The Great boss on killing 'one of the best characters I've ever made' and where the show goes now

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Great season 3.

The Great has always thrived on a certain amount of shock factor, but season 3 takes that to new heights.

Not only do the 10 new episodes (all streaming on Hulu now) feature the usual profanity, political infighting, and well-intended but naive ideas of Catherine's (Elle Fanning), there's also a major peasant uprising, the fall of big court alliances and creation of shocking new ones, and not one, not two, but three jaw-dropping deaths — Peter (Nicholas Hoult), Peter's lookalike Pugachev (Hoult + bad teeth), and Orlo (Sacha Dhawan).

As if that wasn't enough, the show toys around with three other fatalities: Tatyana (Florence Keith-Roach), who gets shot by Georgina (Charity Wakefield); Velementov (Douglas Hodge), who spends the season thinking he's dying of tuberculosis; and Archie (Adam Godley), whom Catherine orders to be buried alive with piss on his grave when she discovers he was at the root of Pugachev's uprising.

By season's end, Tatyana has recovered, Velementov finally listened to everyone and went to a doctor, and Archie gets saved by — who else? — Marial (Phoebe Fox), just in the nick of time.

And Catherine, unaware of this final betrayal, and having gone through fire and the five stages of grief all in the course of the season, experiences a bit of a rebirth. She cuts off her flowing locks, heads into the stateroom, and for once completely lets loose, dancing like a maniac to AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long" as the final episode comes to a close.

Ahead, the man behind the madness, series creator and executive producer Tony McNamara, breaks it all down for us. (Plus, read what Hoult had to say about the shocking death, here.)

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let's start with the biggest moment of the season, when you chose to kill off your lead. Obviously, Peter died in real life very shortly after Catherine took the throne, but the show kept him around a lot longer. When did you know the time was now and this is how he would die?

TONY MCNAMARA: I think we always knew. Nick and I had talked about it roughly around the end of season 1, about when we thought it would happen and when was good. And so I sort of knew then it would be season 3, [but] the thing was when in season 3 [it would happen] — that seemed like the difficult choice. Do you go really early and shock everyone, or do we go late right at the end? So there were all these kind of questions about it, and in the end it sort of became a more story-driven thing... I wanted the marriage to be trying to work, but ultimately, I didn't want that to go on too long. I still wanted to pull the switch relatively early. And Nick was doing Pugachev at the same time. And [in real life] he was having a baby, as well. So we had the practical thing of he was flying in and out a lot and how to manage his time as well. I think in the writer's room we just kept coming back to right in the middle felt good; it felt like we got a lot of story up and running. And I knew how I was going to do it last season.

Oh really?

I decided how, yeah. So I think I knew how, I just didn't know how to get there. I just knew he fell through the ice and he drowned on a horse.

And why did you want to do it that way?

We talked about it a lot in the writer's room with Fiona Seres, who writes with me and I've written on other shows [with her]. We've been friends for a long, long time. And we talked about it a lot, and there was a lot of, "She should kill him, someone else should kill him, he should die in the war." And I had two thoughts about it. One, I think that's what everyone will think we will do, so we can't do it. And two, I thought, you know what? Life's so f---ing stupid and random that of course it's much more likely something dumb would kill him. I think in the end, I want something that kills him that's sort of his own fault, but also an accident. His character brings him into the situation of his ultimate demise, but his demise isn't caused by anyone other than dumb f---ing luck. So they were the two ideas I wanted to kind of put together.

What was it like breaking the news to Elle and Nick?

Well, we all knew, the three of us, that would happen in the third season. So it wasn't so much that, the hardest thing was shooting his last scene because that was their last scene. The scene on the ice and the argument, which took two days to shoot, because it's like 14 pages or something incredibly underwritten by me just for a change. But I think that was very hard to get through for them and very emotional because it was the end of that. And it was emotional for the three of us because I was like, "Oh, I'm killing, if not the best, one of the best characters I've ever made." So I was a bit like, "Oh, I'm never going to write Peter again. That's harsh." So it was hard. And the cast in the weeks before it happened were finding it really hard. Even, I remember Nick and Belinda [Bromilow, who plays Aunt Elizabeth] had a scene and they were finding it very hard to get through because they had a lot of great scenes in the three seasons. So the fact they wouldn't do scenes together anymore, it was very hard for them.

Then there's the Pugachev of it all. Nick gets to play him through the end of the season, but when he died, too, I wrote in my notes, "Tony, what did Nick do to you?!"

[Laughs.] Well, I think in the end, he wasn't going to do Pugachev forever. So I think he wanted to kind of do this as a great last season. I love him and I really wanted him to have a great season knowing he would go out, but that we kind of kept him to the end, and we still got our surprise.

In the back of my mind, I did wonder if maybe you'd find a way to keep the Pugachev thing going, and therefore have Nick around next season.

Yeah, because I think that felt like I was cheating, I guess. And I felt like that would be surprising as well, because in episode 10, you didn't think Maxim would go in and shoot him. You thought something else would happen. But the little kid's a sociopath, what can I do?

We do know ghosts exist in the show's universe. Might we see Peter again in that way?

I mean, I'd never say never to having Nick Hoult around. That's for sure.

Or you could have him play a constant stream of Peter lookalikes.

Yeah. He could play his own lookalike forever. No, I don't know. I haven't really got that far into it. I'm still recovering from [season] 3. We delivered it like four weeks ago.

