‘American Horror Story: Hotel’ episode 8 reaction: Wes Bentley on John Lowe surprise
Was this a surprise? Maybe to some out there, but there was a certain part of it that feels obvious looking back. It explains why Mr. March invited him to dinner with many of the other killers, and it also explains why there is so much distance between him and his wife Alex; he is gone so much that there are clearly going to be problems.
The good news for Wes Bentley is that this was not something that he had to spend much time guessing about. The actor told E! News in a postmortem for “The Ten Commandments Killer” that he learned the truth about his alter ego pretty early on after needing to be clued in on some story elements by co-creator / executive producer Ryan Murphy:
“In my initial meeting with Ryan, he just said I’d be a detective who lost a kid. And we talked a lot about losing our kids and that fear, but he never mentioned I was the killer. And then I received the first three scripts as we were gearing up to shoot and I had all these questions and I was texting him. I just felt like there were things I needed to know. At first he was texting me back and then he stopped texting me and he called me a day later and said, ‘OK, listen, I wasn’t going to do this and don’t tell anybody else that I told you this, but I gotta tell you: You’re the guy. Now I don’t want you to play it. I just want you to know it so that when moments come up, you’ll just subconsciously play it. So it will be good for the show when people know and they look back on it.’ I played it as John, as we know him, which is that he didn’t honestly know who he was, but we could have those moments like the first time coming to the hotel in episode one, there’s a moment where he shares some familiarity with Kathy [Bates] but he doesn’t know why. She’s like an old friend or somebody you knew long ago. So it’s entertaining to look back on, but I never consciously played it. I never thought about it to be honest.”
We were admittedly surprised to see that the entirety of “The Ten Commandments Killer” was focused almost entirely on this singular character’s backstory, but this is one of those situations where there was a lot to unpack. Hopefully next week we will get a better chance to understand how this fits in more to the surrounding picture on the show.
If you are interested in previewing what lies ahead on “American Horror Story: Hotel,” be sure to head over to the link here right away! Also, you can sign up right now to secure some other TV news on everything we cover, sent right over to you via our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: FX.)