more “From” is over, and after the twists and turns of the Season 2 finale, the Season 3 premiere kicks off with a heartbreaking, harrowing turn of events right out of the gate.

With their crops rotting in the ground, the citizens of “From’s” nameless nightmare town start to panic as the livestock becomes more essential to their survival than ever. So, when the livestock is let loose at night with monsters on the prowl, Boyd (Harold Perrineau), Victor (Scott McCord), Jade (David Alpay) and Tian-Chen (Elizabeth Moy) rush out to rescue them. And they almost all make it back to safety.

Jade and Victor make it to the bar, but Boyd and Tian-Chen take shelter in the barn, quickly hanging a sigil and taking a sigh of relief — before they realize the monsters are already inside, with soul-crushing plans for Boyd. Calling back to Boyd’s Season 2 finale declaration, a monster goads him, “You said this place couldn’t break you,” while handcuffing him to a post. “We’re not going to kill you,” the monster says as they drag the diner matriarch across the barn. “That would be too easy.” Then, they get to work on sweet Tian-Chen, ripping the poor woman apart in front of Boyd’s eyes.

It’s a traumatic moment for Boyd and was, unsurprisingly, a “really sucky night” of filming, according to Perrineau, who spoke with TheWrap ahead of the Season 3 premiere. The actor explains how Tian-Chen’s tragic death gives Boyd new insight into the monsters, how he taps into Boyd’s extraordinary empathy and why you should never work with cows.

I loved watching these first few episodes and I’ve got to tell you, I think you guys hit a new high point this season. When you read the scripts and got to work on Season 3, did it feel like things were clicking the same way I’m seeing on screen?

It really did. You know, we are at that point where we’re on the roller coaster, where it’s just like, “Oh snap!” You’ve been anticipating stuff, and it is just now starting to happen. It’s not going downhill yet. We are still ramping, I mean, ramping up where it’s so scary now, you’re like, “I don’t know if I want to go down the other side. This is terrifying.” But yeah, I think that it did feel like that.

And the added bonus, or torture part for us, is that we had to wait for the strike to end, so that we started shooting in the winter and it makes the town look really, really, really dark and scary. But it really sucked. It sucked, terrible! [Laughs] And I was like, “Yeah, this is going to be really good, because I hate every minute being here.”

Had you guys started filming already and then had to pause due to the strike? Or was it delayed outright?

We hadn’t. We got picked up. We had a date to start. And then the strike happened, so we didn’t get in anywhere. We started right before Christmas in Halifax, in the dead of winter, like it was not a joke. We were cold. The first week I got frostbite on my ears because I was doing this thing where I was like, “Well, I mean, I don’t want to mess up my hair. We work so hard, so I won’t wear the earmuff, so just wear the jacket.” And so, like, I just kept going. I would take my jacket off, we do the thing, and I put my jacket back on. And by the end of the first week, it was like, “Oh, yeah, frostbite, got it.”

Let’s talk about the end of the premiere. Harold, I cried. It got like, a “Game of Thrones”-level reaction out of me. That only works because of your performance. It’s the consistency of Boyd’s character, and it’s what we see on your face that we, wisely I think, don’t see on the screen. What can you tell me about the practicals of filming that scene and getting that performance right? Especially now that I know you were probably freezing.

So look, Jack Bender and Jeff [Pinkner] talked to me about what they are going to film, so I had an understanding of what I would be seeing in real time. But that being said, it’s hard to imagine that stuff in real life, so you have to find other real-life, personal horrors to focus on.

That was a really sucky night, not only because it was cold, because I voluntarily put the worst things I could think of in my brain, and then played them out while the camera was watching, so that hopefully you guys, myself, everyone would feel like, “Oh, my God, what’s happening. This is terrible.” And that you would “Game of Thrones”-level cry [Laughs].

How long did it take to film that particular sequence?

That took a few days to do. It took a few days with those animals. First off, if anybody says, “Hey, we should do a scene with a cow” to you, just say, “No, thank you. No, thanks. I’m good.” They’re like… it’s so hard. It’s a cow, it doesn’t know you’re filming, doesn’t care. You can’t move it. You can’t make it do what you want because you said action, now it’s going to go. So it took us a couple of nights. We had all the stuff with the animals, and then we had all the stuff with the monsters.

And so just that last part with her, that took a couple of hours, because we just kept tweaking. “What about this?” And even though you only have a couple of seconds there, if you ever see any deleted stuff, we have a lot they could have done, a lot of different things that we played with that night.

It’s also a really illuminating moment from a character perspective. Boyd doubts himself, but he’s that guy who’s going to show up. He shows up for Tian-Chen even though there’s not much he can do for her. But he’s with her, he doesn’t look away, he speaks kindness to her and he clings to her final words even though he doesn’t understand. What do you think motivates that element in Boyd, especially in these really heightened moments when other’s might crumble?

OK, so me putting together the character, right? If you imagine a guy who’s been in war, he tells a story in Season 2 about a kid who he saw, you know, get blown up from an IED, right? But if you imagine a person who’s been through that, they understand the horrors of death, they understand the horrors of the moments before death, and there’s a kind of compassion and a kind of like, “So that you are not alone I will do whatever I can so you are not alone. And whatever you need, I will do that with my life. They’re trying to torture me. They won’t, because I’m going to doggedly be here with you.”

I think that that’s what Boyd has. I think he’s seen it enough, not in this way, but he’s seen enough of it to understand the kind of empathy, compassion that he has to have for someone who’s going through this tragic, tragic, final moment in their life. So that’s how I imagine that’s how he’s able to do that.

Something else we learn from that scene is that Boyd’s actions in the Season 2 finale riled this place. He’s made himself Public Enemy No. 1 to the monsters and they’re going to take even more pleasure in his pain. How does that knowledge influence his actions from here on?

I think it gives him insight into their mindset, right? Because at the end of the day, they realize that he’s a guy who could be dangerous for them, right? He killed Smiley. He might figure something else out. And instead of killing him and getting rid of him, they are playing with him. And so it gives him a kind of insight.

It’s not good. It’s not like, like, “Oh, you’re really great at this,” but that insight can be helpful. That insight into like, oh, that’s why they don’t run, because they feel like they’ve won already. That’s why they’re not chasing anybody. That’s why they’re laughing and knocking doors, because they feel already like they’ve won. That could be helpful. Do you know what I mean? When you’re dealing with somebody like, Oh, you think you have this, I might find someplace else to exploit. And I think that that’s what Boyd is trying to work out.

“From” Season 3 airs Sundays on MGM+. The first two seasons are also available to stream on Prime Video.