Preacher Season 1 Will End Where The Comics Began

♦ Preacher on AMC is about ready to rock, and star Dominic Cooper has been talking to the press. We have a round-up of his views on the role of Jesse Custer and the world premier trailer for Preacher (below)

A preacher, a criminal, and a vampire walk into a bar. A scene from Preacher the TV show, translated to the screen by Seth Rogen, his This Is the End co-writer and co-director Evan Goldberg, the co-executive producer of Breaking Bad Sam Catlin, and DC Comics.

Created in 1995 by Garth Ennis and artist Steve Dillon, Preacher centres on the Rev. Jesse Custer, a small-town Texan who has lost his way, faith, and the trust of his congregation, when he is possessed by a supernatural entity and begins to develop otherworldly powers that give him the power to command anyone to do anything he says: he literally has the voice of God. He discovers that he’s not the only supernatural being on this planet.

Sam Catlin told BuzzFeed in an interview, that the show was “fucking crazy, and it should not be on television.”

“The meeting I had with them, in the beginning, was a bunch of hairy blokes trying to explain to me the insanity,” he remembers. “The way they were pitching the show, with a boy who has a face like a sphincter and a man who will sleep with meat and the various other things. They had such joy about such ridiculous things and such a clear idea of what they wanted it to be. You could gather that they were going to get it right.”

Why did AMC want him for Jesse Custer? 

“I don’t know what it is, there are things that I’ve gone in for that I’m just like, ‘How do I have the nerve? It’s hard to say, but there’s obviously enough stuff for them to see to know that I would be able to do what’s required for Jesse Custer,” he says.

 

As he’s playing Jesse Custer in an AMC show, does he think Custer fits the same anti-hero mould as Don Draper of Mad Men or Breaking Bad’s Walter White?

“I suppose he does,” Cooper admits. “It’s an interesting idea and questions why we’re enjoying watching that. I suppose it’s because we can relate more to it because we all are in some way flawed. Even if we’re not, we certainly think we have flaws in our own personality and mistakes that we’ve made, or we’re trying to be better than we actually are.”

“[A man like] Don works for an advertising agency,” Cooper says. “This man [Jesse], is spiritually led. has grown up believing in something, but has a huge guilt from his childhood. That in itself is a different story. It’s another idea of why a man is broken. It’s interesting and exciting to see a man or woman dealing with his or her demons and trying to do something good and better.

“[Jesse] really, genuinely wants to bring this corrupt, dilapidated town that’s at its knees to stand up again, resurrect itself and be the wonderful place he remembers his father taking care of. But it’s really hard. I think it’s a good reflection on the difference in society in a small town then and now in our society. He’s dealing with different people with different desires, and a different need for money.

“He wants to make things good. Whether that’s coming from his own guilt towards his father, I don’t know yet. Where does that come from? He’s trying to make peace with what he did, the things he did to his dad. Was he the cause of his father’s downfall and death? He’s trying to make that right. I think they’re interesting complexities that we as humans like to watch because we struggle with them. If we don’t struggle with them much, we probably know that more struggles will come along at some point. It’s interesting to see how people deal with them.”

How closely does Preacher the TV show align with Preacher the comic?

“We almost end where the comic starts,” Cooper reveals. “And it’s so necessary because you need to get to know characters. The shows that are flawed and that haven’t continued, however good they’ve been, have been when there’s a kind of chaos of people that we can’t, as an audience, get to know or understand, and therefore care about.

“I think what we have done is establish the roots of these people,” Cooper continues. “This is their home, this is the world in which they inhabit, this is where they’ve come from, this is the reason they go on this journey, which we learn throughout the comic with flashbacks and things like that. But you need to make a success of something to show. It’s such a good environment anyway, such an interesting physical environment. This is their town, this is where we are, this is the beginning of the story. I think that was definitely an essential decision that was made, to ground something that can become extraordinarily flamboyant and all over the place.”

“I’m sure we’ll end up, in some series down the road, in Hell or somewhere, or maybe in Heaven. It’ll become more and more extraordinary. I think it has to be embedded in something at the moment that people can grasp.”

Cooper says the intention of everyone involved in the creation of AMC’s Preacher has been to stay true to the spirit, rather than the letter of the source material.

“When I first met the guys, creatively, who were behind it, they said, Look, we’ve got these beautiful, wonderfully well drawn-out characters, but we need to now make a world for it, and we need to be able to take it in any direction. They’re going to stick to the idea – the journey, the search – because they have to. I think that’s essential”

Sources: Comicbook.com, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Buzzfeed