This Monday, April 29th, The Following wraps up its 15-episode first season with "The Final Chapter." I had a chance to speak with actor James Purefoy -- Joe Carroll himself -- about the depths of Joe's madness, having all of Joe's best laid plans crumble around him and how he doesn't even know which ending audiences will see in the finale.
IGN TV: First off, can you tease the season finale a bit?
James Purefoy: Obviously, I have to be very very careful because I must not give anything big away. All I do know is that it's very astute at tying up a lot of the loose ends and [series creator] Kevin Williamson obviously wants to make it a satisfying conclusion to the season. And I would imagine, because he's a mischievous little imp, that he'll want to keep the fish hook firmly placed in the upper lip of the audience to try and drag them on to the second season. It will be explosive and if you are of an asthmatic disposition you are going to need your inhaler because the storyline with Agent Parker gets pretty f**king grisly.
James Purefoy as Joe Carroll.
IGN: I know! Being buried alive is pretty much everyone's nightmare scenario.
Purefoy: Does she survive or doesn't she? One of the things about our finale is that I'm not sure who knows how the show ends. Because I don't think I know how the show ends. There were various scripts going around with different endings. I know that they shot some endings, but maybe not others. But which of them they shot and which of them they didn't, I don't know. What I do is that I had to go in and do some ADR a couple of days ago and they asked me to do some stuff in there that could send the story off on an entirely different direction. But again, that might have just been Kevin Williamson f***ing with me.
IGN: Does he do that a lot?
Purefoy: Oh yeah. Kevin Williamson kind of is - without, obviously, the killing of sophomore students - he is like Joe Carroll.
IGN: Going into the finale, there are only a two or three followers left from the mansion. Was Joe's plan always to thin the herd and have no one standing at the end?
Purefoy: We must remember that, at this point, Joe's followers, these people, were quite localized around Richmond, Virginia. And that the internet is a vast, spectral beast that leeches into the lives of people all over the world and as far as I know we've only used up the followers within a hundred mile radius of that town on the Eastern seaboard. There are other places, not just in the United States but all over the world, where we can go with this show.
IGN: For the first half of the season, Joe was incarcerated. Now he's out and about, but it also seems like all of his best laid plans started to crumble when he escaped prison. Was it fun for you to play a more unglued, irate Joe?
Purefoy: I liked it. I quite enjoyed it. I enjoyed both parts of the season of course and the really interesting thing about being in prison is that because you are stuck in one place, the possibilities of your dangerousness become sort of endless in a way. And funnily enough, they become more limited by being out of prison. Because when you're in prison it's only the barriers of your mind that stop you from going to places that you can't deal with. Whereas, when you're out and everything's in reality, he can do whatever he wants to do. But having said that, certainly the big missile, if you like, that has broken through the belief in himself and the force field that he'd placed around himself with absolute certainty was when Claire stabbed him. I think that came a real visceral shock to him. Because Joe - let's not forget that Joe is mad. He's always been mad.
He's a very theatrical figure in many ways. He puts on costumes of calculating cold calmness. That's just a costume he puts on. Underneath that, he's volcanic lava bubbling away with just absolutely random insanity that has no consistency whatsoever. So it's completely feasible to assume that what Joe thinks needs to be done a 9:00 in the morning could change completely by 9:15. We can't put the measure of our own sanity against someone like Joe, in terms of what he's capable of doing. In that respect, it's been a lot of fun playing him because you never know what he's going to do next.
Continue to Page 2 as Purefoy discusses Joe's failed writing career, fan encounters and more.
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