[Editor’s note: The following contains some spoilers for Evil.]

The Big Picture

‘Evil’ Season 4 explores dark and unsettling cases with strong supernatural and scientific elements.
The characters face challenging personal and professional situations, adding depth and intrigue to the show.
The final bonus episodes offer closure while leaving room for potential future continuation, making it hard for the cast to say goodbye.

From creators Robert and Michelle King, the fourth and final season of the Paramount+ series Evil is as creepy, unsettling, and deliciously naughty as ever. Kristen (Katja Herbers), David (Mike Colter) and Ben (Aasif Mandvi) continue to assess cases that could trace back to the origins of evil and either be something truly supernatural or something that has a clear explanation rooted in science or religion. Now, on top of everything else, Leland (Michael Emerson) is trying to get Kristen to raise the baby he’s hoping will become the Antichrist, the Vatican wants more from David, and Ben isn’t sure what’s real anymore.

Over the course of its run, Evil has consistently been one of the best shows on TV. It pushes boundaries with the dark and demonic, embraces differences in viewpoints when it comes to religion, and always manages to still keep its humor. At its core, it is a procedural, but it’s one with enough twists, scares, and surprises that you can never get enough of, which is why it’s so sad that Season 4 (and its additional bonus episodes) will be its last. Please somebody pickup this show!

During this interview with Collider, co-stars Herbers, Colter and Mandvi talked about the biggest challenges their characters are facing this season, the similarities between Malcolm X’s relationship with the Nation of Islam and David’s journey with the Catholic Church, Kristen’s family drama, Ben’s emotional spiral, Kristen and David’s evolving dynamic, why the final bonus episodes of the series shouldn’t be the end, and their hope that maybe they can still find a way to continue telling this story.

Evil “Evil,” the 2019 TV series from creators Robert and Michelle King, is a gripping exploration of the intersection between science and the supernatural. The series stars Katja Herbers as Dr. Kristen Bouchard, a forensic psychologist drawn into a world of dark mysteries and unexplained phenomena. Alongside priest-in-training David Acosta (Mike Colter) and tech expert Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi), Kristen is tasked with investigating a series of bizarre cases for the Catholic Church, including demonic possessions, hauntings, and miracles.Release Date September 26, 2019 Cast Mike Colter , Brooklyn Shuck , Katja Herbers , Dalya Knapp , Marti Matulis , Maddy Crocco , Kurt Fuller , Michael Emerson , Skylar Gray , Aasif Mandvi , Christine Lahti Seasons 4 Creator(s) Michelle King , Robert King Network CBS , Paramount

‘Evil’s Core Trio Have Their Fair Share of Challenges in Season 4
Image via Paramount+

Collider: Your characters seem to be in this constant competition of who’s dealing with the weirdest and worst thing. What would you consider to be the most challenging thing each of your characters is facing this season and how well do you feel like they handle it?

AASIF MANDVI: I don’t think any of us handle it particularly well. That’s what makes it interesting. We’re all trying to handle things. I think if we handled it really well then there wouldn’t be a show.

KATJA HERBERS: The toughest thing Kristen is dealing with is this baby that she has with Leland, and I do think she ends up handling it as well as she can. It’s a crazy thing to have a baby by a rapist, I guess, in another person’s body. And then, for that person to say that I have to take care of this baby now, that’s probably the craziest thing for Kristen.

MANDVI: The craziest thing for Ben is that he’s got this medical condition that is now challenging his empiricism and his certainty about science, and he’s having these visitations from this djinn, and he can’t explain it. He gets to that point where his scientific knowledge and expertise enters that place where he just cannot explain what’s happening, and it’s happening to him physically as opposed to externally. That’s a very scary thing when something happens to you and there’s no explanation for it. No one can explain it and you end up having a paranormal experience, so he starts to lose his mind a little bit.

MIKE COLTER: It’s crossed my mind probably a few times in the first season, but it’s more so now. I’ve followed Malcolm X’s journey for a long time. I started reading about him a long time ago, and David reminds me of Malcolm X, in the sense of the Nation of Islam. When you think about David, David doesn’t trust the church anymore, so he becomes a person who is, in his eyes, fundamentally more devout and good than the people he is trusting to guide him and lead him. Once that doubt is there and that weakens his foundation, he doesn’t know what to do with it. People probably don’t follow this, but that was the case for Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, where he left and created his own organization. He traveled and found more knowledge that was available to him, after listening to everything that the Nation of Islam said.

And I think David feels like that about the Catholic Church. He feels like there’s something that they have, that they wanna do for him and that’s in a direction they want. Everything is about what they want and it’s not necessarily for the good of mankind or for the good of the church. He has questions and he doubts all the people that he used to look to for answers. That’s where he is. He’s still here, believing what he’s supposed to be doing and the good of it all, but also doubting it and trying to figure out how to do both. How do we continue the journey when fundamentally he doesn’t trust the people that he’s supposed to be working for, that used to be people he really believed in? That’s the hard part. There was the Allah of it all for Malcolm X, and there’s the God of it all for David. He’s really a man of God, but there are people he’s supposed to serve on planet Earth.

MANDVI: An interesting thing that our show often deals with is the criticism of systems and the criticism of infrastructure. There was that one storyline where we saw a saint, and the saint happened to be a Black woman. Systems are infused with racism and injustice and sexism, and the show handles that really deftly, quite often more than a lot of shows of this genre.

COLTER: Without really beating you over the head and being too heavy-handed, we just touch on it.

MANDVI: We’re also hilarious.

Related ‘Evil’ Season 4 Review: Everything Good Horror TV Should Be ‘Evil’ Season 4 premieres May 23 on Paramount+ in the U.S.

Are you ever surprised that this show still manages to keep its sense of humor, with all of that going on?

