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[ThisstorycontainsspoilersforeventsduringSeason4of[Thisstorycontainsspoilersthroughseasonfouroffrom.]
There’s something sinister going on from The city, this is a secret for everyone. Well, almost everyone. certainly, from Creator John Griffin knows the truth. And now, thanks to him, I know it too.
It’s September 2025, and I’m sitting with Griffin in his office while filming an MGM+ thriller. Production on Season 4 is currently well underway, with only a few episodes left to film. Griffin’s story goes back to the days between seasons, in the wake of Season 3’s dramatic (and shocking) finale, in which the show’s big bad side finally revealed itself.
“We have to pick up the momentum where we left off and bring a new level to this story,” he says. “So the idea we came up with was for the man in yellow to come to town and live with everyone as a little girl named Sofia.”
Griffin saw the look on my face – he saw that I had become as pale as the boy in white – and it occurred to him: “Wait. Is this the first time you’ve heard that the man in yellow is Sophia?”
I nodded, my pale jaw still hanging on the floor.
“Oh,” he says. victory. Then a big laugh. “Fuck.”
Elsewhere in the city, a car stops in the middle of the post office. Parked may not be the right word to describe the state of the brown sedan, embedded in the wall of this makeshift police station like a man stuck inside the concrete walls of an empty swimming pool. I’m standing on Main Street, staring at the car, as if one of Sheriff Boyd’s deputies is trying to solve a puzzle. A few hours later, Griffin said: It was the car that brought the devil to the city.
After a few hours WhichThe devil enters the bar. “Hi,” she says with a smile. “I’m Julia.”
Praising executive producers Griffin and Jeff Pinkner, along with fellow executive producer and director Jack Bender, from The film’s events take place inside a nightmare city from which there is no way out. It’s filled with vampiric monsters, menacing birds, eldritch horrors, and the most terrifying creatures of all: humans, and lots of them. It’s the most-watched show on MGM+, with an audience so loyal it has created no less than four different subreddits for theories, memes, and more. Some fans have traveled around the world, from as far away as Germany, just to catch a glimpse of the hands-on set in Halifax, Canada.
When one stands in the heart of the city, which was built on an abandoned radar base over just 12 weeks, one cannot help but feel drawn towards it. from world. The houses are real, and so are the materials inside, filled with Easter eggs from production designer Matt Lickley, one of a small group of people who knew the true traditions of from From the jump. There is no electricity in the city, it is only served silent hill– summed up the whole experience of walking past Father Khatri’s church, the restaurant, the hotel sign – and of course, the local watering hole in town, which we must return to, lest the devil get bored.
Newcomer Julia Doyle sits inside the bar and talks about her old life from. Even before the offer was a yellow gleam in his eyes, Doyle was already preparing for the role. “Horror is all I watch,” says the young actor. “When I get to choose what to watch on movie night, it’s always a scary thing.” Finally, you don’t just step into the middle of one of those movies, you become the terrifying thing at the center: the Man in Yellow, a shape-shifting menace that collects teeth, eats spleen, and dresses up as a doe-eyed good girl with a Bible passage at every opportunity.
“I knew I was a girl with a secret, and that I was a bad girl,” Doyle says of what she learned about her character during the audition process. On the other hand of winning the role, Doyle found herself sitting on top of more secrets than she initially imagined. “The main thing about playing this character is…it’s all about joy,” she says with playful glee. “They’re happy to be here. I’m just having fun. That’s the thing that drives them the most: causing chaos.”
After three full seasons filled with mysteries, monsters, and nightmares crawling out of the woods, Sofia and the Man in Yellow represents a much-needed “new level of story,” as Griffin calls it. Furthermore, the man himself – or more specifically the Sofia side of the equation – was a new level not only for the story, but for the book as well.
“The Man in Yellow is no surprise,” says Griffin, referring to the vision he and partner Jeff Pinkner conceived from Long before a single scene was written. “However, what we chose to do with him was a very cool discovery. I don’t find villains with mustaches that interesting. Monsters are scarier when you can relate to a part of them. When you realize that the monster is complex and has parts of humanity? That’s really terrifying. Finding a way to explore his agenda within the city is really exciting.”
It’s not exactly exciting for city dwellers, of course. Unaware of Sofia throughout Season 4, the characters nonetheless feel her wrath. At one point, she raises a man from the dead and turns him into a murderous meat puppet. On another occasion, she asks a favor from Clara, a background character brought to the fore through an off-screen deal struck with the Big Bad. In one of her final acts of violence this season, Sofia kills the only person to discover her true identity: Elgin, a young man who once believed he could save the city by placing a curse on one of its happiest residents, and paid for that theory with an upturned eye.
