‘Salem’ Stars Give An Insider’s Look Into The Season Finale [Video]

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Salem.

The second season of Salem has been stressful to say the least, as fans of WGN America’s Salem perched on the edge of their seats in anticipation of the next decisive move in the witch war. Possibly the most devastating blow was to see Mary Sibley (Janet Montgomery), once Salem‘s most powerful witch and the most adept at controlling the factions of Salem‘s community, suddenly reduced to a mere pauper, humiliated in a public display.

In fact, Mary might have given up everything for lost, if it hadn’t been for Anne Hale (Tamzin Merchant) inspiring Mary with words of encouragement. Anne, along with her new husband Cotton Mather (Seth Gabel), have become the focal points of this season in an unexpected twist that has given Salem fans some of the scariest moments of the season.

https://youtu.be/NqOV4Me3MeQ

In particular, Tamzin Merchant recalls filming the intense well scene, which the Salem star reveals took a period of 17 hours to film and required incredible stamina from everyone involved, including the film crew.

“And I’ve never really done like ‘horror’ kind of fright, like the acting if you know what I mean, like real jump scares and stuff. So doing that was really cool as well like working with the stunt double who plays the hag; she’s just so brilliant. Stamina, for sure, was needed but also like an understanding of how jump scares and all that stuff works. That was a really cool thing for me to do.”

Possibly even more memorable with Salem fans was the exorcism of young John (Oliver Bell), and Seth Gabel reveals that he came back to playing Cotton Mather in that scene following an illness, which lent authenticity to the performance. Much of Cotton’s exorcism included prayers and bible verses, which Gabel referenced during the scene.

“I just went along for that ride and we really didn’t know how it was going to turn out but when I watched the episode, I was really happy with it. We had shot it first and then I think once they started the process of post-production, they decided to go back and add things like Mary Sibley being there in this really haunting way. There are a lot of elements that they added afterwards to kind of intersplice with everything and I thought they did a brilliant job with keeping the tension up through that whole sequence.”

In the interview with Salem‘s Gabel and Merchant, the stars were also drilled about their on-screen romance, something that Salem fans have been following with particular interest. Now that Cotton has begun to discover Anne’s true nature, how will that affect their relationship?

“I think it’ll be pretty clear based on what you see this Sunday night. I hope Salem does continue to keep the relationship between Cotton and Anne an active part of the story and will actually elevate the stakes of their situation with everyone else,” Seth replied.

Ms. Merchant seems equally eager to follow through with this part of their shared Salem subplot.

“We can only speculate as to what’s going to happen. I think that there are certain hints, and historically Salem has always surprised me whenever I’ve got the script in my hand, but yes, I think we would all we be up to the task.”

Salem airs Sunday nights on WGN America.

[Featured image: Tamzin Merchant and Seth Gabel courtesy of WGN America/Salem]