‘Evil’ Star Talks [Spoiler]’s ‘Heartbreaking’ Death, Her ‘Fatal Flaw’ & More

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Evil Season 4 Episode 10 “How to Survive a Storm.”]

“I think it was the best season for Sheryl by far,” says Christine Lahti. And it was, but Evil Season 4 was also a heartbreaking one.

Sheryl tried to kill Leland (Michael Emerson), only for it to backfire on her—she wasn’t expecting him to have a demonic henchman there to knock her out after she drugged him. A “fall” from a fourth-floor balcony landed her in the hospital, and she died from her injuries. But she did manage to take down Leland in another way—she left a video with Kristen (Katja Herbers) showing the back room in his apartment where he drained victims, leading to his arrest.

“It was such a fun season for me,” Lahti tells TV Insider. “I got so much to do, and leading up to my demise, I think the Kings wanted the audience to really care about Sheryl, even if it’s complex, it’s conflicted. She has done horrible things, but you see her really trying to save her granddaughter’s life. You really see her trying to bring down the bad guy. You really see how much she cares and loves these girls. So I think there’s some empathy for Sheryl at the end. I hope?”

Below, Lahti reflects on Sheryl’s death, shares the moment she learned about her character’s death, and more.

At the beginning of the episode, Sheryl goes up to Kristen in the supermarket and says that she and her daughters are the most important people in the world to her, even if she hasn’t shown it. Is she being the most honest with Kristen she has been in a long time, maybe ever in that moment?

Christine Lahti: Yes. I think ever since the beginning of this season when Kristen said, “You’re no longer allowed to see my daughters and you’re cut off from me,” that was really the tipping point. All she cares about ultimately is her family, even though she wants power—but she wants power to protect her family, her girls, and she wants to teach her girls about how to become empowered women. But I think, yeah, she finds Kristen in that supermarket and gives her the stun guns [and says], “Leland’s coming after me. He’s coming after you and protect them, and I need to warn you, I need to, at any cost, protect you and the girls.” So I think she’s desperate. I think she’s scared, but she’s on a mission and she hopes to prevail, of course. She hopes to be the one to kill rather than be killed. That is her hope.

Elizabeth Fisher / Paramount+

Then she goes to Leland’s apartment. She has it all set up. But then she gets surprised and hit in the head from behind. She wasn’t prepared for any true fight back, and I think that was her downfall, right?

I think you’re right. I think she thought she had it all worked out, that he would be drugged, and then she would be able to slice his throat and kill him, but she wasn’t prepared for the demon or the henchman. For me, for Sheryl, it’s not a real demon. It’s just an evil man, like a henchman, like a guy that’s going to help out Leland, [like] a bodyguard. So she wasn’t prepared for that, and that was her, I guess, fatal flaw, that she didn’t expect there to be anyone else there that would do his bidding.

And then comes her heartbreaking death. Talk about filming that scene in the hospital room with Sheryl’s granddaughters, David (Mike Colter), and the last rites, and Kristen.

Heartbreaking. Really heartbreaking. We had to shoot that many months later [due to the strike], but I had been thinking about it for many months as well. So I was not only saying goodbye to my granddaughters and my daughter, but I was saying goodbye to being in this show and being part of this family because we didn’t know that the show was going to be canceled at that point. I thought they would go on for Season 5 and Season 6, whatever, but without me, of course. So I was saying goodbye to just being part of this incredible ride and this journey of Sheryl, saying goodbye to Sheryl as an actress. What a journey. What a fun, challenging, exhilarating, crazy, f**ked up character. And I just have loved it. I love the challenge of it. I’ve loved the challenge of how to make somebody so flawed and insecure and dark somehow also understandable and empathetic and battling a world of misogyny wherever she goes and doing the best she can, even though she does some bad s**t.

Complicated characters like that tend to be the best ones.

I think so, yeah. I’ve always liked playing women who are deeply complex like that, whether they’re s**tty moms and why are they, or evil women, why are they. It’s always, what’s the underbelly? Why is she so obsessed about gaining power? Because she felt so powerless growing up as a woman. She grew up, came of age in the rock and roll days where she was a groupie, and it was such a misogynist world, and she was treated like a sex object and I think abused and maybe raped even. I have this whole backstory of why she is obsessed with gaining power and giving and helping her granddaughters and daughter become empowered.

It’s one of the reasons she hated Andy so much—he’s a loser husband. He’s not a good father. Maybe I shouldn’t have put him on a shelf for several months and drained his brain fluid. That probably was going over the edge a little bit, crossing the line a little bit. But ultimately it was to protect my [family]. Again, I can’t judge. These characters that I play that are often not very likable and often very complex and challenging. The key is to never judge them, is to always find their reasons for doing things. And everybody rationalizes. I don’t think there are too many [people], unless you’re really insane, where you say, “I’m going to do something really evil today.” No, [it’s] “I have to do something to make something right, or to bring somebody bad down, to protect whatever it is.” It’s a positive objective. And then therefore, you’re not playing evil. You’re playing someone who’s in need. Does that make sense?

Elizabeth Fisher / Paramount+

It does. But this is Evil. So there are all sorts of ways that we could see you in the bonus episodes. So will we see you again?

No, I wish. I wish, I mean, I heard there was a funeral for me, so there’s a picture of me. There’s some talk about me. But no, I do not appear in the bonus episodes. I was hoping to come back, honestly, as a demon ghost that would just torment Leland and put cockroaches in his ear while he’s sleeping, just have tweezers and just be dropping baby cockroaches into his ear. [Laughs] That was one of the things I pitched to Robert King, but obviously they didn’t take it.

She did leave the video for Kristen, and I’m assuming the envelope for Andy (Patrick Brammall) has one as well. Is there more to the one for Kristen, maybe something more personal for her that we haven’t seen?

No, it’s pretty much, here’s the truth, here’s what you need to do. I can’t remember if there was a line about, I love you. I think there was “I love you. I’ll always love you,” something like that. But it wasn’t more than just, this is what Leland did. I was an accomplice, but you need to get him behind bars. You need to bring him down. I wasn’t able to.

Considering how it ended for Andy and that Leland did try to use him to kill his own daughter, does Sheryl have any regrets about how she’s felt about Andy now?

Yes, I think so. And I think what she wants, what she recorded for Andy was basically, “Here’s what happened to you. Here’s how you can get help.” I don’t know if she apologized because she really was an accomplice to all this, but I think one of the ways to rectify or make amends to Andy is by letting him know truthfully what happened to him so he can get help.

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I did think that Sheryl would be the one to kill Leland if someone did. That was my assumption.

Yes, me too. And I remember getting the call from Michelle King just before they released the script for Episode 10, and she said, “I just want to give you a heads up. You’re going to be killed in this episode.” And I was shocked and really sad, and she said, “I’m sorry, we love Sheryl, but it’s the logical thing to do. It makes the most sense to us in a showdown between Leland and Sheryl, the show is called Evil. Who do you think is going to prevail? The evil guy.”

At least Sheryl got that moment in the hospital with her granddaughters.

Yes. I was really happy they gave her that. It made me very, very happy. She really got to express her love to them and say goodbye, and also to Kristen. And I feel like Kristen, even though she doesn’t understand everything her mom did, there’s at least a kind of reckoning or a kind of forgiveness. I think it’s a kind of connection that Sheryl’s able to make with Kristen that really helps Sheryl, I think, let go and die.

Evil, Thursdays, Paramount+