HERBERS: That’s the power of our show and the power of the writing and the casting. We have a lot of fun making it and that translates onto the screen.

MANDVI: There’s a lot of fun infused in the show. Robert [King], especially, is very interested in the show being fun. The most interesting choice is often the one that’s the most fun, so we’ll often go in that direction.

Katja, Season 4 is an interesting one for Kristen. She’s personally going through so much emotionally, between being partially responsible for the birth of the supposed Antichrist and whatever is happening with her husband. What was that like to explore and to really put her through so much emotionally?

HERBERS: I don’t think she thinks it’s the Antichrist, let me just put that up front. I don’t think she believes in an Antichrist. I think she thinks the whole thing is just so absurd that she goes to a place of, “It can’t get any crazier. I’ve already gone through so much, and now I have zero fucks left to give.” How I approached it was that she says she’s fine, but obviously you cannot be fine with that much going on and with having killed someone and having to be a single parent over these four kids. She throws herself in her work and that’s really gratifying to her, but at the same time, some of these cases are terrifying and add to her scaredness. I like all the extremes of emotions that she goes through. People who go through a lot become more resilient and are stronger people than people who have not had trauma. Kristen has had a lot of trauma and is, therefore, quite strong. She has a good head on her shoulders. I like her a lot.

Aasif, what did you most enjoy about Ben’s spiral this season?

MANDVI: Ben is being confronted with something that he can’t explain. He’s going through a medical trauma and he’s experiencing all this stuff, and it’s overlapping with the paranormal. In terms of his own empiricism and his own sense of certainty about things, that completely gets challenged and he actually starts to have a little bit of a breakdown because he can’t explain the things that he should be able to explain. He gets cornered by what’s happening to him. That’s the journey that he goes on this season. I don’t want to give away the ending, but it does resolve itself in a way for him that you might expect, but then is also a surprise.

When it Comes to Kristen, David Is Just Trying To Keep His Priesthood Alive
Image via Paramount+

Mike, there’s been quite the journey between Kristen and David this season, and really in the series in general. How is David dealing with all of that, after everything that happened last season?

COLTER: The tension at work for David is there, but I think he put it on himself. I’m always trying to figure this out because I had to make sense of it. He knows he’s attracted to Kristen, and yet still he hired her, but he also knows she’s very qualified to help them do what they do. He’s not crazy, but at the same time, he’s playing with fire. He put himself in a situation and assumed that he would figure a way out of it, or that he would just learn to manage it, but he definitely likes this thing that he’s in. It doesn’t make any sense, but I’ve heard of crazier things in life. He just puts it in a place. We’ve seen Demon Kristen. They’ve had a moment in real life that they were going with. They’ve put it out in the open said, “Hey, this is what it is. We have feelings.” Her husband has accused him of them sleeping together, and he’s like, “No, that’s not happening.” We are adults just trying to coexist with sexual tension, and that happens all the time. I think that’s interesting and he’s doing a good job with it, trying to keep his priesthood alive.

Related ‘Evil’ Creators Robert & Michelle King on Why Bonus Episodes Were Needed To Complete the Series The Kings also talk about the fun of forcing Leland to help raise the possible future Antichrist and whether nature vs. nurture still comes into play.

We know that there are four bonus episodes before the series is over. While that’s better than having things abruptly end, personally I’d prefer to have more full seasons of the series. How do you feel about the way the four episodes wrap things up for your characters? Do you feel like they have more of a sense of closure than you would have had if you just left things at the end of Season 4?

HERBERS: I think so. We do have some sense of closure while at the same time leaving an opening for, potentially, another streamer that might want to continue our show. They’re very good and very exciting episodes.

MANDVI: They’re really jam-packed. There’s a lot of stuff. We don’t wrap up everything in a nice, neat bow because that’s not the DNA of our show. There are things that will always be unexplainable. But there’s enough resolution that audiences will feel a chapter of the show closes with the potential of a new chapter existing if it did, or if the show ends there, that’s the end of that.

The ‘Evil’ Cast Would Still Like To Do Another Season

Obviously, you know that every acting job will end after the length of a movie, however many seasons of a TV show, or the run of a play, but some are harder to leave behind. Is this one that will be harder to leave behind, with these characters and this world?

HERBERS: Yeah. We know that Robert and Michelle King wanted to make more and that there was more story to tell, so it feels really painful.

COLTER: If they didn’t have a place to take it, I’d be like, “Okay, sure, that’s fine.”

HERBERS: It would be different if they finished what they wanted to say with the show, but they didn’t, at all, have that feeling. That’s when it really hurts. We’re really great friends in real life and we have really great time making the show. It feels like a death, to be honest. But it feels more like a coma where there is still a chance that someone will have an injection and we’ll be like, “Oh, here we are again.” I’m a little in denial still.

MANDVI: The feeling is that, if we got to make more, we would be so happy and excited. But also, there’s a sense of real gratitude that we got to make this show.

HERBERS: Absolutely, that we got to make it, at all, and that it has been this good.

MANDVI: People should just write in and say they want more episodes and seasons of the show.

COLTER: Otherwise we’ll do a podcast, and we don’t want that. There are enough podcasts. I don’t want it. But if you don’t pick the show up, we’re gonna make a podcast, I swear to God. It’s gonna be ongoing and we’re gonna keep talking. We’re gonna comment on everything from the shoelaces of the President to riding bikes to politics. It’s gonna get disgusting and be so annoying. So, don’t make us start a podcast.

Related One of the Best-Rated, Most-Watched Shows on TV Got Cancelled — What Happened? What’s happened to this show is, well, evil.

Evil is available to stream on Paramount+. Check out the Season 4 trailer:

Watch on Paramount+