Are you ready for more of M Night Shyamalan’s ‘sit-thriller’ Servant?
The director and stars, including Rupert Grint, talk to Danielle de Wolfe about the evolution of the psychological thriller
Abrand new year brings with it a slew of highly-anticipated original dramas and returning Apple TV+ series Servant is no exception.
The M Night Shyamalandirected show looks set to be darker and filled with greater levels of suspense than before. In a plotline permeated with tension, Servant’s first series unravelled the tale of a Philadelphia couple in mourning after tragedy strikes the family.
With an ever-widening rift forming in their marriage and dark forces at work, the first 10 episodes invited audiences into their home – and the perplexing world created by Shyamalan, famous for his thrillers like The Sixth Sense and The Village.
The series stars Lauren Ambrose and Toby Kebbell as husband and wife duo Dorothy and Sean, with Harry Potter star Rupert Grint returning in his role as Dorothy’s brother Julian.
The main cast is rounded off with Game Of Thrones alumna Nell Tiger Free, who returns as mysterious nanny Leanne.
This time around, however, the director was forced to approach the project a little differently.
“When we first started, we were like ‘What is this? What do we call this [project] that we’re doing, these half-hour things all in one place?’ We call it a sit-thriller. Like a situation comedy,” notes Shyamalan, 50.
“We had a tone and a discovery in the first season.
“The second season was the season of ‘Hey, let’s figure out the story, let’s just figure out the whole thing, right now.’
“I couldn’t keep going without knowing anymore; I needed to work it all out.
“So, there was a moment – and it aligned pretty well with where we had to stop, because of the pandemic – to kind of say, it would be really, really helpful to work it all out and then come back and finish Season 2.
“And that’s what we did.” The returning 10-part psychological thriller sees a rapid expansion of the Season 1 storyline.
“The idea was that we pick up exactly where we left off but things transition, they change almost immediately when you’re in the episode,” says Kebbell, 38.
“So, hopefully we’ve accomplished that. And then of course things changed from what the ideas were to what we could shoot, because we shot four episodes in complete isolation.”
“We adapted beautifully,” notes Kebbell of the new Covid-19 filming restrictions and on-set social distancing measures.
“The writers worked well to do that, and for the directing of those episodes, those last four, we did the same.”
As it turned out, the shooting delay brought about by the pandemic couldn’t have come at a better time for fellow cast member Grint.
“We came in – I think we were six episodes in and then we had to shut down,” recalls Grint, 32, of filming.
“How long was the break? A month?”
“Well, I had a baby in the break,” he laughs, “and then we came back and it was very different.
“We kind of had to rethink every element of shooting this show. We were all separated into zones, we were all living in bubbles and there were masks, visors, we were tested three times a week. Full on.
“But I think rightly so, the main priority is keeping everyone safe.”
With almost all scenes taking place inside the confines of a single house, the impact of Covid-19 on filming felt exacerbated for the show’s cast and crew.
Yet the single location is the very element that makes this series unique, bearing all the hallmarks you’d expect from a Shyamalandirected project.
“It’s a set that’s got challenges,” notes Grint.
“I mean, it’s such a small stage, you can’t really hide, it’s quite exposing in that way.
“But I do really enjoy it, it’s kind of like theatre in a way.”
It’s an opinion shared by Grint’s co-star Ambrose, 42, who says: “The characters are, for the most part, essentially doing this intense play for half an hour at a time.
“And that’s a great acting opportunity and provides a nice framework for a lot of creativity from all of the departments.
“Shooting this show feels like getting shot out of a cannon.
“When we were in our bubble, in quarantine, shooting half of the season, we only took one day off a week, so it really felt like we got to breathe afterwards.
“But, you know, it’s good to have that intensity for that amount of time and then be done with it.”
Despite the confined setting of the series – one whose audience is drip-fed information at the slowest of paces – the Apple TV+ offering manages to avoid the pitfalls of stagnancy and monotony associated with such a restriction.
“The creek is only scary upstairs when you’ve established there’s no-one in the house, and so you have to quieten everything down and everything becomes threatening,” notes Shyamalan.
“And so, for me, making it one location for the entire series is my way of quieting down everyone’s minds so that every single thing, every glass falling, every door knob turning, means something.
“I don’t think of it in that sense of moving artifice, it’s a natural movement, but the stakes need to rise for the character – and the physicality as a result can rise as well, as you’ll see season to season.”
Developing the characters’ surroundings, room by room, is but one of the tricks deployed by Shyamalan as part of the forthcoming series.
“One little thing that I am doing is expanding what we’re calling ‘the house’,” he notes.
“We’ve added the attic and the house keeps expanding and each season it’s going to keep expanding into what you see. What you thought was the house keeps on growing.”
“There’s so many more elements to the house that we didn’t know, we didn’t see in season one,” seconds Grint.
“So it is this kind of growing organism and it’s, yeah … something a little bit different.”
● Servant Season 2 is out now on Apple TV+