On the set of Evil, only four actors are encouraged to improvise—but probably not the performers you’d expect.
The answer is not Katja Herbers, who actually has a background in improv comedy. It’s not Mike Colter, with whom creators Robert and Michelle King have worked on both The Good Wife and its spin-off, The Good Fight. It’s not TV’s reliable villain Michael Emerson, and it’s not comedian Aasif Mandvi.
As Michelle King recently told The Daily Beast, the only actors allowed to truly let loose are Brooklyn Shuck, Skylar Gray, Maddy Crocco, and Dalya Knapp—the four young actors who play forensic psychologist Kristen Bouchard’s delightfully chatty daughters.
Robert King (who grew up in a family of seven) told The Daily Beast that when it comes to the girls, “We encourage that nobody gets a line finished. Everybody’s interrupting.” That’s the kind of conversation that King grew up with: “There were no lone children talking. Everybody was talking at the same time.”
Shuck holds court as the oldest of the Bouchard sisters, Lynn. Gray plays the cherubic but deceptively precocious Lila. As Lexis, Crocco often has the most haunting work of the bunch; her character has received dental surgery for her vampiric incisors and, at one point, even sprouted a reptilian tail that only she could see. Knapp plays Laura, the youngest of the bunch and the only one who might actually qualify as “innocent.” Her heart defect was among the reasons Kristen agreed to work with priest-in-training David Acosta at the start of the show.
An ongoing joke in Evil, Robert King said, “is you’re not sure which of the daughters is demonic—as in, truly evil—and how much are they just liars.” Some shows, King said, seem to ignore a fundamental reality about their young characters: “Lying is so much the core of what being young is.”
The Kings cast the Bouchard sisters in groups of four to gauge their chemistry. There’s a unique joy to watching the young actors work from season to season, Michelle said, as they hone their craft. “The adult actors are already at such a high level, but the kids you can actually see coming into themselves as actors.”
Even Herbers, who did improv when she was coming up as a performer in Holland, had to tip her hat to her pint-sized co-stars. The scripts usually contain sections labeled “daughters,” which list the various lines that should be shouted all at once. On filming day, Herbers and her TV brood huddle together to decide who gets to say what—and who gets an extra line or two. “I wait with my cues,” she said, “because they’ll just say the most ridiculous things and they’ll end up in the show. They’re great.”
Skylar Gray as Lila Bouchard and Brooklyn Shuck as Lynn Bouchard in Evil Season 3.
Elizabeth Fisher/Paramount+As Evil Season 3 kicks off, Kristen and her girls are back in action—and constantly haunted by the startling din of trains barreling by their house. The devious psychologist Leland Townsend (Emerson) also continues to lurk in the shadows, eager to pounce at any opportunity to terrorize anyone connected to Kristen. This season, for example, he tries to get to one of the sisters through an online video game—a campaign that doesn’t exactly turn out how he initially hopes.
“I think he thinks they’re gonna be easier marks than they turn out to be, but they are collectively very clever,” Emerson said of his young foes. “It’s that old gag: the older person is completely at the mercy of very young people when it comes to electronics.”
Then again, is that really different from anyone’s experience of these kids? From tech genius Ben, to Leland, to the girls’ mother herself, it seems everyone on Evil is bound to learn one thing eventually: these girls are not to be messed with.
