Working on highly anticipated but super hush-hush projects has to be one of the most challenging parts of the entertainment industry. When Kathrine Barnes landed the role of Cheryl Dawson on Prime Video’s The Bondsman, starring Kevin Bacon, Jennifer Nettles and Damon Herriman, could she scream it from the rooftops? No, her involvement was kept under wraps until two days before the series dropped.
We were privileged enough to get the inside scoop on Barnes’s casting and sit down together via Zoom to discuss what it was like taking on such a pivotal character. Cheryl’s arc is bonkers even on a show involving a demon-hunting bounty hunter, the Devil’s soul-collecting pyramid scheme and a country-music comeback.
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Disclaimer: The following interview has been edited for clarity and includes spoilers for The Bondsman. If you haven’t finished the eight-episode season yet, you may want to stop here.
The Bondsman’s Kathrine Barnes
Diana Keng: What were your first impressions of the show based on its scripts?
Kathrine Barnes: The audition was interesting because it was the first time I saw pages, and none of them were real. Or mine. One was a scene that was for a different character, and they subbed out the name and were like, “Generally, give us some dialogue with this attitude.” I think nothing had been written for Cheryl. I think she was supposed to be a more minor character. But I read that scene, and it was basically just a bartender who’s seen stuff. And that was a lot of fun cause I feel that deeply in my soul.
DK: Have you ever worked as a bartender before?
KB: So, I got my bartending license when I was 17. I went to school for it. I was doing flourishes because I used to be a majorette in high school and loved twirling around the bottles and stuff. And then I couldn’t work for four years. Legally. Then, I never did it. And here we are. Sorry to Boston Bartending School.
Game for Anything
KB: The second [audition] scene was … unhinged. This is the one that people remember when we talk about it. The direction for it was, “We’re watching this character moments after she’s crawled out of a grave. And a demon is inhabiting a body for the first time. Why don’t you just show us what that looks like?” I was like, “Okay.”
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[It was] a dummy scene that never made it into a script, never made it to air. It culminated with her adjusting to being in a new body, killing a guy on the street, and then making direct eye contact with the camera [at an extreme] close-up, and just screaming. For a while. It was a lot of fun. My dog really didn’t like it. I got to do two takes of it before she lost control of herself cause she did not like the screaming. But my impression was generally, “Oh, even if this is all dummy sides, something unhinged is happening on this show. And I want to be a part of that. For sure.”
FIRST MAJOR SPOILER: Kevin Bacon’s character Hub Halloran kills Barnes’s character Cheryl a month before the events of the series premiere. In the season finale, her corpse is possessed by Lilith, a fallen angel known as one of the Shackled Seven.
Lilith
DK: Did you find an overlap between Cheryl and Lilith?
KB: I did a lot of backstory work on Cheryl. It was fun to imagine what life was like in this small town for somebody who had this kind of energy of having been around the block but really hadn’t. She is still in the town that she was born and raised in. I thought about her a lot as somebody who was excited to see the world, wanted to get out and learn things, to travel and take in new experiences.
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[She’s] somebody who knew she had more to do out there. In a very dark way, that is also what Lilith is driven by. She has been trapped in a place, held captive and tortured, and abused for millennia. She knows that she’s got a bigger purpose and is just dying to break out. Not always with the sunniest disposition in mind, but [there’s] this idea of expanse in both of them.
DK: Did you do as much backstory work on Lilith?
KB: Oh, yeah. But I tried to actively avoid the capital “L,” Lore, because our show changed it to something very specific to the show. I didn’t want to get those circumstances caught up in or confused with other stuff I knew about Lilith the character in the Bible and pop culture and in other media. I was trying to stay in my Bondsman Lilith bubble. But within that, yes, I did a lot of imagining. Kind of just sit there and imagine the fury of being held captive cooking, the fury of not being able to live up to your potential cooking.
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No #MeToo Movement in Hell
DK: Were you given the pages where other characters talk about Lilith?
