I’m not looking at it through the eyes of someone who is evil or malevolent, or who wants the world to end. But when I’m investigating who Michael is or when I’m in his skin, I’m looking at the world through his eyes.
I think it’s important, first of all, to say that I understand there’s a separation between who I am and who the character is. So how do you view him, if not in that black-and-white way? People are talking about Michael Langdon as the vessel of evil and I just don’t see that. The last time that we saw him, Michael is about 3 years old and we see him do this one act. But the pressure, or the weight and the fandom around Michael Langdon’s return? I put that completely out of my mind because it’s not something that can help me to play him. ( Laughs.) So that’s when I knew what I signed up for and what I was about to walk into. Fans are very vocal and I’ve heard much about the second coming of Michael Langdon. Then when I got the script and the name was Michael Langdon, I knew straight away. Originally, it was a different name in the script: Elijah Cross. ( Laughs.) That’s what I knew going in.Īt what point did you realize he was Michael Langdon, the Antichrist of AHS? And what pressures come with joining an anthology as a key player in the show’s universe? Then I got the second script and two days later I was shooting that scene with Sarah Paulson, the Venable interrogation scene in her office - a nine page workout. I read the first script but the character’s name was different. Everything was so dark and chic with the red scarves.
Then two days before during the fitting I knew something was up. I had this concept that he was going to not necessarily be on the side of good, but that he ultimately was a good guy. The way that he described the character was as if he was the protagonist, and that Sarah’s character - who I now understand is really Venable and Cordelia - is the antagonist. He told me that I’d be playing this character who would have very long, blonde hair and an affinity for capes. Not that he needed to sell it! But the pitch was that I was going to be acting with Sarah Paulson and Kathy Bates and that was something I very much wanted to do. Ryan had asked me to come in and play a character on Horror Story. So I just put that straight out of my mind.”īelow, in a chat with THR, Fern digs into the genesis of Michael Langdon, teases the end of the season as “satisfying and overwhelming and fun and tragic,” and responds to the real Church of Satan having an opinion about his devil-spawned character. “It’s not something that’s tangible or achievable in the scene or arc of the story.
“I can’t play a vessel for evil,” he says. He actually finds “the whole idea of religion overwhelming and frightening,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter, and he also doesn’t view his character as evil. The irony is that for Fern, who immersed himself in the Old Testament for the role, the scenes that explore Satanism - like Michael eating a heart after a human sacrifice - are not the ones that keep him up at night. By design, mystery still swirls around the man at the center of the season as it barrels towards its conclusion. Seven seasons later, Murphy returned to that mythology with the crossover season of Apocalypse, which has tied together Murder House and season three’s Coven with the end-of-the-world plot. Michael was a 3-year-old who had been prophesied to be the Antichrist, the son of the devil who would bring about the end of the world. Two days before heading into production on the eighth season of horror anthology AHS, titled Apocalypse, Fern realized he was playing more than just a guy with “long, blonde hair and an affinity for capes” when he saw the name of his character in the new script: Michael Langdon.ĪHS viewers first met Michael Langdon in season one’s Murder House. The actor had broken out with a performance on Ryan Murphy’s other FX series, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, and had just wrapped filming on the final season of Netflix’s House of Cards. Cody Fern didn’t know he was playing the Antichrist when he first landed his American Horror Story role.
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