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Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It, I'm Kousha Navidar, filling in for Alison Stewart.

A priest, a psychologist, and an atheist walk into a particle collider. It's not the setup for a joke, it's the setup for the premise of the first episode of the fourth and maybe final season of Evil, which premieres on Paramount+ today. Evil began on CBS in 2019, starring my next guest, Katja Herbers as Kristen Bouchard, a forensic psychologist who gets hired by the Catholic Church to investigate supernatural incidents and determine whether their explanations are scientific or demonic.

Think X-Files, but instead of aliens, it's miracles. Kristen is the sort of agnostic, neutral arbiter of a trio that also includes David, a Catholic priest, and Ben, an amateur scientist, tech whiz, and staunch atheist. Here's a scene from the new season featuring the three of them. They're preparing for a graveyard stakeout for a supposed werewolf sighting. Here it is.

Kristen: All right. Well, if you're doing it, I'm doing it, too.

Ben: Well, you do it then. I don't need to do it.

Kristen: [bleep] you.

David: Hey, guys, maybe we should keep it down.

Kristen: Why?

David: Well, supposedly it won't show up if you make too much noise.

Kristen: Huh? Well, that's not very scary. A werewolf who doesn't like noise?

Ben: Who said it was a werewolf?

David: Parish priest. A few of the congregates.

Ben: And they saw it.

David: Oh, they saw something. No one's showing up to nighttime mass anymore. They're too afraid.

Ben: Does it seem like these assignments are getting weirder?

Kristen: I can't even tell anymore.

Ben: I think it's Father Ignatius. Thinks all this stuff is stupid so he's just sending us out on everything, werewolf hunts, and vampire hunts. Hey, here's to catching a werewolf.

Kristen: Here's to getting home by 2:00.

Kousha Navidar: Over the course of three seasons, the team have encountered purported demonic possessions, haunted houses, and visions that range from the misunderstood to the downright unsolvable. Earlier this year, Paramount+ announced Evil would end after its fourth season, leaving several producers here at All Of It, including the one that prepped this segment, distraught. I'm sorry, Simon. Following that announcement, there was a little good news. This season will be followed by a few bonus episodes, a mini-season 5, which the cast just wrapped. Joining me now, the star of Evil, is actor Katja Herbers. Katja, welcome to All Of It.

Katja Herbers: Thank you so much, Kousha.

Kousha Navidar: Let's do a quick intro for anyone listening who hasn't watched the show yet, what is Kristen's job?

Katja Herbers: Kristen is originally a forensic psychologist, and she is hired by the Catholic Church, by Mike Colter's character, who's a priest, to investigate unexplained phenomena. This is a real thing. The church has a backlog of, I think, 50,000 requests for exorcisms, and I'm there to assess if somebody is truly possessed or if there's a scientific psychological explanation to their state of being.

Kousha Navidar: I heard you say that this is an actual thing that the Catholic Church does in real life, right?

Katja Herbers: Yes, so much so that we sometimes have, we rarely do exorcisms I think we've done maybe five throughout the four seasons, six maybe, but when we do do them, we have a priest on site who will make sure that the exorcisms that we're acting look real. [laughs]

Kousha Navidar: Wow. Can you tell me what's a specific thing that that priest on set has either added or maybe corrected to make sure that it's true to form the way that an exorcism would actually happen?

Katja Herbers: Well, the first exorcism that we did was in the first season, and I remember it was one that just went on for days and days in our story. It was a very difficult demon to get out of this woman's body. She was tied up and truly very brutally treated and bloody and not well. My character and myself obviously thought this was completely ridiculous. I went up to this priest and asked him, "Is this normal? Are we making it like too TV? Are we making it too dramatic?" He was like, "No, no, no, that can happen. Sometimes a demon doesn't want to come out and you're going to have to use some extra special force." [laughs]

Kousha Navidar: Wow.

Katja Herbers: It happens.

Kousha Navidar: I heard you say Kristen's character thinks that this is ludicrous, I'll use that word, ludicrous. Would that fairly describe Kristen's relationship with religion and the supernatural?

