CHUCK Preview: Zachary Levi and Chris Fedak Tease ‘Chuck Versus the Santa Suit’

It was supposed to be a surprise, but alas the NBC promos for CHUCK gave it away — Shaw is back in tonight’s brand new episode!

To try and figure out what that means for the show, we went to executive producer Chris Fedak and series star Zachary Levi (Chuck) to get the scoop…

“Episode seven is the return of Daniel Shaw,” Fedak explained to reporters recently. “We’ll realize that Decker and the plan has all been kind of manipulated by Daniel Shaw from his 12 x 12 cell. So we wanted to do a monster story. We wanted to do a Christmas story, and Christmas is such holiday that’s haunted, like in the Charles Dickens tradition. So [when] we started doing this Christmas story, we thought, ‘Let’s bring a monster from our past.’ At the end of season 3, Brandon [Routh (Shaw)]was such a good ‘mwahaha’ bad guy. I was like, ‘I’ve got to bring back the ‘mwahaha.” It’s one of our most intense episodes. It’s one of our most crazy, intense episodes. It’s Daniel Shaw haunting Sarah Walker in a frozen version of Castle. Brandon came back and he was great. He just plays an icy killer like nobody else.”

As for Levi, he was excited to revisit the onscreen dynamic between Chuck and Shaw.

“It was a trip [having him back],” Levi said. “He’s a tough one…Look, it’s always fun when you get to have recurring themes or recurring characters and Brandon spent a lot of time with us [in the past]. And I’ve known Brandon outside of work for a lot of years, because we have mutual friends, so that’s always fun, too. In some ways, it’s cool to have even more closure than what was the closure before. When I killed Brandon the first time, we didn’t know we were going to have more of a season, so that was him dying. And then we had more of a season. ‘Well, OK. What are we going to do? So he didn’t die. He came back and that was an interesting [idea] to bring his character back. And then really, at the end of season 3, with the Buy More blowing up, we knocked him out. It’s really more implied that he got captured, which he was, and not died, so we really only killed him once. But again, because this season I feel like has had a lot of themes and homage to other parts of our journey, that’s always cool.”

But how will Shaw’s journey end this time around? That’s something you’ll need to tune in to CHUCK tonight at 8 PM on NBC to find out!

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