Rupert Grint & Toby Kebbell Interview: Servant Season 3
Apple TV+'s Servant centers on Sean and Dorothy Turner as they hire young nanny Leanne to watch over a life-like doll based on their late infant son, only for mysterious events to begin occurring in the house. Season 3 finds the trio in a happier position as Jericho is alive and well, though the cult from Leanne's past may still be after them.
Ahead of the series' return to Apple TV+, Screen Rant spoke exclusively with stars Rupert Grint and Toby Kebbell to discuss Servant season 3, the challenges of their characters' new dynamic and filming in a pandemic.
Screen Rant: Servant just keeps getting better and better with that each new season. Starting with Toby then Rupert, what was it like for you guys getting the scripts for this new season and seeing your characters' the arcs?
Toby Kebbell: It was good. You know, it's always a challenge, you have to sort of adjust because you're never really secure. You you might think, "Oh good, this is who I am," but they want things to evolve, they want things to change. So there was a difficulty that I'm suddenly believing in everything and I think I get some redemption from that. But to find that was kind of tricky, it's difficult to go from sarcasm and disbelief into, like, "Praise Jesus." So yeah, it was a tricky thing, but it was important and that's what's so nice. You really are seeing the perspective of the four characters, so it was great. But we got less scenes, me and Rupert got less scenes, which sucked, I'll be honest, it sucked. [Laughs]
Rupert Grint: Yeah, it felt very different. I think I underestimated how much of the vices and the wine that I really depended on in creation of Julian and not to have that, we meet Julian in this season where he's completely sober and doing lunges across the room and he's just in a very different kind of mind. It took me a while to really work out who Julian was without all those things, because they've been such a device for him to deflect from the grief and everything. It definitely felt very different and also not having the ally in Sean, I think their relationship is kind of fractured for a lot of this season., so that was quite a tough one as well.
With this season, you guys had a little extra time to prepare with the pandemic sort of delaying production. What was that like for you guys having that extra time?
Toby Kebbell: You know, it's funny, the pandemic actually hit us halfway through season 2. So we actually returned and shot the final four episodes and then went pretty quickly into three. That was actually more difficult. It was funny, because I thought, "Ah, we're going to take a bunch of time off," but no, they were ready because they'd been doing that writing. They'd been spending all that time writing three, so we were straight back in kind of in January and we finished shooting end of October, just before Halloween. So it was quite jarring. That was the thing, I was like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait."
So I got lucky and I had to use the fantastic internet and found some kind of harrowing, shocking videos of parents who've actually been in this situation and are kind of pleading with the people sending them to jail going, "This isn't real, though, this isn't real." I thought that's it, it's too much for him to believe, so now he'd rather believe all these coincidences and all these things [and] we're dealing with the Lord above. It's just that difficulty to believe in the reality of the situation that kind of led me down that path of figuring out how to play Sean for season 3.
Rupert Grint: I think just being in the house is such a great kind of trigger to get completely back in it, because everything happens there. So we've got this kind of inbuilt memory of everything that's happened in there and it's very easy to kind of slip straight back into it.
Servant season 3 will begin streaming on January 21.