On Set With The 'Preacher' Cast On The Eve Of Their Fourth And Final Season

You can all too quickly leave the streets of Melbourne circa 2019 behind once you open a big, heavy door, tread lightly down darkened corridors and after a few turns left and right find yourself deep in the bowels of some ancient stone structure. Reaching high into the air, the shafts and columns are incredibly realistic – you would be inclined to believe they’re the work of Mother Nature until you overhear someone say they’re on par with anything they've created for master of blockbuster disaster Roland Emmerich, the director of Independence Day. 

The Preacher show has well and truly rolled into town.

The latest in a line of international productions making use of Australian crews and locations, Preacher – the gleefully gory and perpetually provocative tale of Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper), a hard-living Texas priest with supernatural abilities, a shit-tonne of personal demons (figurative and literal) and a grudge against God – has been filming its fourth and final season in Victoria, using Melbourne’s massive Docklands Studios complex as its primary base of operations.

On the day this writer visits the Preacher set, episode nine of the ten-episode season is being shot on a massive soundstage, with crew members milling to and fro and the sweet scent of incense lingering in the air. 

While UK actor Joseph Gilgun – who regularly steals scenes on the show as Jesse’s offsider, hedonistic Irish vampire Cassidy – cracks up a crowd with a spirited tale of a stunt performer getting tossed through a plate-glass window by B-movie tough guy Steven Seagal, the stunt double for Cooper is strapped into a harness, lifted maybe ten metres into the air and dropped smoothly to the ground. It’s a process repeated time and again, even before the cameras roll, and then repeated even more times when the good-humoured Cooper is strapped in to perform the action himself.

In all honesty, Cooper should be well used to such activity by now – over the course of Preacher’s lifespan, the UK actor (whose eclectic body of work includes Captain America: The First Avenger, Mamma Mia!, An Education and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) has been involved in so many fistfights and gunfights against various adversaries that one could easily lose count. (Having said that, the conclusion of Preacher’s third season did involve Jesse brawling in a grotesque pile of blood and guts – that was pretty memorable.)

And with the fourth season bringing to a conclusion Jesse’s long-running pursuit of an ever-disappointing God – who has done a runner from Heaven to hide out on Earth – the mayhem is set to ramp up even further. 

Over the course of its run, however, Preacher (adapted from the comic book series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon) has run the gamut of tones and emotions, from low-key melancholia to high-pitched hysteria, and Cooper has revelled in the shifts the role has allowed him. 

“I’d like to say I felt quite comfortable in jumping between all these styles you mentioned,” says Cooper, taking a breather between scenes. “That certainly has made it so enjoyable to make. You do want a mix of everything, all these things we’re managing to do in one show – maybe we’ve been totally spoiled! – but it has progressed, and it is an ever-changing entity. There were moments in the pilot that felt very different from what happened in the first season, and the second season was very different from that. We’ve all adjusted as the show has grown.”

It’s the same for Cooper’s co-star Ruth Negga, who vividly brings to life badass Tulip O’Hare, Jesse’s former lover who has literally come back from the dead to fight alongside Jesse and Cassidy and “unshackle herself from God’s bullying”. (Viewers who enjoyed Tulip kicking the crap out of a bunch of Nazis at the end of season three should note that Negga enjoyed it just as much: “That was fun!” she smiles.)

“Each of our characters is so bold and so vibrant and so clearly delineated, so in a way it’s quite easy to slip those coats on,” she says in her natural Irish lilt, a marked contrast from Tulip’s American twang. 

“We were all very familiar with the comic books by that stage, and their energy, and I think we took joy in the fact that anything is permissible. We’re in a realm where we can be larger than life, and I think all three of us [Cooper, Gilgun and herself] love that opportunity.

“The fun thing – and the challenge – is that you can oscillate between tones. There are no restraints or constraints. You have the freedom to turn the volume up or down, and if someone says, ‘That’s too much,’ you can simply say [shrugs], ‘It’s Preacher.’”

Ruth Negga

Cooper points out, however, that the creative powers-that-be guiding the show – including executive producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg – have taken great pains to ensure that Preacher, for all its excesses and extremes, is grounded in a recognisable reality, no small ask when your gallery of supporting characters includes God, the Devil and Hitler (played by Australia’s own Noah Taylor!).

“They fashioned storylines that took place before those in the comics so they could embed it in a type of reality, so you knew who the characters were and where they were coming from,” he says.

“I think audiences could have been very confused by what it was, and I think it’s the reality of it that makes it good, that makes it enjoyable, and it makes the extreme even more extreme. It’s about achieving the brilliance of the comics – one man’s glimpse at a very specific part of society. It was a vision of a strange world, and as this world gets more and more incomprehensible, the show needed to push the boundaries, as the comics did. You have to grapple with that, whether you’re making it or watching it, and it’s very exciting.”

Preacher also grapples with religious and spiritual notions of good, evil and everything in between, and when you take on that kind of framework, you have to be primed for potential blowback from folks who take that sort of thing very seriously.

“There has and there hasn’t,” says Cooper. “The show has been very clever in the way it addresses some very risky subject matter, and what it’s done very delicately is deliver no judgement. It acknowledges. It raises questions. And if it gets people talking, that’s brilliant. There may be a backlash against our portrayal, but I think it’s open to everyone’s interpretation. And I hope people see the humour in it.”

Neither Cooper nor Negga can disclose much – if anything – about what transpires in the show’s final season (“We’re not departing from the vulgarity, and the fight scenes are even more bonkers,” reveals Negga), but it’s clear that parting from Preacher will indeed be such sweet sorrow for its lead actors.

Dominic Cooper

“It’s a big part of one’s life, and you’re among people that you’re comfortable with and that you trust, which makes you capable of good work, so I’m certainly sad,” says Cooper. “But [the makers of the show] have been very brave because it could have continued but I think they didn’t want it to fade. It needs to end; it should have an ending. I sometimes wrestle with television because if it’s successful there’s no end to it. It’s why I’ve always loved films or novels because a beginning, a middle and an end are all tougher to handle than the last part. But they are ending this... and they’re ending it brilliantly.” 

Preacher streams from 5 Aug on Stan.