‘Locke and Key’: Griffin Gluck Treated Netflix Show ‘as Carefully as Possible’ Before Big Twist (Exclusive)

Actor Griffin Gluck had to plan his performances “as carefully as possible” for Netflix‘s hit series Locke & Key. Gluck played Gabe, a central member of the group in the series, which remains one of Netflix’s top 10 shows a month after its release. In an exclusive interview with PopCulture.com, Gluck admitted that it was challenging knowing the whole story ahead of time.

Warning! Spoilers for Locke & Key are ahead!

Gluck has a lot of work to promote right now, from his coming-of-age comedy Big Time Adolescence, which hits theaters and streaming services soon, to his upcoming dark comedy Dinner in America. He is also back in the lead of a Netflix original series, but this is a long way off from his previous roles on the streaming service.

Gluck’s character Gabe came into Locke & Key a bit later into the season. Beginning as a member of the “Sevini Squad” and a friend of Scot (Petrice Jones), he soon became a romantic rival for the affections of Kinsey Locke (Emilia Jones). The very end of the season reveals that Gabe is actually just another persona of the shape-shifting demon that the Locke kids and their friends believed they had defeated.

Gluck told us that he “knew from the very beginning that [he] was going to be the evil man.” With the whole series filming at once, he had lots of time to prepare for that reveal, but in some ways that made it even more difficult to get across.

“I would say in my head when I was filming, there was always that voice in the back of my head saying: ‘remember, you’re an evil person, you have evil intentions,’ but I tried play it as carefully as possible,” he said. “Not to do too much on either spectrum, because it would just totally blow the character.”

Gluck added that the credit for the big reveal should go to the directors and writers on the show, as well as author Joe Hill who wrote the original comic books.

“I think a lot of it came through the directing, and specifically the writing — like lines that you would never expect to have evil intentions behind them, but they do,” he said. “I think the writing made it really a lot easier for me to get into that sort of head space because the lines are already there. And you can put a slightly mischievous tone onto it, but the more natural it comes off in the scene, like the less people really notice and notice it until the very end.”

Locke & Key is now streaming on Netflix.