The finale is pretty brutal.
Yeah.
I think people are going to have a strong reaction to the scene where David rapes Syd after altering her memory. How concerned were you about making your protagonist do something like that, and what were your concerns about doing that to a female character?
I mean, for me, the whole show started with this idea, even before I had assigned a character to it. It was just: What can I do in this genre? I felt like, for the genre to be great, it would have to be a great show regardless of the genre. I thought, Well, it would be interesting if it was a supervillain story on some level. To say, How do you take a character from a sympathetic place to an unsympathetic place?
That doesn’t mean that David is going to stay there, because obviously, in the X-Men universe, characters cross back and forth. You have Magneto, who, sometimes he’s on the right side, and sometimes he’s on the wrong side. With David, there was always this underlying question of, “Is he mentally ill or does he have these powers? Or both? Does he have these powers but he’s also mentally ill because just of the experience of living with these powers for 30-plus years?” If you’re in a psychiatric hospital and you’re hearing voices and you’re seeing things, even if those are your powers, at a certain point, your personality develops around them. He has this vulnerability, personality-wise and psychically. I liken it to Fargo on some level. In Fargo, at some point, there’s always a moment where the worst person in the show says, “I’m the victim here.”
From David’s point of view, he had this really traumatic event in his childhood that he’s never recovered from. There’s part of him that, in a very understandable way, is still a small child going, “I’m a good person and I deserve love.” You can rationalize a lot of things based on feeling like you’re the victim and you deserve something. In his mind, it’s okay to make Syd forget how she feels about him and then rob her of all consent because they’re in love. In his mind, it’s a love story and it’s going to end as a love story. Of course, watching it, it’s a little creepy for us because we realize, “Hold on, this genre’s not supposed to do that. We’re not supposed to have our protagonist who, as she says, ‘You drugged me and had sex with me.’”
I mean, look, it’s controversial. I don’t know what the conversation will be, but I think it’s worth having the conversation about consent and about the fact that there is no justification for acting without another person’s consent. And, as she said, “I’m the hero and you’re just another villain.” On some level, that’s the story of the show. The question is, is there any redemption for him coming out of that? And where do we go next?