Image Credit: Colleen Hayes/ABC
At the beginning of the current TV season, Revenge creator Mike Kelley told EW that his soap opera’s big mystery — what happened to Daniel Grayson (Joshua Bowman) on the beach the night of his engagement party to Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp, at left)? — would be wrapped up by the show’s 13th episode.
But we recently chatted with the producer again, Kelley backtracked and exclusively told EW that the show’s writers have decided to extend the mystery’s big reveal by two episodes — to episode 15.
“Initially, before we got our full-season pickup, I wanted [the mystery reveal] to be episode 13 because I figured that, in case the show was only hitting for a smaller number of fans, I wanted to be able to satisfy the people who had tuned in and make sure it had bookends,” Kelley says. “But we’re finding we have so much story to tell.”
The extra story Kelley wants to tell has everything to do with new-bad-boy-in-town Tyler (Ashton Holmes), Daniel’s increasingly creepy friend from Harvard Business School. Tyler’s arc “becomes bigger and bigger,” Kelley says. “In order to service that, we needed to push the engagement party on the beach just a couple of episodes. It hasn’t changed the story we want to tell. It’s just that we found we had more story to tell.”
So what is up with Tyler? “There’s a much larger story with this guy,” Kelley teases. “He’s inspired by Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley. We just love the idea that this guy really wants to become Daniel. He wants to be this guy. He will do what it takes. Obviously, there are some issues here. He gets more and more dangerous. The more and more he become marginalized by Daniel’s relationship with Emily, coupled with his inability to really crack into the Grayson empire on Conrad’s side, causes him to generate some pretty shocking story down the road.”
Tyler’s love interest Ashley (Ashley Madekwe) factors into Tyler’s increasingly unhinged storylines, too — as you’ll witness in tonight’s very juicy episode. “There’s a large story coming,” Kelley adds, “between her, Tyler, and Nolan that’s on the horizon.”
Read more scoop about Revenge in this week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly, on newsstands Nov. 4.
Tanner on Twitter: @EWTanStransky
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