The Strain – Q&A with Corey Stoll

In [Sunday] night’s episode, when [Eph] throws his former boss off a train…

Corey: By accident.

…Did he have a choice or did he make the choice to kill him?

Corey: No, he didn’t; he didn’t.  It was really a move to not get hit, and before what he knew what was happening, he had killed him.  Now it was in his best interest probably to kill him but this is—it’s still obviously a very big deal, it’s his first human kill.  No, he did not intend to kill him.

Now that he crossed that line, will this open up a door to sort of a darker Eph, a guy that’s willing to do more and cross the line a little bit more easily?

Corey: Yeah, I think you can say that.  The first time he killed anybody intentionally he was being attacked, and that was sort of purely defensive.  As the first season went on, he became more inured to killing to the point where he doesn’t really sort of flinch killing people who are completely turned.  

Then he crossed the line, again, at the beginning of this season, experimenting on freshly-turned people, and then this is another one, and then sort of the ratchet that sort of keeps pushing him past these lines that he never thought he would cross.  But yeah, it’s definitely from that point on to the rest of the season, he is in a different place, morally.

They’ve recast Zach for this season. [Has] it been more difficult to formulate that relationship because you don’t have the first season to kind of draw on working with the other actor?

Corey: The material was so different from season one to season two in terms of the types of scenes that I had.  It really is almost—it would almost be a whole new sort of relationship even with the same actor.  I think maybe that had something to do with the recasting with a sense of that this character was going in a very different direction from where he had been in the first season.  

So, just the very nature of the scenes are so different.  In the first season, Zach was really an object really in the fight between Kelly and Eph.  Here in this season he’s much more willful and self-governed.