‘Evil’ Stars Talk Leland’s Major Power Move & Ben in ‘Survival Mode’

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Evil Season 4 Episode 9 “How to Build a Chatbot.”]

Just when Sheryl (Christine Lahti) thinks she’s finally gotten one up on Leland (Michael Emerson)—and in a major way—the latest Evil features another bloody move by the villain.

Before heading into work, the two arm themselves (Sheryl with armored dress that can stop bullets and knives, Leland with knives in his phone and suitcase). Then the men of the company learn a lesson when they stand on the glass ceiling above Sheryl’s office only for it to crack, sending them down to the floor below. The Manager (Fedor Steer) gathers the women, and Sheryl tells him that he wants them on his side, so he asks what they want. It’s the usual company stuff (bonuses, female members on the board), but Sheryl also has a condition: fire Leland. After, Leland sees them exiting the room and tries to stab Sheryl … only for her dress to bend the tip.

The Manager, at first, refuses to fire Leland, until Sheryl tells him he had Timothy (the Antichrist) baptized—and shows him the “proof,” the certificate and photo she got when she brought the baby to the church.

Getting Leland fired is “part of her goal, to bring him down in every way she can, not just to kill him, to humiliate him, to ruin his dreams, to destroy his ambition,” Lahti tells TV Insider.

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She enjoys the dynamic Sheryl has with the Manager “because I think as much as the Manager is a complete sexist, misogynist pig, there’s something about Sheryl that intrigues him, and I think he admires in Sheryl this kind of strength and determination and ambition. Also I think he’s happy that Sheryl revealed the truth to him about Leland. Well, Sheryl made it up, but the idea that she revealed that, see, Leland is not who you think he is. He had this baby baptized, which is such a lie. But I think the manager’s just, ‘Okay, good. You’re doing the good spy work for me.'”

It can be argued that Leland let that happen, since he could’ve kept the baby with him at all times.

“That’s right,” Lahti agrees. “I think he trusted the wrong person, and I think his own neediness about, ‘I don’t know how to take care of children, and I’m a baby and I don’t like the mess and the crying,’ okay, well, too bad. We know how to deal with this and we’re also going to take advantage of it.”

Leland does try to turn it around to benefit him, claiming that baptism did nothing to the baby and he has the most perfect teacher for the Antichrist in his “true mother,” Kristen (Katja Herbers). He’s still fired (which, at this company, means being thrown off the roof if he’s not walking out of the building in 10 minutes). However, Leland then interrupts the Manager’s Welcome to the Beginning of the End presentation to use the proof of baptism to claim that it was the demon’s doing. Since he poisoned him, the Manager can’t speak to his own defense and can’t do anything while Leland cuts him open then removes and takes a bite out of his heart.

“He’s often—well, he is not often bold. He is sometimes bold, and he’s terrifying when he’s bold,” Emerson says of his character in that moment. “When he’s cornered, sometimes the only way he sees out is a great bloody gesture and the demon hierarchy, it doesn’t like rebelliousness, but it is also deeply impressed with quick violence. That gets respect in that world. So if he’s Brutus and he takes out Julius Caesar, then his stock rises. So I’d say it’s a calculation on his part. It has to come off perfectly or it won’t work. And then every once in a while, he goes into this kind of frenzy of bloodiness and jubilation, like smearing blood on things. I hardly know what to do with those scenes, but I do them.”

Sheryl is there for the presentation, though she quickly makes her mistake once she sees how the situation turns. “I don’t think I was expecting that once that happens, I was expecting him to be fired and kicked out and never to be seen again,” admits Lahti of Sheryl. “And instead, Leland kills the manager and he’s going to rise to power, and what he’s going to do with that power does not bode well for Sheryl.”

Elizabeth Fisher / Paramount+

Meanwhile, Ben (Aasif Mandvi) continues to deal with the aftermath of that quantum beam hitting him at the particle accelerator in the premiere. Now, he’s talking to Dr. Boggs (Kurt Fuller) about his strange behavior (which he can’t remember but has proof of on video). He’s turning to Boggs because, since he can’t go see Kristen since she’s his friend, the other man “feels like the closest thing he has to somebody who he can go to in a professional capacity,” Mandvi explains. “I don’t get the sense that Ben knows a lot of psychotherapists. So I think it’s kind of if a guy can fix a carburetor, you’re just going to go to the guy you know who can fix the carburetor.”

Ben also goes to see a doctor his father went to about migraines, and that doctor told him to use tin foil—on his head (which he covers with a hat) and to sleep in. And Ben does it! He is still trying to find a scientific explanation for everything, but that’s now a struggle.

“I think he’s little shaken. The tinfoil stuff, I don’t think he knows how to explain it. I just think he knows that it works,” says Mandvi. “Now, it may be psychosomatic, maybe there’s some kind of, he’s convincing himself. You get to a point, even as a scientist I imagine, where if it works, it works, and then if it’s something where you’re actually experiencing a certain trauma or a certain pain—he’s having these migraines and stuff—it’s like whatever works to stop the migraines, I’m going to do, and then we can deal with figuring out what it means or why it’s happening later.”

Elizabeth Fisher / Paramount+

He continues, “But in the meantime, I think he’s trying to figure out how to stop the thing from happening and this tinfoil thing, for whatever reason, seems to work.” Furthermore, “there’s an element of him getting pushed towards a certain idea of faith because that’s kind of what faith is, right? You just have faith that it works. If it works, it works. If praying to God makes you less anxious, then just pray to God. I think he’s in that space right now where it’s like, ‘Whatever it is that’s going to help me, I’ll just try it,’ because he’s dealing with a physical pain.”

Ben has been put through a lot this season already, between the migraines, the djinn he’s hearing and seeing since the particle accelerator, and finding out information he didn’t know about his father and cheating. Mandvi loves that his character has been “put in kind of a pinball machine,” he says. “He’s just getting hit from all sides. I love that because as an actor that’s just super fun to play when you’re just getting bombarded with different things.”

Because of everything going on, he has no time to sit back and perform an assessment on himself like he, Kristen, and David (Mike Colter) do with cases each week. In that kind of situation, “you’re just trying to figure stuff out,” Mandvi continues. “So I think he’s just trying to figure out how to get the migraines to go away. He’s going to wear this tinfoil thing and the hat—’Okay, it looks stupid, but I’m going to wear it.’ He’s trying to process what he’s learning about his dad. He’s trying to deal with is this djinn. And I don’t think at that point you can sort of sit back and go, let me try to figure out the overarching themes here. I think he’s just in survival mode, and that’s fun because it’s very active and it’s very in the moment. He’s just trying to survive and he’s getting hit from all sides by a lot of things that are surprising and inexplicable. He’s trying to explain it, he’s trying to figure it out, but he’s also trying to just survive.”

What did you think of Leland’s bold move? What do you think is going on with Ben? Let us know in the comments section, below.

Evil, Thursdays, Paramount+