Florence Pugh Met Her ‘East of Eden’ Sons for the First Time on Camera. It Was Their Idea.

This story discusses the finale of East of Eden.

The first time Florence Pugh looked her on-screen sons in the face, the cameras were already rolling on the scene where they confront her. That was the plan, and it wasn’t hers.

After a screening of the East of Eden finale Friday night at Netflix’s FYSEE Fall Edit in Los Angeles, Pugh joined creator Zoe Kazan, co-stars Christopher Abbott and Hoon Lee, co-showrunner Jeb Stuart and composer Laura Karpman for a Q&A on how the seven-episode Steinbeck adaptation came together. The Nerd Wire was in the room. Here’s what they said.

On the panel
Zoe Kazan, co-showrunner, writer and executive producer
Florence Pugh, executive producer and “Cathy Ames”
Christopher Abbott, “Adam Trask”
Hoon Lee, “Lee”
Jeb Stuart, co-showrunner and executive producer
Laura Karpman, composer

“They didn’t want me to feel familiar”

Asked about the finale’s confrontation between Cathy Ames and her son, played by Joseph Zada, Pugh said she had never met either of the actors playing Cathy’s twins before that day on set.

“Both of my boys, that was the first scene where I met them, and it was their decision,” Pugh said. “They didn’t want me to feel familiar or for us to have any shorthand in a relationship, which was just such a good idea.”

Keeping the rule was not always graceful. “We actually had a few close calls where I’d be getting in a car one day, or they’d be getting in a car, and I’d be like, ‘Oh my God, hi. Oh, shit, sorry, you didn’t want to meet me,’” she said. When the moment finally came, it “added the most insane pressure and tension and emotion and hysteria” to a scene that already had plenty of all four.

Zoe Kazan’s seven index cards

Kazan has been carrying this book around for more than 20 years. She read it at 15, she said, and pictured it so clearly that the 1955 film directed by her grandfather, Elia Kazan, surprised her: much of what she loved most about the novel wasn’t in it.

She also reminded the room that Steinbeck’s novel was a popular hit and a critical punching bag when it was published. She and Pugh tracked down one original magazine review. “The headline was ‘Gentlemen and Sluts,’” Kazan said. “So that was the vibe.”

Seven episodes still meant sacrifices, including the Hamilton family storyline. What stayed fixed was the ending: Adam’s final “timshel,” which Kazan called a North Star the whole series had to travel toward. She credited Abbott with the line that every reader has an infinite budget in their head. A production does not.

Her best explanation of adaptation was the one she gave her eight-year-old. Picture the Mona Lisa, then imagine being handed seven frames the size of index cards and told to tell the painting’s story with them. “I think we’d all frame the mouth,” Kazan said. “But where else would we put those frames?”

Every episode got its own genre

Steinbeck’s book swerves between fiction, memoir and philosophizing, and Kazan wanted the series to keep that jigsaw-puzzle quality. So each episode got a reference point. The first plays like an Arthur Miller play, she said. The second is “kind of like Carrie.” The third is Days of Heaven. The fourth is Hitchcock’s Notorious.

The connective tissue came from every department. One example: a dress worn by Charles’ mother in episode one comes back in episode two, when Cathy turns up with no clothes of her own.

The shoot was just as unconventional. Instead of filming in two-episode blocks, the production cross-boarded the entire series around locations and actor schedules, starting with episode four and everything set in Faye’s brothel. The crew then rebuilt the set into Kate’s brothel in about three days. Kazan said Pugh worked every single day for roughly four months.

“It was bonkers. It was totally bonkers,” Pugh said. “But we made something good.”

Pugh on Cathy: “I couldn’t put rules around her”

Pugh came aboard six years ago, before the series had a network, and spent four years inside the development process before a frame was shot. Being asked to help build the character, she said, changed her as a performer and a creator.

What she never found was a formula. “The biggest gift that studying her gave me was I couldn’t put rules around her,” Pugh said. She described a nightly routine during the shoot: home, shower, sometimes a drink, one song to loosen up, then the sofa with her books, reference photography and notes until bed, pacing the kitchen to test line readings. “Sometimes it was too warm. Sometimes it was too cold. I was absolutely obsessed with finding the right amount of her always.”

Some of Cathy stays deliberately out of reach. “There are things that I let you know what I’m thinking, and then there are things that I don’t let you know what I’m thinking, but you can see that I’m thinking,” Pugh said. As the character ages into what she called a “crow-like, bird-like creature,” Pugh changed her voice and her bearing along with her. She called the role the biggest thrill of her career.

Adam and Lee: “In a sense, it’s a marriage”

The moderator singled out the household Adam Trask and Lee build together as something rarely seen on screen: two men, platonic, raising a family. Abbott agreed. “In a sense, it’s a marriage,” he said, with everything that comes with one. “There’s even some jealousy.”

Abbott described Adam’s arc as a vagabond “essentially becoming his father.” To find the Trask brothers’ history, director Garth Davis brought Abbott and Mike Faist out to the family house set before the crew arrived, to sit in the quiet and read through their characters’ childhood scenes. Their first day together was the reunion the cast now calls “the bacon scene.”

Lee had not read the novel before he auditioned. He got the audition, Kazan said, because casting director Ellen Lewis kept asking around for the right actor, was handed his name and contacted him through a website that was “practically defunct.” He didn’t have representation at the time.

What struck Lee about the scripts was their nerve. The adaptation took a position, he said: “It didn’t try to be all things to all people.” He credited Pugh and Abbott with setting the tone on set. “They’re so confident in their abilities that they can let you do anything.”

A villain theme that isn’t one

Karpman didn’t score episodes. “It’s a seven-hour movie,” she said, and she approached it like a feature, starting with a suite of character themes. Cathy’s is “almost like a Marvel villain theme. But it’s not,” she said. “It’s an open question.”

Two more themes sit opposite each other: one Kazan nicknamed “snake in the grass,” which Karpman described as discomfort (“It’s not evil. It’s just not right”), and a home theme, used mostly for the brothers, that stands for safety. She compared the job to writing music for ballet because the cast is so physical, then admitted the downside of knowing actors’ every gesture from the edit: “Composers are like stalkers.”

“This is Zoe’s show”

Stuart, who wrote Die Hard, said his first reaction to Kazan’s scripts was wondering why she’d want to work with him. They bonded over wanting a set people looked forward to coming to, and he was clear from day one about whose series it was.

“No one’s ever going to remember me from East of Eden,” Stuart said, before quoting the line they will remember him for. His only measure of success was whether Kazan was happy with what ended up on screen. “And I’ve had a great experience.”

All seven episodes of East of Eden are streaming on Netflix.