DEADLY CLASS: Interview with Tom Stevens (Chester)

We had the pleasure of speaking with Tom Stevens who plays the delightfully terrifying Chester F*ckface Wilson on Deadly Class. I assume this goes without saying, but if you haven’t wanted the entire season there are some spoilers below. 

How Tom became Chester
Tom was introduced to the show through his wife who was a background casting director on Deadly Class. When he got the audition for Chester he immediately sent her a text, “Baby! I got an audition for Deadly Class. For F*ckface and I’m f*cking a goat!” As he says, “So that was crazy – that was nuts.” Tom was working another job at the time and wasn’t able to be in the room for the auditions so he taped his own audition with the help of his friends, “I taped the first scene with some friends, like we were having friends over for dinner and I was like to my buddy Alex Rose, ‘would you like to help tape the Deadly Class audition with me?’ He tapes the first one with me and then they added another scene and I taped that one with my buddy Michael Patric.
Sidenote: if this isn’t a testament to really good friends – friends who don’t blink when you are asking them to tape you auditioning for a character that is f*cking a goat.
As soon as Chester was his Tom ordered the Deadly Class comics and started reading. Per Tom, “Having the source material before you start shooting a show is just so fantastic.”

Commitment to the comics
We all know how hard it is for a show to get things exact when you are turning a comic into a show, but according to Tom things aren’t too far off, “I was actually just looking at the moment when Marcus wakes up after the punk show and sleeping with Saya and one of the fan pages had shot for shot what they did in the show versus what they did in the comic.” It was spot on.

Getting into character
Between getting the part and the start of shooting Tom has about a month to prepare Chester for the screen. “What I ended up doing was I was watching anything that was in the vein of Chester….what I attached too was Juliette Lewis’s accent in Natural Born Killers. I was looking for a West Texas thing. I ended up going with this Juliette Lewis sound because she had the mania that F*ckface has.” We can all agree that it works.

(Photo by: Katie Yu/SYFY)

Chester’s Demise
When asked if Tom thought Chester would make any appearances in a possible season two “I think that the comic is canon, that’s what we have to stick to. The wonderful thing about Deadly Class and the terrible thing about Deadly Class is that everybody dies, that is part of the reality. I think that there’s definitely a possibility that we could see something with Chester because everybody that Marcus kills is still in his mind. Marcus is not a very level-headed character, his mind is not a safe place and he does not walk on stable ground. So anything’s possible.”

Most Memorable Scene
Tom had a few scenes he won’t soon forget. “I like that Donahue scene because I liked coming to that full amalgamation of the character relationship between Marcus and F*ckface. I also like the bathtub scene because I didn’t think they were going to give me an opportunity to give this character any redeemable qualities and I like the toilet scene because I never felt like I was going to throw up on set more. There’s something so authentic with that scene that I couldn’t avoid it Especially when my good friend Ben Rogers was shoving his face into the toilet bowl I was like I almost threw up.”

How THAT song came to be
Tom describes the song Chester plays while in his tighty whiteys as a, “punchline to Chester’s character” Tom believes that if Chester hadn’t become this terrible serial killer, if his life hadn’t taken such a bad turn in childhood he would have been a beautiful artist.
“It opens up with the hoedown and then it says, spotlight on the top of the stairs, Chester descends the stairs in tighty whiteys with a guitar and the words were ‘kalu kala kalora a fella came to me his legs are orange as big as a tree.’ And I went this is hilarious! I read my wife the description and exactly what was happening and she came up with a melody so I picked up a guitar and started playing. I recorded a voice memo of that to send to Rick (Remender). Rick said, ‘This is awesome you f*cking nailed it! This is exactly what I wanted!’ I didn’t know that he was going to take that voice memo that I recorded literally within 15 minutes of reading the script to like Sony, and NBC and all the producer meetings showing it to people like,  ‘This is the song this is the song!’ ”

Best Moment in the Show
While speaking about the incredible music Deadly Class uses Tom had one moment that stuck out in particular, “ The ‘Lady in Red’ song with Billy and Petra when they dance. That is the best moment in the whole show. When ‘Lady in Red’ is playing and they’re dancing in the slow rotation it was so great.”

You can follow along with our Deadly Class coverage here. 

If you want a second season of Deadly Class be sure to let SYFY know by tweeting #renewdeadlyclass !