‘Twisted Metal’ Stars Talk Raven’s Surprise for John, Quiet’s Backstory & More
Spoiler Alert
[These interviews were conducted prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike authorization.]
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for all of Twisted Metal Season 1.]
For John Doe (Anthony Mackie), his Twisted Metal Season 1 journey was supposed to lead to the life he always wanted. Unsurprisingly (just look at the first part of the show’s title), he was in for a surprise in the finale.
After delivering the mysterious package Raven (Neve Campbell) requested (ice cream), John not only was brought to the house in which he grew up(!) but was then informed that she wanted him to be her driver in a major tournament. Whatever his feelings about participating, he definitely feels like he can win it. “If you ask him, he’s the best driver there is. So the idea of being in a competition, there’s no way he could lose,” Mackie told TV Insider.
But before that, he tried to bring Quiet (Stephanie Beatriz), with whom he’d found a home, into New San Francisco with him, only for Raven to refuse. “By the end of the season, he loves Quiet,” Mackie said. “They’ve gone through so much that they’ve developed a rapport, they’ve developed a relationship, and it’s something that he’s never had before, just simply because he’s such a charismatic, open vessel that when he allows her in, it just seems natural and easy.”
At one point, it’s said that he would never choose her over his car, which is destroyed. But if his car was still around, who would he pick at the end of the season? “I don’t know,” Mackie admitted with a laugh. “I think there’s a relationship faux pas there. If it came down to and he had to sacrifice Quiet for Evelyn, I think he would do it.”
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On Quiet’s side, Beatriz isn’t sure how her character feels about John, whom she forces to let her go so he can have the life he wanted (or so he thought he would) in New San Francisco. Rather, she’s focused on what she sees as her new purpose. “In the beginning of the season, the goal was very clear. It’s revenge or bust,” Beatriz explained. “After she meets John, things start to shift and change, and she starts to maybe realize that there’s more. They’ve got a very limited life, but maybe there’s more to their limited life. And at the very end of the season, you see her take on the sort of bigger societal, structural revenge thing that might be happening.” (She’s taking from those inside walls and given to the people stuck on the outside.)
That comes after the fantastic Episode 6, in which Quiet’s backstory was revealed; she’d taken on a contract in domestic work for the dream presented when her years were up. “There was something really striking about those scenes when reading the scripts,” Beatriz shared. (She read all 10 for the season in one day.) What stood out to her about Episode 6 was “this idea of who controls power in this post-apocalyptic world? Who has power? Who has access? How do they get it? How do they keep it? It’s like a metaphor for our own world right now.”
Beatriz especially loved working with Richard Cabral, who played Quiet’s brother Loud. “He’s just a phenomenal actor. He’s a very, very giving scene partner,” she raved. “I felt a bond with him immediately. He’s so open about who he is and his past and his life. … You see vulnerabilities from both of us that we are maybe pulling from our own lives. When I think about acting, a lot of times, I think about being an open channel to somebody else’s story. If I remain open to the possibility that this person is real, then I can pull from my own life and use the feelings that I’ve had that everybody alive has ever had — the feelings of loss, grief, falling in love, laughing, joy, all of that stuff that’s just, like, human. It was really easy to do with Richard alongside me. He’s such an open channel as an actor that I just trusted him.”
Quiet does lose Loud, to Agent Stone (Thomas Haden Church) and his form of the law, in the first episode of the season. (Stone said they could resist and he’d kill them both, or one could take his or her own life as punishment; Loud picked up the gun.) Then, in the finale, she confronts Stone and leaves it up to him how he dies; he turns the gun on himself.
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Church does think that moment results in his character gaining respect for Quiet. “I think he considers her to be a worthy adversary, given where their story starts and that she manages to navigate the landscape to their final confrontation,” he said. “I think he considers her to be inferior because she’s a criminal. So to that end, it is the yin and yang of how Stone evaluates a person.”
Did Stone die with any regrets about changing and reacting to the apocalypse? “I don’t think so. He’s not bitter. He’s not villainous,” according to Church. “He really believes that he is the lantern and the way of justice. He really believes that if they just follow him, he’s going to take them back to as much as they can return to before the states were divided, and there was so much lawlessness and these horrible, ferocious tribes of humans. But if they will just follow him, he can bring them back to a place of peace and security, and safety. But they have to do it his way.”
Given everything that happens (including getting shot and run over), a character who survives the finale is Sweet Tooth (Joe Seanoa, voiced by Will Arnett). How? “I would say a hefty dose of the many vitamins he likes to take, probably times two,” Seanoa suggested with a laugh.
Before that, a moment that fans of the PlayStation game were likely waiting for came in the finale: Sweet Tooth setting his head on fire. Seanoa did see a rendering after spending quite some time asking when it would happen. “I remember pouring the gas over my head and just being like, ‘Here we go. This is what everybody’s been waiting for,'” he said. “It was a really cool moment and really fun to do. It’s not often that you hear people talk about self-immolation in such a glowing faction.”
That moment leaves Sweet Tooth in an “extremely damaged” mental state at the end of the season, according to Seanoa. “He’s been lied to, betrayed, treated wrong in all the worst ways. And when you do something to someone like Sweet Tooth, well, there’s usually hell to pay afterwards.”
Stu (Mike Mitchell), who spent quite a bit of time at Sweet Tooth’s side, is facing that hell in the final scene of the season. “He desperately wants Stu to be his friend. He desperately wants to believe in Stu and be able to trust him, and he’s almost trying to bring up a fledgling disciple, somebody that he can have pride in, and it didn’t quite work out as well as he hoped,” said Seanoa.
Stu is last seen being dragged off by Sweet Tooth. Did the clown kill him? “That’s the thing with Sweet Tooth; you never quite know. He could have murdered him in fantastic fashion, or he might have greater plans for him,” Seanoa pointed out.
Sweet Tooth had let John and Quiet leave Las Vegas, but what would happen if the clown crossed paths with them now? “I don’t know if he’s quite looking for them, but I think that they now are active targets in the mind of Sweet Tooth,” Seanoa warned.
Twisted Metal, Season 1, Streaming Now, Peacock
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