Return from the Dead
Payne goes from Jesus to a role in Prodigal Son
Prodigal Son
Debuts Monday, Fox/Global
There’s an art to portraying death on television, and Tom Payne is shaping up to be a Picasso. Take his character on The Walking Dead, for example. Last season, Paul Rovia — nicknamed Jesus — got stabbed in the back and then in the head by two different people before settling into rigor mortis.
Payne confesses that gearing up to film the scene, his emotions went from meh to melancholy.
“I was a bit blasé about the whole thing, like, ‘Oh, OK. I’m leaving the show to do other stuff,’” he says.
“And then when we got to that final day I was definitely like, ‘Oh s---. I’m going to die now.’ There’s a finality in that. It caught me by surprise a bit that I was so affected.”
Nevertheless, in a bit of biblical serendipity, the man who played Jesus is now the lead in a show called Prodigal Son. Debuting Monday on Fox and Global, the drama centres on a criminal psychologist whose father (played by Michael Sheen) is an infamous serial killer.
“Walking Dead is obviously an unreal world, but this show is based in reality and there are people like this who exist and are locked up in jail — and not locked up in jail — who do these things,” says Payne.
“It’s a tough thing to face. I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts and watching documentaries and TV shows and films about this subject. It’s a hard step to take to recognize these things happen in real life.”
In the past few years, Hollywood has turned out a few notable projects about serial killers and the darkest of dark things they do. Jeffrey Dahmer was the focus of the 2017 biopic My Friend Dahmer, which was headlined by former Disney Channel actor Ross Lynch. Ted Bundy got the big-screen treatment in May with the Netflix film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, starring fellow Disney alumnus Zac Efron.
And on the fictional side, Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley played a bookstore manager/ serial killer in last year’s Netflix series You. The fact that all three leading men have built their careers on teen heartthrob vibes didn’t escape critics, who argued that Hollywood was romanticizing cold-hearted murderers.
But Payne takes issue with that assessment.
“It’s like saying video games glamorize violence and make you want to shoot people. I think either you have that in you or you don’t,” says the actor, who, incidentally, also auditioned for the Bundy role in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile.
“I think stories about murderers will always be fascinating. It’s like people who climb big mountains or people who jump off buildings — it’s another aspect of human psychology that people are interested in.”