JUL-2019
P.2/2
17:15 From: CIA To: +91 22 2537 5343
PREACHER
Wanted: FeatherstoneWWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK |^053
“SEASON FOUR FEATHERSTONE IS DEFINITELY MY
FAVOURITE FEATHERSTONE,” says Julie Ann Emery of
her ever-changing Preacher villain. From sultry singer to
abused wife to brash tourist, all via the deadpan, fanatical
Featherstone herself, Emery has clearly had a hell of a lot of
fun with the character.
“[Featherstone] surprised me in really delightful ways this
season. The character really gets rounded out in Season Four
and I’m pretty thrilled about that,” Emery adds. “There’s
defi nite confl ict for Featherstone in Season Four, but she’s
also having a good time, at times. And that’s new for her.
Featherstone defi nitely rides a good wave for a little while.”
Emery confi rms that the move to shooting in Australia was
so that they had access to plenty of desert locations, which
was ideal for bringing The Grail’s headquarters, Masada –
glimpsed in the Season Three fi nale – to life. “We get a lot of
action from The Grail this season,” Emery says happily. For
Emery, working in Australia has been a career-long dream.
“I’ve said since I graduated from theatre school that some
day somebody was going to pay me to come to Australia and
Preacher did! It’s been wonderful.”
When we speak to Emery – just as we’re going to bed and
she’s waking up, courtesy of the time difference –
has only ten days of fi Preacher^
lming left to go before wrapping. “We’re
shooting the fi nale right now and everyone’s getting really sad
on set,” Emery says. “We’ve been part of each other’s lives for
a long time now,” she adds, pointing out that the international
cast will be scattered across the globe when fi
so the cast are making the most of their last days as a unit. lming ends,
“There’s not a day when people aren’t knocking on each
other’s trailer doors and sitting on steps to chat. I’m going to
miss everybody,” Emery says.
She already began the process of saying goodbye at the end
of Season Three when her Grail partner Hoover, played by
Malcolm Barrett, met a fi ery death. “That was really hard,”
she admits. “That was the very last scene that we shot of
Season Three, on the very last day of shooting, and I found
it really hard and really upsetting and really diffi
couldn’t imagine any of The Grail happening without him... cult and I
Malcolm’s a fantastic actor and can make absolutely anything
funny, and we played very well off of each other. I feel very
lucky to have developed Featherstone with him as Hoover.”
But while saying goodbye to the rest of the cast is hard,
saying goodbye to her character might be even harder. “I
don’t know how I’m going to walk away from Featherstone,”
she admits. “I’m starting to get scripts for what’s next and
nothing is ever going to live up to Featherstone... in a lot of
ways it’s like playing six roles in one, there’s always a new
persona cropping up, a new character to develop through
Featherstone’s eyes. I don’t know how I’m ever going to follow
her up in a satisfying creative way.”
She tells us that she’s been proud to see pictures of people
cosplaying as Featherstone, often with the broken nose that
she sported for the entirety of Season Three. “I had one scene
at the very, very end of the season where I did not have the
nose!” she laughs. “It was such a humiliation for such a proud
woman, such a visual humiliation of what she sees as her one
shortcoming, which is that she couldn’t beat Tulip.”
Working with The Grail characters has always proven to
be a highlight on the show for her, especially as the cast
and crew developed the very specifi c humour of
Preacher.“The comedy in The Grail is defi nitely a function of these
characters being completely, purely, true to who they are, and
just putting them in a situation together. Sometimes when
we’re shooting, things wind up funny that no-one anticipated,
just because if we all fully commit to our characters then the
scene fi nds its way, both comedically and dramatically, and I
feel really lucky to be on a show like that.”
She tells us that Preacher is not the sort of show where you
can get away with phoning in a performance. The anarchic
tone might look chaotic and freewheeling on screen but it’s
actually very fi nely crafted on set by a team of actors that
Emery can’t praise highly enough. “It’s a very exciting show
to do, to work with Ruth Negga, to work with Pip Torrens,
to work with Joe [Gilgun], Dom [Cooper] – there’s not an
actor on our show who doesn’t elevate the material. You can
never lay back as an actor on Preacher. You have to be fully
prepped up and ready to go when you show up on set because
your scene partners are going to make it fl
y, so you’ve got to
step up.” Emery thinks that that’s the secret to the success
of Preacher’s weird tone: “No matter how outrageous the
situation, the characters are grounded in their own truth and
we have a very high-end cast.”
Emery tells us that she was sad for the show to come to an
end, but relieved that it gets to have an end at all, given that
everyone expected it to be cancelled at any moment due to
its somewhat blasphemous (read: shockingly blasphemous)
content. “It’s always been a question mark for us because
our show, by its very design, pushes the boundaries in every
possible direction. So I think for a show like
proper ending is pretty extraordinary – and we defiPreacher to get a
proper ending.” And Emery assures us that it’s an ending that nitely get a
won’t disappoint: “We go out with a bang. It’s a big bloody
glorious end, for sure.”
Preacher Season Four begins on Prime Video on 9 August.