Exclusive: Del Toro, Stoll & Maestro Talk The Strain, Its Creatures & Future of the Series

Corey Stoll is almost unrecognizable as Eph. That’s how much a full head of hair can change a character. Eph has enough problems before vampires descend on New York. He’s involved with a custody hearing for his son Zach, and that would be a distraction from a standard day on the job. This is no standard CDC case. Stoll also has a role in the upcoming Ant-Man movie and was completely cool and chill chatting in the hallway of the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

Shock: Is Eph’s hair a complete wig?

Corey Stoll: What are you talking about? I grew my hair out.

Shock: I would believe you.

Stoll: It’s a wig. It’s a complete wig, yes.

Shock: Is that how he’s described in the book or something you wanted to do to change your appearance?

Stoll: That was very much Guillermo’s idea and vision. I don’t know if he really bothers to describe his hair in the books but I think he certainly thought that he was modeling it off of what Eph looks like in the graphic novels.

Shock: Are you the type to have done research with the CDC?

Stoll: I did. I read some books over the months before we started, but the irony is that all of that goes out the window pretty much after the first episode. His baseline is this world of protocols and science, and very quickly it proves itself useless.

Shock: Things get really crazy at the end of 4, and even crazier in 5. Does it keep ramping up?

Stoll: Yeah, yeah. I feel like the basic shape of the season is sort of a build up to episode 8. 8 is when the team starts to come together. I don’t know if that’s a spoiler, and then it really takes off from there. There’s a little bit of respite and it takes on a real sort of adventure mode after that.

Shock: How much of the creatures are practical on set with you?

Stoll: An enormous amount. Obviously the tongues are all CGI and the worms, but the makeup is incredible. There was a learning curve I think with the makeup artists but pretty soon, halfway through the season, they were cranking out vampires. You could look at them just a few inches from your face and you couldn’t tell where the prosthetics started and their faces began. It was really pretty remarkable.

Shock: Is there more coming, like we haven’t seen the extent of the creatures?

Stoll: No, no, I don’t think you ever will. I think Guillermo and Carlton are very smart about constantly upping the stakes and upping the strangeness of the world. That’s one thing that’s amazing about where the series starts. They really throw down this gauntlet of this incredibly bizarre and grotesque world, and the fact that they have to keep topping that as they go on, they’ve really set themselves an incredible challenge.

Shock: At what point did you get to see the FX with the tongues?

Stoll: I don’t think they really even knew. I think it was a rolling experiment. It wasn’t until maybe the third episode that we started to get some test material and really start to see what we were encountering. But that was incredibly helpful, and when we started to see the worms, that was also really helpful. Throughout the whole pilot, we really didn’t know what they were going to look like. We were looking at these little neon green plastic tubes. They’re a lot more frightening in the final product.

Shock: Did you shoot the pilot at an actual airport?

Stoll: We did. Yeah, Toronto International Airport which was, luckily, I think it had been a temporary terminal as they built the new one. So it was barely used, so it didn’t have that sort of deep funk that a lot of airports have. It was actually quite a comfortable set and it was so cool. We had a real, I think it was a 767, and I got to walk on the wing of it. We crawled up into the cargo hold. It was pretty incredible, but of course when you see us on the interior of the plane, that’s a set. It was actually the same set that they built for the movie Non-Stop which I spent a couple months on before. They took it apart and drove it up to Toronto, so I’ve spent a lot of time on that plane.

Shock: There must only be a few planes they use for movies and shows. I wonder what other planes it was before.

Stoll: I think they built it for Non-Stop.

Shock: Was everything about the custody hearings helpful to you in understanding who Ephraim was before this happens?

Stoll: Yeah, it’s great. That’s the juicy stuff. That’s a great thing about this role is you do have a fair amount of medical jargon to get through but you’re constantly going back to this family drama, which is evolving and heartfelt and gives, because at a certain point, the end of the world, you can start to get a little numb to it. But, I think family drama has an immediacy that’s relatable.

Shock: Obviously this is a true emergency, but if it weren’t for this, would there be a solution to Ephraim’s workaholism and family life?

Stoll: That’s a good question. I tend to think not. I tend to think Eph is somebody who is an overachiever and has overachieved his entire life. Guillermo kept on referring to Orson Wells who was this boy genius who just succeeded beyond any sort of deserving when he was  young, and kept on succeeding and kept on succeeding, and everybody expected the world of him until somewhere in the middle of Magnificent Ambersons and then everything just fell apart. That’s where we find Eph. He’s pretty much in the middle of shooting Magnificent Ambersons.

Shock: Would he not want to be an overachieving father?

Stoll: That would’ve been a good thing for somebody to have told him. That would have been a very smart way to frame the issue for him. Ephraim is also a bit of a puppy in the sense that he is very distractable and will go to wherever [he’s needed]. He’ll put out the fires. He’ll oil the squeaky wheel, whatever metaphor you want to use. So when he’s with his son, and when he’s with his wife, he loves them 100% with all of his being. But, when his attention is demanded elsewhere, he’s 100% there. That’s the issue with him. It’s not a question of a lack of commitment or depth in his feeling for his family.

Shock: He seems to think he can micromanage his son which doesn’t work.

Stoll: Right, and Zach’s arc, for people who’ve read the book and I assume it will be somewhere along these lines in the series, Zach’s arc is almost as big as Eph’s over the course of the three books and however many seasons it takes us to get there. So he’s a remarkable character and the way they change over the course of the story, their stories really influences each other.

Shock: Does Eph get comfortable with Setrakian pretty quickly?

Stoll: I think he keeps a certain degree of skepticism throughout. Eph is a devout skeptic and that’s really the root of his belief system, is skepticism. He doesn’t give that up without a fight. By the end of the season, he’s given up a lot but he still believes in modern science.

Shock: Have they said what character you play in Ant-Man yet?

Stoll: I’m not sure. I think I read something that there were some rumors but I can’t confirm or deny them.

Shock: With Ant-Man – was it hard to have a director turnover?

Stoll: Well, I found out just like everybody else did, so that was surprising. It was hairy for a second there when we didn’t know what was going to happen, but I think having met with Peyton a couple of times, I think he’s great. He’s so enthusiastic and so smart, and I think the script is fantastic so I’m really psyched.

Shock: Actors must get new scripts all the time. Did it even seem like a thing to you?

Stoll: Honestly, actors are so fixated on when I read a script, I try to read the whole script but I’m just looking at my own role. I’m really thrilled with where my character’s at. I think it’ll be an enormous amount of fun.

Shock: Were you a horror fan before The Strain?

Stoll: Not particularly. I was a big comic book fan and sci-fi fan. I’ve loved great horror movies in the past. Certainly I’ve been a big fan of Guillermo’s, but a lot of the things are new to me, that horror world.

Shock: What are your uber comic book and sci-fi references?

Stoll: I actually haven’t kept up as much. There was a point in high school where I thought I would be a comic book artist. I didn’t think I’d be an actor. I remember practicing my signature to be like Walter Simonson. His name is like a brontosaurus. And I was a big fan of Mike Mignola before he did Hellboy and I was a big fan of Hellboy before the movies came out. And I’m going to Comic-Con for the first time next week so that’ll be exciting. I used to go to Comic-Con in New York in the Pennsylvania Hotel to buy and sell comic books but I think this’ll be a little bit different experience.