Grant Hermanns is a TV News Editor, Interview Host and Reviewer for ScreenRant, having joined the team in early 2021. He got his start in the industry with Moviepilot, followed by working at ComingSoon.net. When not indulging in his love of film/TV, Grant is making his way through his gaming backlog and exploring the world of Dungeons & Dragons with friends.
Dan Stevens is back in the horror genre with The Terror: The Devil in Silver, and it pays tribute to another of his acclaimed shows.
The third season of the Ridley Scott-produced anthology series serves as an adaptation of Victor LaValle's 2012 novel of the same name, with LaValle and Halt and Catch Fire's Chris Cantwell acting as showrunners. Stevens leads The Terror's ensemble cast as Pepper, a mover living with a mother and her child with ambitions of tapping into his old rocker ways by becoming a music teacher.
Everything changes when his partner's aggressive ex-husband shows up to see his daughter, resulting in a violent confrontation that gets Pepper arrested and sent to New Hyde Psychiatric Hospital, a decaying institution run by the ominous Dr. Anand and head nurse, Miss Chris. As he grapples with his inability to leave the facility until the staff deem him compliant, Pepper discovers a dark entity is being housed in New Hyde that could keep him and his fellow patients from ever leaving.
Dan Stevens' Pepper looking intensely while holding keys in his hands in The Terror: The Devil in SilverEmily V. Aragones/AMC
Joining Stevens in The Terror: The Devil in Silver's ensemble cast are CCH Pounder as Miss Chris, Aasif Mandvi as Dr. Anand, Judith Light, Chinaza Uche and b as fellow patients Dorry, Kofi and Loochie, and John Benjamin Hickey as a form of the eponymous entity. With the first two episodes helmed by Emmy nominee Karyn Kusama, the show has garnered rave reviews from critics, initially debuting with a perfect 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes before landing on its current 92% score.
Ahead of its May 7 premiere, ScreenRant's Grant Hermanns interviewed Dan Stevens to discuss The Terror: The Devil in Silver. As the conversation shifted to the creation of his character, the star was asked about comparisons to McMurphy from Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a role that earned Jack Nicholson his first Oscar victory, and Stevens' own acclaimed Marvel series Legion, as Pepper serves as the viewer's emotional anchor while also being something of an unreliable narrator.
Stevens expressed that such a balance was "what made it such an inviting role" to play, describing Pepper as "not an innocent trapped in this horrible system" as he's sent to New Hyde, but rather someone who has "his own demons" and is subsequently "being thrown into a very demonic situation inside the American healthcare system." The star, who is also an executive producer on the season, further confirmed "there's definitely nods to Legion" in The Terror: The Devil in Silver, as well as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, denoting that "many of our great stories are set in these psychiatric institutions":
Dan Stevens: The idea of wrongful incarceration, playing with the mind, surrounded by just a real motley cast of characters who you would never normally find in one situation. And yet here they are, this sort of diaspora of inconvenient, undesirable folk that have just been shunned by society, and deposited here. I think one of the great insights of Victor's novel was that dehumanization doesn't cure dysfunction, it manufactures it. If you strip someone of their name or their agency, their dignity, and then you're surprised that they don't get better, that's not treatment, that's just cruelty with a clipboard.
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ScreenRant: I've gotta say, I've always loved The Terror, and The Devil in Silver is just fantastic from start to finish. Kudos to you and everybody on that. I'd love to hear how familiar you were with Victor's novel, and with the series as a whole, before being approached to be a part of it.
Dan Stevens: Yeah, I mean, two very different things. I hadn't read the novel, and was brought into chat with the guys at Scott Free and Victor and Chris, the showrunner. Immediately, Victor was like, "Don't read my novel." Of course, I did. But he was like, "Don't read the novel. I wrote a long time ago, lots changed, whatever." But what I was really struck by was what a social critique there is baked into this horror story, and how much of it is rooted in real stories. And the way that he abstracted the trauma of some of those real stories into this horror allegory. I was completely hooked by it, and it made for a very unusual piece, I thought. And The Terror — I love an anthology, man. I keep getting told by networks and commissioners, "Oh no, we don't like anthology. We don't do anthology." And yet the best stuff is always anthology, whether it's Guillermo Del Toro's show [Cabinets of Curiosities] or Love Death and Robots, or this, they're always great. You get to try this, try that. You do something set in this century, this century. You hop around, but the network gets the safety of the umbrella of the name, The Terror. And yet we get to usher in a totally new story, a totally new cast of characters, totally different world that has elements of horror to it, that has a haunting genre to it, but couldn't be more different to the first or the second seasons, but I hope every bit is entertaining.
ScreenRant: The dehumanization theme is really such a fascinating thing about the series, and more so than some other mental health institution-set stories, just how much it really shows that dehumanization, and how wrong that is to do to patients. One patient alongside Pepper who I loved was Kofi. I mean, Chinaza just absolutely kills it in that role. I'd love to hear what it was like working with him to really find that unique dynamic between him and Pepper.
Chinaza Uche's Kofi looking in thought while sitting on his bed in The Terror: The Devil in Silver VerticalEmily V. Aragones/AMC
Dan Stevens: Yeah, it's one of the things I love about my job, but also about this story is that they're very unlikely roommates. I didn't know Chinaza before this job, but I have friends who worked with him. A really wonderful actor, very, very beautiful actor, and brought such humanity and humor and warmth to that role that was so endearing. And it's so heartbreaking, his story. Frankly, we had such a talented cast of New York actors coming and bringing these incredible backstories to their worlds. It was such a joy on set, because we had just such a mad range of people every day. But Chinaza was absolutely wonderful. I'm glad you highlighted him, because I think that storyline is particularly very haunting. It really is. And I think it really comes out of the novel, and it's to Victor's credit, that part of the social critique of his story is the socioeconomic, racial lines along which these things are drawn, and that is so haunting, frankly.
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The Terror is a 2018 horror anthology series inspired by real historical events and featuring a touch of the supernatural. Each standalone season explores a different historical period and narrative, with the first a depiction of Captain Sir John Franklin's expedition to the arctic in the 1800s and the second set in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during WWII. A new season releases in 2026 and stars Dan Stevens, adapting and named after Victor LaVelle's novel The Devil in Silver.
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