Katja Herbers: Yes, she's a lapsed Catholic, so there's something inside of her that, I guess, does resonate with that world. I think throughout the season she has come to see that sometimes an exorcism can have a placebo effect for people. The purging, the thinking that maybe this demon is driven out of you can cure you in some way. She's become more lenient. If David, Mike Colter's character, thinks, "Let's give him an exorcism," she's like, "All right. Let's just go ahead and do it. Maybe it will help this person."

[laughter]

Kousha Navidar: Kristen's gone through a lot over the last three seasons, and her character has shifted sometimes pretty drastically. I'm thinking of in Season 2, in particular, she really explores her dark side. She's also a mother, and she's also flirtatious and sexual. What's been fun as an actor that you've gotten to do with this character over the past three seasons?

Katja Herbers: Well, what's been just really, really wonderful is how much she shapeshifts and how many different identities or faces this character has. Not only do I sometimes get to play a whole other character, a demon version of myself, but also just in the way that she fulfills all these different roles of a mom and also being like, I don't want to spoil anything for anyone because our first two seasons have just come out on Netflix, and so if you haven't seen the show, go ahead and give it a watch, but there is a particular way in which Kristen stands up to defend her family. She has four daughters, and there's a person out there to make her life so miserable and who says that he will kill her daughters. She takes measures into her own hands. Is that how you say it in English?

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. Measures into her-- That's perfect, yes. That definitely translates. Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking with Katja Herbers, who is the star of Evil. Season 4 premieres today on Paramount+. The show is now four seasons deep, and the characters and us have seen all kinds of supernatural and inexplicable things. Katja, like you said, no spoilers, but Kristen and even more so Ben, remain skeptical and they're always looking for logical scientific explanations. In your opinion, how can these characters possibly still be skeptics after what they've been through? How do you make sense of that in your portrayal?

Katja Herbers: Well, I guess different people hold on to different things, right? For some people, I'd love to, personally, I'm not religious, but I can really see the appeal of it and thinking that there's a bigger plan, and that when you lose a loved one you're going to see them again. I wish I could think that. I've just not been brought up that way. For other people, logic and science is really what they hold onto to give their life a structure. I think that Kristen and Ben's character, they hold on to the how can I explain this logically side of the equation.

Kousha Navidar: Ah, yes. A lot of your recent work in the US, at least, has explored themes that are similar to the ones in Evil. You had a recurring role in Westworld, you're also in The Leftovers. Most recently you appeared in the Peacock series, Mrs. Davis, which is another show about nuns, technology, mystery. Is there a theme in the roles and projects you're drawn to, or is that all coincidence?

Katja Herbers: Oh, that's very much a coincidence, I guess. There's so much good American TV being made. I'm originally from the Netherlands, and when I came out here, I thought I'm only going to work on shows that are the kind of shows that I would watch back home in Amsterdam and dream about being on, and I'll never take a job that is less than anything that I would really, really want to watch. So far, I've been extremely lucky to be able to do so.

Kousha Navidar: When you first got the script for Evil, what drew you towards it?

Katja Herbers: Well, I knew Robert and Michelle King, and I have been a massive fan. That immediately was very interesting to me, and then when I read the part and the themes of this show and the quirkiness of it, and the sense of humor, and then when I spoke to them, they said that they had seen some of my more comedic work from Holland, and they needed someone who could portray both lightness within the darkness of evil, and that they were going to write to both these things, that made me extremely interested to do it. I feel like that might be the strength of our show where we are sometimes extremely scary, but it's also very funny. I just saw that The New York Times even called it a comedy, and I was like, "Oh, okay."

Kousha Navidar: I'm not really into scary, but when I started watching Evil, it was the humor that kept me. I agree with that. It is that sense of levity, I suppose, that's interspersed with the, I wouldn't say horror with a capital H, but it really did strike me. It's such an interesting way of thinking about it because that is a hard line to toe. When you first heard about Evil, you first read the script, did you have any concerns about whether the show would work?

Katja Herbers: I'm always, when you're in something yourself, a lot of insecurities at play.

Kousha Navidar: Sure.

Katja Herbers: Am I going to do a good enough job? Do people want to see it? No, not when I thought about, oh, the Kings are the leaders of this ship. I actually, when I saw the pilot the first time when I was doing some additional dialogue recording, I was like, "Oh, okay, we're going to get picked up and this is really, really good."

