Fear No Evil

This season’s scariest show—exorcisms, anyone? —might make you want to close your eyes more than once. But with superlative stars like Katja Herbers, Mike Colter, and Aasif Mandvi, you won’t be able to look away.

- By Fred Schruers. Photography by Williams + Hirakawa

Aasif Mandvi is an actor many viewers know best from his arch persona on The Daily Show, where he delighted with sardonic segments such as “Paging Dr. Mandvi” (who diagnosed the “malady” of liberalism, among other imagined and real ailments). But on this summer afternoon in a sprawling penthouse suite at Hollywood’s historic Roosevelt Hotel, Mandvi is sincere and heartfelt as he describes the easy rapport he found with co-stars Mike Colter and Katja Herbers as they shot the pilot for the new CBS entry Evil, a psychological drama full of dark thrills that somehow also makes room for both sly jokes and deep dives into the characters’ psyches.

“There’s a cohesion that’s happened because we’re working together,” Mandvi is saying as Herbers is greeted at the doorway a few steps away. “But I feel like we’re also the kind of people that all get along organically—” He pauses a beat as his gaze shifts 45 degrees away from his interviewer to Herbers, who is grinning zestfully at him with her right middle finger jabbed skyward.

“See how we all get along?” he asks, not neglecting to return the gesture. Herbers, who was already an established star in her native Holland before banking a series of well-regarded character portrayals in the building-the-A-bomb saga Manhattan, the dystopian drama The Leftovers, and more recently the shape-shifting HBO centerpiece Westworld, explains, “Just because he was saying that we all get along so great, I thought it was appropriate to give him the finger.”