‘East of Eden’: Inside Cathy & Charles’ Surprise Reunion With Florence Pugh & Mike Faist

Netflix’s East of Eden takes liberties with John Steinbeck‘s source material, but also amplifies some of the book’s smaller moments. Warning: Spoilers for East of Eden ahead!

From the jump, Charles (Mike Faist) sees who Cathy (Florence Pugh) truly is behind the meek, innocent facade. Charles even warns his brother, Adam (Christopher Abbott), that Cathy will destroy him. Despite the tension between Charles and Cathy, like calls to like, and they have a brief tryst. Years after Cathy and Adam left Charles behind in Connecticut for the Salinas Valley in California, Charles is the person Cathy envisions as an extension of herself as she begins to lose her grip on reality.

In Chapter 40 of Steinbeck’s novel, Cathy feels Charles, who has long been dead, is “behind her, looking over her shoulder.” In the final two episodes, the limited series expands on this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it book moment and brings Charles back into the fold. Stars Florence Pugh and Mike Faist, as well as co-showrunner and executive producer Zoe Kazan, spoke with TV Insider about the significance of Charles’ haunting presence in Cathy’s life. Watch the video above.

“I think the moment she meets her children, and they don’t want her, it breaks her in a way that is irreparable,” Pugh said. “I don’t think she comes back from that. And the way that she is processing her life and thinking about the decisions that she made is obviously making her feel very sick and having Charles in her mind constantly and talking to her… I believed in those moments when we were shooting them that she is coming to terms with the fact that he probably could have been her one true love. Whether that is the case or not, that was definitely a way of me accessing that relationship, and her kind of romanticizing what could have been, or even just the short while that they did have.”

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Faist finds it fascinating that Charles is the one Cathy ends up thinking about in this period of her life. “She’s having these reflections after having lived the life that she has led, and she’s bringing him up as this kind of almost Cheshire Cat figure in her Alice in Wonderland story,” he said. “And I think it’s very natural because her character makes the choice to marry Adam and move out west, and she’s lived with these choices that she’s made. And the person that she’s talking to in the end is Charles, the person that she actually left behind. It kind of just goes back to that thing that Charles ultimately says: kind recognizing kind. I think these are two people that really see each other. They see this thing that exists within each other, and they have a very powerful connection.”

For Kazan, she needed a way to access Cathy’s “inner life” and quickly realized bringing Charles back via Cathy’s mind was the way to do that. “Cathy is an incredibly lonely person, and her self-isolation is, I think, central to her fate and to her character,” Kazan told TV Insider. “I think that it is an extension of her viewpoint of the world, which is that the world is full of evil and full of stupid and evil people.”

She continued, “I, at the same time, really needed access to her inner life, and so I couldn’t give her a friend to talk to. I had been playing with this direct address from the very start of the series, like her voice-over. She’s speaking directly to the audience, and I always thought of that as her speaking to herself. And I kind of wanted to do a little sleight of hand where Charles stands in for herself, and I think it thematically doubles back on this idea of kind recognizes kind, and her idea that maybe — and maybe she says it’s just for effect, or maybe not — that she maybe could have loved Charles. I found it very useful, and also the way that she describes having an imaginary friend in Alice, like her conception of Alice in Wonderland. I thought, oh, there’s quite a lot of textual support for this choice, and then also we just wanted to get lovely Mike back on screen.”

Netflix

Initially, Charles’ reappearance was only going to be brief, but with an actor of Faist’s caliber on your roster, his screen time quickly increased.

“Originally in the script, it was only kind of a few interactions with him, but it was so beautiful having them back together again. And Mike was crouched down by a chair, and he insisted on coming back early to be in the room and reading with me. Because usually, with things that small, the first AD would read it or the director would read it. You wouldn’t necessarily need or require for the actor to come back just for a few lines, but he insisted on being back there and insisted on being in the room with me. And what that created was a whole relationship,” Pugh shared. “And we did. We put him in more and more, and then got him in his costume, and then got him in the room and had him interacting with me. And it was like she finally gets touch in the way that she wants it, and she finally gets love in the way that she wants it, and it’s all manifesting in her own psychotic break.”

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‘East of Eden’ Adaptations: Films, TV Series Based on Steinbeck Novel

Cathy spends her entire life choosing to protect herself in her attempt to feel safe. Pugh pointed out that “it’s interesting that, even at the end, when she’s in her own home, she’s looking back to a decision that she made when she was younger, based off that very decision, and maybe there’s regret there. But I think it’s a really beautiful way to end her life because I’m sure there will be plenty of things that we all regret when we come to those days beforehand. I actually feel like for the first time she feels really comfortable with him. We actually get to see her happy and flirting and coy.”

East of Eden, Streaming Now, Netflix