On Set Ahead of Season 5 MGM Series
[This story contains spoilers through season four of From.]
There’s something sinister happening in From Town, and it’s a secret to everybody. Well, almost everybody. Certainly, From creator John Griffin knows the truth. And now, thanks to him, I know it, too.
It’s September 2025, and I’m sitting with Griffin in his office on the set of the MGM+ thriller. Production on season four is well underway, with only a few episodes left to film. Griffin story-walks his way back to the days in between seasons, on the heels of a dramatic (and traumatic) season three finale, in which the show’s big bad finally revealed himself.
“We have to capture the momentum of where we left off and introduce a new level to this story,” he says. “And so the idea we came up with is, the Man in Yellow comes to the town to live with everybody as a young girl named Sophia.”
Griffin sees the look on my face — sees that I’ve gone as pale as the Boy in White — and it dawns on him: “Wait. Is this the first time you’re hearing that the Man in Yellow is Sophia?”
I nod, pale jaw still hanging on the floor.
“Oh,” he says. A beat. Then a huge laugh. “Shit.”
Elsewhere in town, a car is parked in the middle of the post office. “Parked” is perhaps not the right word to describe the state of the brown sedan, embedded in the wall of this makeshift police station like a man stuck inside the concrete walls of an empty pool. I’m standing on Main Street, staring at the vehicle, like one of Sheriff Boyd’s deputies trying to solve the puzzle. A few hours later, Griffin just … spills it out: it’s the car that brought the devil into town.
A few hours after that, the devil walks into a bar. “Hi,” she says with a smile. “I’m Julia.”
Hailing from executive producers Griffin and Jeff Pinkner, alongside fellow exec producer and director Jack Bender, From takes place inside a nightmare town with no way out. It’s populated with vampiric monsters, menacing birds, eldritch horrors, and the scariest creatures of all: humans, and lots of them. It’s the most watched show on MGM+, with an audience so devoted as to create no fewer than four different subreddits for theories, memes and more. Some fans have traveled across the world, from as far as Germany, just to catch a glimpse of the practical set in Halifax, Canada.
Standing in the thick of the town, built on an abandoned radar base over the course of just 12 weeks, one can’t help but feel drawn into From world. The houses are real, as are the materials inside of them, filled with Easter eggs from production designer Matt Likely, one of a small handful of folks who has known the true lore of From from the jump. There’s no electricity in town, which only serves to Silent Hill-ify the whole experience of walking past Father Khatri’s church, the diner, the motel sign — and, of course, the town’s local watering hole, which we should return to, lest the devil get antsy.
Sitting inside the bar, newcomer Julia Doyle speaks about her life before From. Even before the show was a yellow twinkle in the eye, Doyle was already preparing for the role. “Horror is all I watch,” the young actor says. “Whenever I get the choice of what to watch on movie night, it’s always something spooky.” At last, not only has she stepped into the middle of one of those movies, she’s become the spooky something at the center: the Man in Yellow, a shape-shifting menace who collects teeth, eats spleens, and cosplays as a doe-eyed good girl with a bible passage for every occasion.
“I knew I was a girl with a secret, that I was a bad girl,” Doyle says about what she knew of her character during the audition process. On the other side of winning the part, Doyle found herself sitting atop more secrets than she initially imagined. “The main thing about playing this character is… it’s all about joy,” she says with terrifying delight. “They’re just happy to be here. I’m just having fun. It’s the thing that drives them the most: wreaking havoc.”
After three full seasons filled with mysteries, monsters and nightmares that come crawling out of the forest, Sophia and the Man in yellow represent that much needed “new level to the story,” as Griffin calls it. What’s more, the Man himself — or, more specifically, the Sophia side of the equation — was a new level not just for the story, but for the writers as well.
“The Man in Yellow isn’t a surprise,” says Griffin, referring to the vision he and partner Jeff Pinkner carved out for From long before a single scene was ever written. “What we chose to do with him, however, was a very nice discovery. I don’t find mustache-twirling villains all that interesting. Monsters are scariest when you can relate to part of them. When you realize a monster is complex and has shreds of humanity? That’s genuinely horrifying. Finding a way to explore his agenda within the town is really exciting.”
It’s not exactly exciting for the townsfolk, of course. Unaware as they are of Sophia throughout season four, the characters nonetheless feel her wrath. At one point, she raises a man from the dead and turns him into a murderous meat puppet. At another, she calls in a favor with Clara, a background character brought into the foreground via an off-screen deal forged with the big bad. In one of her last violent acts of the season, Sophia even kills the one person who’s discovered her true identity: Elgin, the young man who once thought he could save the town by damning one of its most joyful denizens, and paid for that theory with a gouged-out eye.
