‘Exorcist’ Showrunners Tease Vatican Twists and New Characters

The Exorcist season 2 premiered on Fox, bringing us back tot he to the saga of Father Tomas Ortega (Alfonso Herrera) and Father Marcus Keane’s (Ben Daniels) battle against occult forces trying to invade our world.

Since the decision was made to treat each season of The Exorcist like an anthology, this season premiere transported us to a whole new local (rural Montana) for a whole new story involving some new characters (like John Cho’s Andrew Kim and his foster kids).

The Exorcist excels as teasing demonic threats and generally creeping viewers out with dark foreshadowing – and we certainly got that in the season 2 premiere. However, as you can see in the video above, we also got to speak with showrunners Jeremy Slater and Sean Crouch, who revealed where season 2 will take us, and a new player in the chess game between good and evil that we have yet to meet.

Vatican Problems

One of the big reveals of The Exorcist season 1 was just how much demonic corruption there was in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. As Father Bennett found out the hard way, trusting in elders and superiors of the church can be a deadly mistake. 

As we’ll see early on in The Exorcist season 2, the heroic faction of exorcists (Tomas, Marcus and Bennett) will be confronting more of the corruption in the church – and that corruption leads right to the Vatican itself. 

As the showrunners explain in the interview above, “we’re delving deep into the Vatican to evolve the mythology of our show, and going to the Office of the Exorcism, which actually exists.”

As for what else is coming in season 2, the showrunners say, 

“Big twists, big surprises coming up. A lot of people have secrets they have not yet told. There’s something fun about pairing up these characters in ways we haven’t seen before, so really bringing Marcus and Tomas together as brothers and partners and exploring the dynamic between them… and really diving into this family and playing up the mystery of which kid it is in the foster home that’s a target of the demon. It’s allowing us to do a lot of sort of fun Poltergeist-style scares that we didn’t get to do in season 1.”

The New Player

The Vatican won’t just be under threat from the hellish and demonic forces you’d expect – it will also be facing pressure from a new character in the series, whose allegiances won’t be clear at the outset. 

Actress Zuleikha Robinson (LOST, Rome) was cast in the show as “Mouse,” who was described by Deadline as “a mysterious figure waging her own private war against the Catholic patriarchy. Mysterious and pragmatic, Mouse takes her duty seriously, but in the end, she’s loyal to only herself.”

As the showrunners describe, Mouse will help them “to go into more of the mythology of demons in the Vatican, and how the Catholic Church actually digs them out. And that if there’s darkness, there’s a force of light fighting them.”

From that statement it’s not clear if Mouse will be friend or foe to Tomas and Marcus, but it sure does have us and other fans excited for the rapidly expanding world of The Exorcist. 

The Exorcist airs Friday nights @ 9/8c on Fox.