I KNOW WHAT BOYD’S LIKE
Harold Perrineau is the lawman trying to keep evil at bay in From
What about this project piqued your interest?
When I read it, I was like, “Yeah, this is crazy good.” And then [they] told me that Jack [Bender] would be directing and Jeff Pinkner [producing], who was also part of that JJ [Abrams] crew, I was like, “Oh, please, please let me do this now!” I trusted the team could take the genre and actually do the thing that I like to do, which is invest in the human beings.
From is also the very first show where you are the lead character…
Yeah, I hadn’t gotten a chance yet to be the lead of an ensemble, so that was also a new challenge for me. I’m usually one of several actors who are part of a thing. So, to actually lead this whole thing, I felt like it was a long time coming.
Sheriff Boyd takes care of the main town. Was there anything about him as a character that you felt particularly connected to?
There’s a loneliness to Boyd that I felt because at some point I couldn’t even be with my family, so there’s a kind of melancholy. But you know that there’s a job to be done and that’s exactly what Boyd has. He’s got a job to do.
Boyd is estranged from his artist son, Ellis (Corteon Moore), who chooses to live at Colony House. Will we see why in the first season?
Yeah, Boyd can be really extreme. There’s no playing around. We are in a perilous situation, so nobody has time for the tomfoolery. You see him making these choices with his son and I think, because we know the stakes, that it pays off throughout the first season.
What kind of relationship does he have with the Matthews family?
I think right away Boyd connects with Jim in a way that is really subtle. Jim asks him a question, and you see Boyd look right away and say, “You have your family with you?” You know that he’s like, “Fuck! I showed up here with my family too!” So, he tries to communicate with Jim on the level of a dad that’s the protector of a family, in the very patriarchal way that many of us feel like we have to protect the family. Later on you see that it forces Boyd’s hand in another way and pushes him to do a thing that he’d been waiting [about], but now has to do.
It’s a very mysterious show. Did you ask the writers where it’s all going?
I really needed to know what we were gonna explore this first season, for sure. Lost [in which he played Oceanic Flight 815 survivor Michael Dawson] was really interesting with us never knowing, but then there were mistakes I felt like I made because things then changed. And had I known that, I’d have made other choices. So, in this first season, it was [knowing] what that rift is with Boyd and Ellis, and what that could be about. And so, when you see us talking the first time, it gave them a depth of understanding. As the show unfolds, you’ll go back and be like, “Ah, that’s why he responded the way he did!”
And what about knowing the season finale?
I didn’t need to know where the first season ended. I did need to know the origin of Boyd’s pain. That’s really the most that I needed. And so yes, when the show did end, I was fully surprised, which I think is a good thing. It reminded me of that very first season of Lost where we quite often would call each other and go, “Did you see that? Is that a smoke monster?” All of us were like, “Hey, wait a minute. Did you see that coming?”