‘Mrs. Davis’ Cast & Creators On Asking Existential Questions, Simone’s Relationship With Jay & That WTF Moment In Episode 4
SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the first four episodes of Peacock’s Mrs. Davis.
In Mrs. Davis, Betty Gilpin is a nun on a mission to destroy an all-knowing artificial intelligence that has become a mainstay in society. In order to do so, she must first go on a mission to find the Holy Grail.
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Yes, that Holy Grail. The one that Jesus Christ drank from at The Last Supper. The one that may or may not even truly exist.
The show has been billed as a “versus” show, pitting faith and tech against each other. But in reality, it’s more complicated than that, co-creator Damon Lindelof told Deadline.
“There’s always been a push-pull between faith and science. And now it’s become much more directed in terms of belief and tech,” he said. “The more nuanced reality of it is, neither of those things are going anywhere. A thousand years from now, there’s still going to be religion, and there’s still going to be technology. We don’t know what religion is going to look like. We don’t necessarily know what technology is going to look like. But it’s not like one of them is going to devour the other. So the more interesting idea becomes, what does it look like when the two come together or the two are in conflict?”
Lindelof and co-creator Tara Hernandez — as well as series stars Gilpin, Jake McDorman, and Andy McQueen — spoke with Deadline about the first four episodes of Mrs. Davis, which set up a surreal adventure that at times confronts some of the biggest questions that society faces about technology and faith.
On the tone of the show
For all the existential questions it asks, Mrs. Davis isn’t meant to be taken too seriously. The tone shifts from slapstick comedy to drama and back so quickly at times that one might get whiplash. And then there’s the surrealist elements, like Simone’s relationship with Jay (Andy McQueen), who turns out to actually be Jesus Christ.
For Lindelof, it was all about “how do you solve for the paradox of a group of writers and actors and directors and artists saying ‘We take our jobs very, very seriously. But this is not a serious show.’ That delighted us so much.”
The tonal shifts certainly presented a challenge for the actors, but McDorman, who plays Simone’s ex Wiley, explained “that line was very established in the scripts.”
“When I first auditioned for it, I only got a couple of scenes. And you felt like that line was there, but without the context. I was like, I don’t know if I can play this really seriously. Are we kidding?” he remembered. “So it wasn’t until I got the entire script — which then it was like, ‘Holy sh*t, what is this?’ — that you realize that line is exactly the line they’re trying to forge where it kind of oscillates between comedy to the point of almost being slapstick, but not losing the realism so that it can flip back over to drama with really high stakes.”
On Simone’s relationship with Jay — er, Jesus.
When Gilpin first discovered Jay’s true identity, she naturally leaned into the metaphysical aspects of one’s relationship with their faith. But that’s not exactly what Lindelof and Hernandez had in mind.
“When I had read the pilot, I thought, ‘Okay, well here are my ideas for the chemistry with this mystery person.’ Thinking of it as just a normal relationship. And then once I found out he was Jesus, I thought, ‘Okay, well, it’s way more metaphorical and metaphysical and it’s like being in love with a star or the ocean or the air,’” Gilpin told Deadline. “And Damon and Tara were like, ‘No, no, it’s just, you’re in love with a guy. We just want it to be a relationship, like you just happen to fall in love with this person who happens to be Jesus.’”
At the end of the day, love is a universal language that most audiences can understand, even when religion may not be, Hernandez explained.
“So much of being a nun can feel inaccessible. How do we take that and make it something that people can latch on to? So this idea that some nuns are brides of Christ was just so exciting that it gave us the opportunity to say ‘Oh, a bride and a marriage, that feels universally relatable,'” she said. “So, certainly, it’s subversive, and it’s different, and it’s terrifying, but I think the real testament is to Andy McQueen’s depiction and you really do feel like [this is] someone that Simone has fallen in love with and that they have real relationship ups and downs…”
Throughout the first three episodes, Simone’s devotion to Jay is unwavering. Even as she departs on such an uncertain quest, she remains committed to her vows and seeks Jay out as a source of solace. That is, until Episode 4, when Jay sends Simone on a detour to Rome with a very specific quest to deliver a king cake to the Pope. The strange task becomes seemingly impossible when Simone tracks down the baker Jay requested for the job, only to find out she refuses to make anything for the Pope — unless Simone can pay her a million euro. With a little help from Mrs. Davis, Simone pulls it off, only to find out that she isn’t the first nun that Jay has sent on this wild goose chase.
