PERPETUAL GRACE, LTD Team Previews the New EPIX Series

In the new EPIX series PERPETUAL GRACE, LTD, James (Jimmi Simpson), a young grifter, picks the wrong marks: Pastor Byron Brown/Pa (Sir Ben Kingsley) and his wife Lillian/Ma (Jacki Weaver), who ran their own con, manipulating their devoted followers into giving them their savings.

“We felt like what we wanted to do is examine the entirety of human existence so that all humans, whether you at first glance might call them evil or simple-minded or whatever, that they all are subject to the same frailty, and grace, and yearning for beauty, and meaning in this world,” executive producer Bruce Terris said during the show’s Television Critics Association panel. “And, so the tone reflects that: these are a group of people who ordinarily wouldn’t ever be involved with each other. Who are all, in their own way, struggling to try to find grace in their own place in this universe. And, that they’re going to need each other to do that, and so the tone that comes out of that is not simple. It’s broad. I feel that we can handle a broad bandwidth of tone from…the humor to the more serious.”

And while Pa and Ma are morally complex, the most straightforward aspect to them is the genuineness of their relationship.

“I think they do have a faith; they certainly have a faith in their relationship,” Kingsley said. “It never tires, it never wavers, it accumulates tremendous energy…and I think part of our faith, Jacki’s character and my character, is that an unswerving faith in each other, and my, paradoxically, because he is a villain, my unswerving faith in the marriage. ”

For Simpson—who has kept busy in recent years with WESTWORLD, the PSYCH movie, and UNSOLVED—he was cautious about which project to take on next…until he saw the script for PERPETUAL GRACE, LTD.

“I just hadn’t read anything so beautiful in years,” he said. “And it became a process of fighting hard to see if I could have a shot at articulating this character James, he’s this drifter who’s lost, and becomes lost unwittingly like a lot of us. We don’t mean to be, we don’t really intend to lose our way but we do, and then what happens. And James’ part in this story is this man, who is lost, he’s wandering left as [executive producer] Steve Conrad says beautifully, and I just had never seen a story so complete, offering me that thing for myself.”

But should viewers be rooting for specific characters? “I do remember Steve saying every one of these characters is incredibly flawed, as we all are in real life,” Weaver said. “But part of the story is the audience coming to feel enormous affection for even the most-wicked ones, which I think does have a Shakespearian feel to it.”

PERPETUAL GRACE, LTD, Series Premiere, Sunday, June 2, EPIX

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