‘Snowpiercer’: Daveed Diggs Talks ‘Super High’ Stakes & Danger in Final Season

“Season 4?” That was the succinct question filling Daveed Diggs’ DMs over the past year, the Snowpiercer star recalls. Fans wanted to know if and when the dystopian thriller would return after its cancellation by TNT in January 2023. Happily, the series was picked up by AMC this past March and the long-awaited fourth season premieres on July 21.

 “I didn’t give up hope,” the Tony winner (Hamilton) who plays the justice-seeking Andre Layton says. “I knew that there was a finished season of television that a lot of people liked, so at some point someone was going to show it. I am very happy it ended up at AMC, a place that understands this kind of show and its fans.”

In the third season’s finale, we saw the surviving remnants of the extinction-level global freeze make life-changing decisions after unceasingly circling the world in the 1,001-car-long titular train for nearly a decade. Their choice: Remain on Snowpiercer, fairly secure with engineer Melanie Cavill (Jennifer Connelly) running “The Eternal Engine,” or split the train in two and follow Layton into the back end of the train (nicknamed Big Alice, after its engine) to look for what Layton believed was a life sustaining warm spot, in the Horn of Africa. He was right, and as passengers debarked at their possible new home dubbed New Eden, the scene switched to three months later, when Melanie watched a missile explode in the air in the distance. Could it be an updated attempt to end the current ice age?

That missile plays an important part in the final season, which opens with Melanie’s closest allies Ben (Iddo Goldberg) and Till (Mickey Sumner) searching through the frozen wastes checking for metal pieces that fell from the sky. What happens when the pair try to flee as menacing figures in white come up a hill toward them will change the story’s trajectory. Who are those people, where did they come from, and what they do want? “The stakes are super high,” promises Diggs. Look for two new characters in the mix, played by Clark Gregg (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) and Michael Aronov (The Americans).

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Eight months later, New Eden isn’t exactly a tropical garden — think Alaska in the winter — but the inhabitants are working hard to make the settlement run democratically and sustainably. “It was the first time in three seasons that I got to shoot anything not on a train car,” Diggs notes. “We didn’t have to walk in a single-file line all the time! It was so beautiful.”

Layton is happier than ever at his new home: co-parenting his daughter with his baby mama Zarah (Sheila Vand) and his love Josie (Katie McGuinness). That is, until an enemy enters. “You can always count on danger at the end of the world,” the actor notes. Indeed.

With menace at their doorstep, and unaware of what’s happening back on Snowpiercer, “the inhabitants will quickly discover that [New Eden] is not what was hoped for — or expected.” Speaking of danger, AMC’s official trailer teases a quick image of Mr. Wilford (Sean Bean), Melanie’s longtime mentor and megalomaniacal villain. Last we saw the warped visionary who created and ran Snowpiercer like a fiefdom, he was inciting a coup on the train and, for everyone’s safety, was placed in suspended animation in the same small railcar on the track that Melanie had barely survived. If he lives, how Wilford fits into the story of his beloved train is yet to be known.

Snowpiercer, Season 4 Premiere, Sunday, July 21, 9/8c, AMC