Simone’s displeasure gives way to a jarring scene where she confronts Jay about the fact that he has relationships with other women (and angers God in the process).
“That is such a turning point with their relationship and how we look at it,” McQueen said.
Because, of course, Jesus has relationships with million of other people. That’s kind of his whole deal. And Simone is says she’s willing to accept that, but is she really?
“I think that Simone, when we meet her, tells herself that she’s at the end of her movie. She’s at the end of her arc, that she’s fully enlightened. All problems fixed. She’ll live the rest of her days in the convent and is a fully formed nun,” Gilpin said. “And I think that her experiences over the course of the show make her realize that she still has some work to do in her life of faith. In her relationship with Jay, she’s kind of skipping a step or almost cheating. There’s not a lot of faith that she needs to have when the proof is in her hands. She can literally make out with Jesus and see him whenever she wants to. There’s not a lot of faith required when you have constant proof. And I think she’s been compartmentalizing that. I think that that is the challenge for Simone.”
And then there’s Wiley
Jesus isn’t the only man after Simone’s heart. Audiences are quickly introduced to her ex, Wiley, who has spent his entire inheritance to form an underground resistance focused on taking down Mrs. Davis. “Or get Simone back, up for discussion,” McDorman jokes.
When we first meet Wiley, it’s clear that their relationship didn’t end on the best of terms, but it’s difficult to put a finger on exactly what went wrong (that’s what McDorman calls “reverse engineering”). It’s not until Episode 3 that we find out Wiley is the reason that Simone became a nun in the first place, and he doesn’t even know it.
“That trauma of him perceiving her to leave him at his most vulnerable point, when he chickens out and jumps off of the bull, I think that pain really motivated a lot of the decisions and the actions that he’s doing in these first couple of episodes,” McDorman said. “And then they have the conversation in the rain, and she explains in fact, that’s not what happened. It was the opposite. She was trying to protect him.”
It turns out that Simone committed her life to Jesus because she asked him to save Wiley from that bull riding fiasco. And it worked. It’s a moment of relief for Wiley to finally understand why Simone left him, but it also stirs up a whole other set of questions.
“I think he hasn’t decided yet if he’s like, ‘Really, I’m competing with Jesus Christ? That’s your new guy? Sh*t.’ Or if he’s like, ‘Oh, my ex is insane,'” McDorman added. “They were right back to having some kind of closure for him or understanding and maybe mending that rift that happened at the rodeo, until that last curveball of like ‘Jesus is my guy.’ The actual Jesus Christ. Then it just throws them back into another like ‘Well, what the f*ck?’”
Needless to say, Wiley isn’t going to take it very well having to compete against Christ himself. As for the remaining four episodes, McDorman says: “We find him again, at some new version of rock bottom. You imagine the rodeo was a rock bottom for him. And now he’s got to this whole new rock bottom that he kind of climbs out of from.”
On that WTF moment at the end of Episode 4
There are plenty of moments in the first four episodes that may leave viewers scratching their heads, but none so much as the end of Episode 4, which reveals that the opening scene — where “Clara” protects the Holy Grail from a group of thieves — actually wasn’t real at all.
The good news is, you’re not supposed to understand everything just yet. To be fair, not even the characters are sure what’s going on.
“There’s eight episodes in the show and the end of Episode 4 is the midpoint. It’s that ticking sound that you hear when you’re on a roller coaster as you’re approaching the tippy top of it,” Lindelof said, explaining that the final scenes of Episode 4 are tasked with “recontextualizing the opening of the pilot.”
“It’s the first thing that you see in the show. It feels a little pretentious, it feels over the top, it feels expected and obvious. We’ve seen television shows that basically start 800 or 900 years ago before but the idea of suddenly saying like, ‘Well, but it’s a commercial and it’s selling something.’”
He added: “In a lot of ways, the show is sort of playing with that idea of forcing people’s behavior and the audience has to be playing the game too. And Mrs. Davis gets confused about what’s real and what’s not real in the same way that the aliens in Galaxy Quest get confused about what are historical documents and what was a television show…As long as you’re not feeling WTF at the end of Episode 8, we’ve done our jobs. If you’re feeling that at the end of Episode 4, that’s why Simone is saying it.”
The show doesn’t plan to leave its audience hanging for long. Episode 5 will dive into how, and why, that shoe commercial came to be, and what that means for Simone’s quest.
New episodes of Mrs. Davis stream on Peacock on Thursdays.
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