Which By the way, Elgin’s version is on full display in the special effects makeup clip. Patrick Baxter, award-nominated artist fromThe most terrifying moments from the written word to the physical world, proudly displayed by a life-size model of actor Nathan D. Simmons is filled with cotton swabs and other mundane items that help sell the fantasy of his tortured, eyeless state. (“I just brought it for you,” Baxter says with a laugh, throwing his arms around the Elgin model who insists it’s not always For display. “It would be pretty boring in here if you were just looking at pizza boxes full of prosthetics.”) Elsewhere in the dense trailer: pizza boxes laden with fake prosthetics of bloody skin as advertised, as well as models of the aforementioned Sophia doll and the defiled corpse of Tian Chen, who was killed in season three as a means of psychological torture for main character Boyd, played by Harold Perrineau.
It’s been a whole season since then and I’ve been sitting with Perino. We’re at the Sheriff’s Station on the other side of a long day filming a scene on the roof of the Colony House, with Perrineau and his colleagues wearing seatbelts. Perrino was as exhausted, if not quite as wrecked as the car that had come halfway out of the far wall.
“The technical parts are the technical parts,” he says of the job. “Sleeping at night is the hardest.”
As a veteran of legendary TV shows like lost and geeseIn addition to famous film roles in Romeo + Juliet and MatrixPerrino knows his way around a stressful story. Here, Perrino insists, leaning back in Sheriff Boyd’s chair, “I woke up during this period more terrified than I’ve ever been in my entire life. The show is so unrealistic. It’s a show about monsters, right? So you really have to invest. You have to put yourself in a place where you can’t tell if it’s the case or not.” [the story] Real or not. It’s really stressful for your nervous system.
Perino is not the only one who is worried. from. He’s not alone in this roomemphasizing from. A few minutes into the interview, Perrino’s on-screen deputy, Ricky Hee, walks into the post office, for no other reason than he wants to hear the man at the top of the call sheet talk about the show. This level of commitment is evident throughout the cast, and beyond. Scott McCord, who plays the tragic Victor, says his wife and her friends are deeply engaged in theories about the show’s plot. Catalina Sandino Moreno, who plays Victor’s mother Tabitha (it’s kind of complicated), says her actual son watches the show and regularly brings up theories he’s read on various subreddits. Similar stories abound throughout the cast, about how much their loved ones care about the series, not just because it provides them a livelihood, but because the narrative twists and turns so completely.
“Whenever my son sees John Griffin, he’ll ask, ‘What happens when?'” Sandino says from ends? Will there be a spinoff for someone? This is the whole world you built! It’s really all over the world fromHe is very interested in whether we can leave, whether we can get out of the city, and how everything will end. I wonder about that too.”
Of course, when it comes to the series finale, Griffin never says a word, other than to say it was planned from the beginning. In fact, despite the casual way he tells me about Sofia and the man in yellow, the mastermind from He is well known on set for having an exceptional poker face.
“There were a few times I would run into a theory,” says He, who plays Kenny, the city’s heartthrob. “And he’ll say to you, ‘You can say what you want, but I’ll give you my deceitful face.'” And you know what’s great? Every time I have a theory for it, I turn out to be wrong. Every time I’m sure we’re going a certain way, we take a different turn.
Griffin’s end remains unwritten, but not for long. It’s now July 2026, and production is about to begin on Season 5, which is also the final season of the series. Theories abound among the cast, crew and their loved ones about how it will all end, but what matters to Hannah Cheramie, who plays Julie who drives the story, is that it will end at all.
“I really feel it, especially as we get closer and closer to him,” she says, standing outside the bar where the devil resides. “I just got the scripts for [season four] Episodes 7 and 8, and I realize there are only 12 more scripts left. It amazes me, how close it is. Every time I get a script, I can’t wait for the next one. But one day soon, there will be no next. “This is going to be a really tough day.”
Difficult days lie ahead from town. All participants have different ideas about how they want this story to end. For Perino, it’s simple: “We need to win.” Unfortunately, victory seems a long way off as of the end of Season 4, as Sofia removes the only protection the city has against monsters. Overcoming this obstacle, and all the others that still await, means at least one thing for Perino: more nightmares.
“You have to tell yourself this is real, which is hard on a show like this,” he says. “That tension shows in the way you hold yourself, the way your hands shake…that’s a big part of giving a show.”
Periño takes a beat. Then a big laugh. “It was wonderful and weird to do this show,” he says.
I said to him, “Well, we have a main title for the article.”
“Great,” he says. “It’s a big Kansas thing. “It was cool and weird. “This is our show.”
The first four seasons offrom Now streaming on MGM+. The fifth and final season is expected to premiere in 2027.
