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“The beauty about it is the scripts were well-written,” Chirisa says. “We had an understanding, through the guidance of the director, Haifaa Al-Mansour. They were able to really craft the gradual breakdown of Ciprien throughout that particular episode in the house. Just being able to do the same thing but with half the energy.”
It sounds as draining as an afternoon with a psychically ravenous Lasher, but acting technique and technical expertise feed each other. “Obviously, the mechanics of that really was challenging,” Chirisa says. “But it was fun, because it wasn’t something that just stuck out.”
The slow move through the bigger journey was also helped by sticking close to the chronology. “We filmed that very linearly, so it was easy to track the emotional trajectory and the physicality of the character,” Chirisa says. “It just made it that much easier to portray the weakness that he ends up having towards the end of that episode.”
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In a purist’s definition, Chirisa is already playing a double role in his series credit. He doesn’t get twice the pay, but it comes with a cost to Rice’s novel. “Ciprien is an amalgamation of two characters, Aaron [Lightner], who worked for the Talamasca, and Michael [Curry] who has these gifts,” Chirisa explains. “We meshed these elements, and went on this discovery of finding out who Ciprien was in his own right, without delving too much into the history of these two other characters.”
During “The Thrall,” Ciprien uses psychometry to remember what happened before the possession, reading the knife Carlotta Mayfair (Beth Grant) stuck into him mistakenly at the end of the “Curiouser and Curiouser.” For a life-long practitioner of the art of reading objects, one would think Ciprien would have learned more about the gift than how best to accessorize for it.
“Psychometry can be very overwhelming,” says occultist Ashley Ryan, aka Pythian Priestess, whose podcast The Occult Unveiled recently hosted Mayfair Witches’ Annabeth Gish. “The book’s description makes it seem like he gets information from every object a person touches. The character receives these gifts in a very traumatic way, making the power traumatic to use. It does take a great amount of concentration in order to receive images and information. Generally, once you gain control over the power, it can become more controlled, where you don’t actually need to wear gloves.”