And what about Peter's last line: "Actually, I..." I know Elle told me she thinks he was changing his mind and coming back to be with her —

Of course she does.

I'm sure ambiguity was the point, but I am curious about your thoughts on it.

In all honesty, I'm not 100 percent sure what he was going to say, but Elle could well be right, or he could have said anything. "That terrine was good."

The season ends with Catherine shaking it off, literally. We don't know yet if there will be a season 4. Would you be content with this as a finale ending? It had a certain conclusive feeling to it that we maybe haven't had before yet on this show.

For me, it's not an ending, it's a rebirth in a way for her as a character. She hasn't ruled by herself yet and been without his... everything, even the grief of him colored everything she did. So I guess for me, it's like now she's free of him and she's deeply damaged, what happens now? She's kind of cut loose in the way that [the real] Catherine the Great was once she was free of all that — she ruled in a quite crazy way. So I'm interested in that version of Catherine that we haven't seen, but yeah, I know what you mean. I think we were discussing it today actually, how people will read the ending. I think for me, I get that it's very satisfying, but I also think hopefully it leaves enough that you're like, "What can happen with her now?"

There's so many interesting ideas brought up by season's end. She doesn't yet know that Archie is still alive, and she has no idea that she killed Orlo.

There's that. And she doesn't know Georgina is betraying her left, right, and center. Amongst the ensemble, there's a lot of intrigue to be played out, I suppose.

Let's talk about poor Orlo, who no one seems to care about enough to investigate what actually happened to him. When did you know he was also getting the axe?

Sacha wanted to move on, because he wants to make his own things, and I'm totally, 100 percent behind that. And he felt like it was the right time for him to do it. So I knew that at the end of season 1. And then I just had to work out how I wanted him to go. I kind of liked the idea that Catherine thought she got everything settled, and then she was the one who accidentally killed him, and then no one had any idea what happened. And also because of the kind of place it is, he was sort of mourned, but also people barely skipped a beat because it was like, well, that's the world they live in. They're like, "I don't know, he went away or they killed him. Who knows what happened." So I think I liked him kicking off this season with such a strange and funny, dark kind of ending to [episode] 1.

The whole ensemble gets so much to play with this season, we could spend a whole separate conversation just on that. Of all the new alliances that take shape, who surprised you the most as you were writing it?

We did make a very conscious decision to each season bring the ensemble up even more. And I really think the one that surprised me, because I sort of knew what I was doing, but I partly didn't know what I was doing, was Georgina. It was hard because I had to explain it as, "She believes it, and she's like a method actor in court. And she just has to keep doing it. The audience aren't going to believe it, and the characters around her aren't going to believe it, but she's never going to crack. So at some point, people are going to start to believe her." And then when I was writing episode 6, at the end when Catherine was playing badminton by herself, and George went in at the end and kind of went, "Oh, let's play," it kind of rocked her into the rest of the season in a way. Then she kind of came together for me as a good antagonist in that second half, particularly through [episodes] 7, 8, and 9.

You also introduce a bit of American history into this season. Was that fun for you to delve into?

Well, it came out of the research, strangely. I thought, let's see what else was going on in the world at that time. And of course [the American Revolution] was going on in the world. And then I got a researcher and I [wanted to know], "Did Catherine have anything to do with it? What was her attitude to it?" And then they came up with this thing where the British had actually come to her to strike a deal and to get support. And I thought, "Oh, what if the Americans came too?" And so there was this idea, and I just thought it was funny in terms of how bad relations are between Russia and America now. I thought it seems funny that once upon a time they were like, "Well, we're behind you guys." So it just seemed funny to us, and the episode came out great.

Another new dynamic was having Maxim [Henry Meredith], Marial's 11-year-old husband, around a lot more.

He's just this amazing kid. I remember when he did his first scene or two, I think maybe it was Colin Bucksey, who's directed for 40 years, and one of the actors, someone went, "He just belongs here. He's just a kid who walks on set and you know he is an actor." And he is, he's great. I'm sure actors will be interviewed who will tell it, but I did plan for him to die in the duel in episode 2. And his table read was so funny that I rewrote the script that he didn't, because we were howling every time he comes in. It's crazy, but let's keep him, he can win the duel and keep going. But he likes it. It's funny because [of his age] he has to go on and off set, so he has to walk in and out of the table room. He mic drops every line because it's like the door opens, he walks in, says three lines, everyone roars, boom, he's out.

I'm speaking to you before the world has seen the new season. Are you nervous, now that you've killed one of your leads? How do you move on from this?

How do I move on? No, you move on by thinking of new stories and getting excited about it. I think yesterday I was reading some things and I thought "that'd be cool for season 4." I'll never move on from Nick, and hopefully we'll work on other things together. But yeah, it's hard to move on. It was very hard, in episode 7 and 8, I felt like the whole cast were in grief. Actually, for real, in particularly for Elle and I probably, even though Nick was around a little bit. I think it's all just a challenge. I mean, it was a challenge how to do this season. And that's what I like about TV — it's a challenge. It's like, "Okay, now we've got Elle and this amazing ensemble, what do we do now?" And in a way, we've done it, because we did four episodes more or less where Nick was there, but he wasn't like the fulcrum that he had been. And I felt like we still did four great episodes. So I feel like I'm interested and I'm excited about what it is — what is this iteration of the show, which was always kind of one we were heading towards.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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