by Grimm’s executive producers David Greenwalt and Jim Kouf spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about the cast’s reaction to the finale script, their favorite beasts, and the difficulties while shooting the episode. Source: The Hollywood Reporter
Take a sneak peek at THR interview. (This interview contains spoilers from the series finale)
You faked everyone out a bit by appearing to kill off nearly all your main characters. Were you ever tempted to just let them stay dead?
Jim Kouf: We had all fallen in love with the characters. We had the same desire as our fans so we didn’t want to kill them. And because this final season was dealing with such powerful religious icons including the staff of Moses, we started researching it and learned that nobody’s ever explained what happened to it. It did appear to have magical powers, so if you have those abilities, why not bring everyone back to life?
David Greenwalt: It would have been a pretty bold thing to end by leaving Nick alone, but what would that have meant? The universe is an empty cipher and humanity is going nowhere?
Did you fake out the actors when they sat down for their first table read?
Kouf: We actually didn’t do a table read. Every actor first got the script on his or her own. And they were all stunned when they discovered they’d died. They said they gasped and went, “Oh my God!” when they read each of them getting to have their own death moment. Then they kept reading to find out who’s going to die next. Some of them did think that their characters’ trajectories were headed in different directions than they actually were. And they were surprised that certain characters didn’t come back.
Did they ever ask what you were planning for the finale?
Kouf: They didn’t want to know. In the beginning, a few of them asked but most didn’t want to know. They wanted to treat it more as real life, where you don’t know what’s coming at you next.
How hard was it for everyone to film their final scenes together?
Greenwalt: It wasn’t easy, but that had a lot to do with the fact that as we prepared to shoot the last three episodes – which we saw as one giant movie – Portland got record snowfall. It took a month for the last episodes. We were using a lot of sets out in the woods and we couldn’t get to them. We went a lot of days over what we’d intended. It felt like this was the show that wouldn’t die! Maybe it was God’s way of saying, “C’mon guys! Give us just one more season!”