KB: Yeah, I had a week with them. It was [a] flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants and living-in-the-present sort of shoot. But that was nice to have a few days just to kind of be like, “Okay, here’s her priorities. Here are the circumstances. Here’s what’s going on here. She’s angry. Let’s go.”
Getting Out of Landry
DK: Does Cheryl see Lucky as someone who could be an escape from this small town? Why does she defend him to Hub?
KB: I think of that as radical acceptance. Lucky is there, he’s employing her, and she’s seen a lot of much bigger a–holes. If she can get Hub, her buddy, to bury the hatchet with him or think of him as less of a threat than Hub feels like he is, she can have her buddy back at the bar, I think. It’s more about Hub than about Lucky.
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DK: What would Cheryl do if she got out of Landry?
KB: I thought her dad probably had an incredible experience in Thailand or the Czech Republic. She’d wanna start somewhere far [away] and soak it up. I kept seeing her take pictures of things, which is so antithetical. I forget to take pictures anytime I’m on vacation or on a trip or anything like that. It’s pathological at this point, honestly. For some reason, I just kept imagining her – maybe not with a really nice camera – but something.
DK: Does Cheryl have connections that tie her to Landry, or is it a fear of leaving what she’s known?
KB: For Cheryl, I think it was connections and finances that kept her there. It’s so funny. I did a bunch of imagination stuff, thinking that maybe she just had one parent for seven of the eight episodes, and then I got the script for the last episode, and Maryanne said something like, “Her parents will want to know where she is.” And I was like, “Well! Start over, then. But yeah, definitely, one or two parents, she’s got people she loves there for sure.
SECOND MAJOR SPOILER
DK: So, by the end of Season 1, Cheryl’s back. How does she reacclimate? What is the first thing she’s going to want to do?
KB: Probably call a lawyer. Honestly, she’s got like 40 deaths on her hands publicly. A lot of people have seen what they think is Cheryl killing a diner full of people. I can imagine there’s going to be a little bit of a detention situation while somebody figures out how and why that happened. Or somebody tries to convince an authority figure that demons are real. Or at least an authority figure who hasn’t seen that yet.
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Y’know a lot of people around the set were like “I’ll be she’s so pissed at Hub. This is a chance for there to be some sort of new antagonistic relationship.” Every time someone said something like that, I always kind of bristled. My impulse for her is that she wants to get a good enough answer out of Hub for why he did this to her or contributed to this level of suffering that she has gone through. She really, really wants him to have a good answer for her because she wants to maintain that connection. So, she’s going to be driven to understand the whole thing that we as the audience got to see.
The Glamorous Life
DK: How many days of shooting were spent on Cheryl dying in the freezer?
KB: We did that in one day. We did a lot of prep with the FX rigging. Mike [Kaye] helped with that! [He has pictures] of a giant bloodstain right in the center of my ass and then all the way down my legs. Really beautiful stuff. It’s the glamorous life we’re livin’ here. Yeah, did it in one day. I remember towards the end of it, my director Lauren Wolkstein, whom I adore, was like, “All right, Kat, we’re going to do one more take,” and I couldn’t stop myself. I just started uncontrollably laughing and I [said], “Don’t take this to mean anything. I’m game for anything, boss, but I can’t stop this absolute cackling that is emitting out of my exhausted body right now.”
DK: Were the wings pure VFX? Just pretend they’re there?
KB: Yeah, pretend they’re there. Would’ve been cool, but I was having enough trouble with that jacket. As it was getting hotter, it was real sticky, so I was like, “This is enough, thank you.”
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The Real Experience
DK: When Hub’s burying Cheryl in the woods at the end of Episode 3, was that a dummy corpse or was that you?
KB: No, that’s me. That was a whole night of me and cellophane and Kevin Bacon’s sweat on my face. His abs shining in the moonlight. And the best crew in town. I just had to lie there. I’m great. Literally let every single muscle go. I was like, “I could help Kevin by holding some tension… No, just give him the real experience.”
DK: What would define The Bondsman Season 2 for Cheryl?
KB: Purpose.
All eight episodes of The Bondsman Season 1 are now streaming on Prime Video.
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