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\u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever worked with an actor who was more different than the character they were playing than Leland and Michael,\u201d King said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to imagine where he\u2019s pulling that from, because he is so very different from that in life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Christine Lahti, one of Emerson\u2019s \u201cEvil\u201d co-stars, concurred. \u201cHe\u2019s the opposite of Leland,\u201d she said, describing him as \u201cgentlemanly, kind, sensitive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emerson said he has been drawn to \u201cgrotesquerie\u201d since he first started acting, in school plays in Iowa where he grew up. \u201cI was always the bespectacled little guy with the shrill voice who would play the old man or the clown or the wizard,\u201d he said. He would do drawings of \u201cghoulish figures that have no eyeballs.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s still a taste of the macabre in his otherwise very pleasant penthouse: There\u2019s a large drawing, by Emerson, of a cat skull he found under a house he was working on in St. Augustine, Fla. Florida was one of the detours Emerson took during his lengthy journey to a thriving acting career.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen young actors ask me \u2018What advice do you have?\u2019 I say, \u2018Can you answer this question: Could I wait 20 or 30 years to be a success as an actor?\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cBecause that\u2019s what it took me.\u201d<\/p>\n
He moved to New York to act after college but found it hard to break into the business, and eventually pivoted to magazine illustration after taking weekend classes at Parsons while doing retail jobs. His first marriage, which ended in divorce, brought him to Jacksonville, Fla., where he did regional theater. A graduate acting program took him to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, which is where he met Preston when she came to town to play Ophelia in a production of \u201cHamlet.\u201d Emerson was Guildenstern.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Preston now stars in the CBS procedural \u201cElsbeth,\u201d also created by the Kings. It\u2019s a family business, although the cheery sleuth Elsbeth could not be more different from the disconcerting Leland. (Emerson marvels at Preston\u2019s work on \u201cElsbeth\u201d: \u201cWhere does she come up with that? It\u2019s just so great.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Emerson credits his Shakespearean training \u2014 twice he played Iago, the chatty schemer of \u201cOthello\u201d \u2014 for his ability to keep viewers on edge. \u201cIago forces the audience to collaborate with him and makes them complicit in his mischief,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
When Emerson reads a script for \u201cEvil,\u201d he starts to imagine how unpredictable he can be. \u201cIs the line maybe secretly funnier than anyone imagined? Let\u2019s try that,\u201d he said. \u201cOr playing a counter strategy: Being gleeful about a thing that the audience expects you to be glum about. Or be upset about something that no one else in the world would be upset about.\u201d<\/p>\n
Herbers, who plays the forensic psychologist Kristen Bouchard on \u201cEvil,\u201d said acting opposite Emerson is like a game of \u201chigh-level chess.\u201d He delivers a line about, say, murdering her character\u2019s children as if he were offering \u201ca bouquet of flowers.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe meet in the scene, and we surprise each other, and I think we excite each other,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Emerson said the \u201cEvil\u201d crew is thrilled when there is a Leland scene to shoot. (Herbers confirmed this.) \u201cThey rather delight in Leland,\u201d Emerson said. \u201cThey just know it\u2019s going to be scenes that are just dangerous and have a little crackle and also sly humor and many comical upsets or frustrations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the course of the four seasons, Leland has confessed his troubles to a devil therapist, posed as a video game character to threaten Kristen\u2019s daughters and danced in a wheat field in a particularly hilarious dream sequence. He\u2019s been drenched in blood and pelted with Antichrist vomit. In one scene, Leland sings the song \u201cKids\u201d from \u201cBye Bye Birdie.\u201d Emerson sometimes feels as if the Kings are testing him: \u201cCan we make it so dopey that Emerson won\u2019t do it? But I\u2019ve defeated them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n