That version of Elgin, by the way, is on full display in the special effects makeup trailer. Patrick Baxter, the award-nominated artist who brings From’s scariest moments from the written word to the physical world, proudly shows off a life-size model of actor Nathan D. Simmons filled with cotton swabs and other mundane items that help sell the fiction of his tortured, eyeless state. (“I kinda just brought him out for you,” Baxter says with a laugh, arm around the Elgin model he insists isn’t always viewable. “It would be pretty boring here if you were just looking at pizza boxes filled with prosthetics.”) Elsewhere in the dense trailer: pizza boxes loaded with fake bloodied skin prosthetics as advertised, as well as models for Sophia’s aforementioned meat puppet and the desecrated corpse of Tian-Chen, killed in season three as a means of psychologically torturing main character Boyd, played by Harold Perrineau.
A full season has passed since then by the time I’m sitting with Perrineau. We’re in the sheriff’s station on the other side of a long day filming a scene on the Colony House rooftop, with Perrineau and his co-stars strapped into safety harnesses. Perrineau is weary, if not quite as wrecked as the car sticking halfway out of the far wall.
“The technical parts are the technical parts,” he says about the job. “It’s going to sleep at night that’s trickiest.”
As a veteran of legendary television shows like Lost and Oz, as well as iconic film roles in Romeo + Juliet and The Matrix, Perrineau knows his way around a stressful story. Here, leaning back in Sheriff Boyd’s chair, Perrineau insists: “I’ve woken up more during this period in a fright than I have in my entire life. The show is so unreal. It’s a show about monsters, right? So you really have to invest. You have to get your psyche to a place where it can’t tell if [the story] is real or not. It’s really stressful on your nervous system.”
Perrineau isn’t alone in stressing about From. He’s not even alone in this room, stressing about From. A few minutes into the interview, Perrineau’s on-screen deputy Ricky He walks into the post office, for no reason other than wanting to hear the man at the top of the call sheet talk about the show. That level of commitment is seen throughout the cast, and beyond it. Scott McCord, who plays the tragic Victor, says his wife and her friends are deeply invested in theories about the show’s plot. Catalina Sandino Moreno, who plays Victor’s mom (kind of, it’s complicated) Tabitha, says her actual son watches the show and regularly brings up the theories he’s read on the various subreddits. Similar stories abound throughout the cast, about how much their loved ones care about the show, not just because it’s providing a livelihood, but because the narrative twists and turns just so.
“Whenever my son sees John Griffin,” says Sandino, “He’ll ask, ‘So what’s going to happen when From ends? Is there going to be a spinoff for someone? There’s this whole world that you’ve built!’ He’s really into the whole world of From, and is very invested in if we can leave, if we can get out of town, and how it’s all going to end. I wonder about it, too.”
Of course, when it comes to the ending of the series, Griffin never says a word, other than to say it’s been planned from the start. In fact, despite the casual way he tells me about Sophia and the Man in Yellow, the mastermind of From is well known on set for having an exceptional poker face.
“There have been a couple of times where I’ll come at him with a theory,” he says, “And he’ll say, ‘You can say whatever you want, but I’m just going to give you my poker face.’ And you know what’s great? Every time I have a theory for him, it turns out, I’m wrong. Every single time I’m sure we’re going down a certain road, we take a different turn.”
Griffin’s ending remains unwritten, but not for long. It’s July 2026 now, and production is about to begin on the fifth season, which is also the show’s last season. Theories abound among the cast, crew, and their loved ones about how it’s all going to end — but what matters most to Hannah Cheramy, who plays the story-walking Julie, is that it’s ending at all.
“I’m really feeling it, especially as we get closer and closer to it,” she says, standing outside the bar where the devil resides. “I just got the scripts for [season four] episodes seven and eight, and I’m realizing there’s only 12 more scripts left. It’s blowing my mind, how close that is. Every time I get a script, I can’t wait for the next one. But one day soon, there won’t be a next one. That’s going to be a really hard day.”
Hard days lie ahead for From Town. All involved have different thoughts on how they want this story to end. For Perrineau, it’s simple: “We need a win.” Alas, a win feels pretty far away as of the season four finale, in which Sophia removes the only protection the town has against the monsters. Overcoming that obstacle, and all the others still lying in wait, means at least one thing for Perrineau: more nightmares.
“You have to tell yourself that it’s real, which is hard on a show like this,” he says. “That stress, it comes out in the ways you hold yourself, the way your hands twitch… that part of making the show is a lot.”
Perrineau takes a beat. Then, a huge laugh. “Making this show,” he says, “has been great and weird.”
“Well,” I tell him, “We have a headline for the article.”
“Great,” he says. “It works. ‘It’s been great and weird.’ That’s our show.”
The first four seasons of From are streaming now on MGM+. The fifth and final season is expected to premiere in 2027.