Kousha Navidar: A part of the joy that really comes through in the show is Kristen living in Astoria with her four daughters. They're all around middle school, high school age, and they have a lot of energy. The scenes with them are one of the real charms of the series. Paramount+ even made a YouTube video, I don't know if you saw it with the title, The Unique ASMR Of The Bouchard Girls, which is just, I'm talking-- have you seen that one?

Katja Herbers: No.

Kousha Navidar: [crosstalk] Luckily we have a clip of it. Let's just listen to that clip real quick.

Katja Herbers: Okay.

[Evil, The Unique ASMR Of The Bouchard Girls clip plays]

Kousha Navidar: I also want to read the three comments on that YouTube video, @MarvelFan1995 said, "I'd rather have maybe one or two daughters." @KimberlyBone once said, "OMG shoot me. LOL. It's a cacophony of deafening children. My ears are bleeding," smiley face, and @FXG5509 said, "I couldn't stand them at first, but they've grown on me."

Katja, what do you appreciate about the daughters on this series?

Katja Herbers: Aside from that, in my real life, I adore them, and it's been so special to see in these five years that we've been making this show to have grown so close to them and to see them grow into these wonderful little older children now. I really love the craziness that Kristen faces at home that is both her rock, or why she's still saying probably, and also adds to the crazy. I know that Robert King comes from a family of, I think, seven children. That's, I think, where the inspiration came from.

Another thing that I really, really like is that we've kept this cacophony going, and that we will always be these lines in the script that are-- it just says daughters, and then there's a whole bunch of lines. On the day we will figure out who says what. They're also very good at improvising, so sometimes I'll just let it. I'll wait to respond and let them go a little longer. What I like is that nobody understands what the hell they're saying except Kristen. She knows exactly. For some reason, she can listen to all four at the same time and make perfect sense of it.

Kousha Navidar: Four daughters, Season 4, earlier this year, Paramount+ announced that the show was actually going to end after Season 4, but with some bonus episodes that technically aren't part of Season 4. Were you surprised when you learned that Paramount+ didn't plan to continue the series? What's it been like filming those last episodes?

Katja Herbers: To be honest, I was very surprised because it's been so well received. We got 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and all the reviews are so great, and nobody was sick of each other. The Kings were so inspired to make more. Robert and Michelle have said that it feels like it's a novel that they haven't been able to write the last couple of chapters for now that it's coming to a close. I was very surprised.

At the same time, I felt very fortunate to have done it in the first place. It's sad. When you're so lucky to do something like this that is both just a personal joy and a creative feast, then it's hard to move on from that I guess. All of us at Evil share the same sentiment, and we might be slightly maybe delusively hopeful that another streamer might swoop in and snatch up the goods.

Kousha Navidar: Since it was added to Netflix in April, the show has had a resurgence of interest there. How have you experienced the new audience coming across the series? Is there any talks of Netflix? I don't know if you can share any of that, but how has it been for you seeing that kind of resurgence of interest?

Katja Herbers: It's been super exciting. We've been in the top 10 for a bit. New audiences finding the show. I think probably even if we don't continue, I do hope that we do, but if we don't, I think it's probably a show that will live on, and that people will continue to find. It's so unique in its tone and its thematics, like I don't know another show that is similar. I think that when we do find our audience, the audience gets extremely invested. That's what I've found from fans.

Kousha Navidar: What can Evil fans do to help make Season 6 a possibility? Is it just watch as much as possible, tell your friends, tell your family?

Katja Herbers: I guess so. Probably make sure that Netflix sees how successful we are on that platform. Watch the first two seasons on Netflix and tweet, do social media stuff, it's happened before.

Kousha Navidar: The gauntlet's been throwing down everyone. If you would like to see a Season 6, plus the extra episodes that makes Season 5, you can check out Evil Season 4, which premieres today on Paramount+. We've been here with Katja Herbers, who is the star of the show. Katja, thank you so much for joining us.

Katja Herbers: You're so welcome. Thank you, Kousha. Thanks for having me.

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