Did you watch that jaw-dropping episode of Westworld final night time? HBO Max’s sci-fi sequence proved that, even in its fourth season, it nonetheless has the flexibility to yank the rug out from beneath its viewers. io9 received an opportunity to speak to Aurora Perrineau (Truth or Dare), whose character was on the heart of the massive reveal.

Just in case you haven’t watched final night time’s episode, “Generation Lost”…

So principally: you discover out that Perrineau’s character, C—a member of a gaggle of human resistance fighters who crosses paths with Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) and Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth)—is definitely the grown-up model of Frankie, the daughter of Caleb (Aaron Paul). We knew that Frankie and her mom escaped assassination when Caleb went to assist Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) battle Hale (Tessa Thompson), however we didn’t know till “Generation Lost” {that a}) Caleb didn’t survive, and is now a Host beneath Hale’s management, and b) the storyline with Bernard, Stubbs, and C takes place greater than 20 years after the Caleb-Maeve-Hale showdown. In the episode, Bernard—who is aware of every thing about each timeline, and due to this fact is aware of C’s true identification—guides C to uncover a “weapon” within the desert: Maeve’s physique.

That was some good, old school Westworld mindfuckery, was it not? Incredibly, Perrineau—whose character first appeared in episode three, “Années Folles”—didn’t notice who she was actually enjoying till the final minute. “I got the script for that episode, I think a week before we shot that episode,” she informed io9 over video chat. “We were getting the scripts as we were filming, and so I didn’t know when I was filming the first episode what I was doing.”

Naturally, coming aboard Westworld meant being sworn to secrecy. “It’s a standard that you sign things that are like, ‘please don’t talk about it, don’t spoil things.’ But what you shouldn’t do normally in any show is tell people huge plot points,” she stated. She positively needed to dodge questions from family and friends, although. “There isn’t a lot of ‘do you work with this person or this person or this person?’ And ‘what does this mean?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’”

All the secrecy meant that Perrineau and the actor who performs younger Frankie, Celeste Clark, didn’t get an opportunity to check notes concerning the character. “Neither of us knew that we were playing each other, so she’d already shot [episodes] one and two and I was doing three. And when I got to four, they were like, ‘Oh, by the way, this is your mini-me.’”

In the younger Frankie scenes, we see how Caleb faucets into his army coaching—and his personal experiences tangling with hostile Hosts—to coach his daughter to be a survivor, and the way loving and supportive he’s as a dad or mum. Though Caleb vanished from her life when she was very younger, Perrineau thinks he continued to have a powerful affect on how C lived her life after that time. “Her respect for him and admiration and love is probably the reason she is where she is and doing what she’s doing,” she stated. “I think the core of everyone is that love is the thing that pushes you to do everything, and I think her love for her father, and wanting to know the truth of what really happened to him, is her main objective. Even when she’s looking for this weapon, it’s really because she’s looking for him. I think her whole goal is just to know what happened to him, because she loves him.”

So far, we haven’t actually gotten a lot perception into how the people who’ve resisted coming beneath Host management reside their day-to-day lives. Perrineau clearly couldn’t say how a lot we’ll get to see within the coming weeks, however she did have just a few hints. “They’re hot all the time. They’re really hot,” she joked, since thus far we’ve solely seen C and her fellow people scurrying round what positive looks like a post-apocalyptic desert. “But I think you adjust to everything. And I think that their day-to-day is just trying to figure out the best way to, you know, save what they believe humanity is. That’s a never-ending, never-sleeping, being kind of always go, go, go thing. Surviving is their main goal right now.”

Though C is the primary human we’ve frolicked with in Bernard’s storyline, just a few others are additionally current, notably C’s fellow rebels J (Into the Badlands’ Daniel Wu) and a lady performed by Outer Range’s Morningstar Angeline. J and C butt heads when deciding what to do with Bernard and Stubbs, and Angeline’s character steps between them earlier than sharing a young second with C. “You’ll see more of [C and J’s] relationship as the season goes on. And I think there’s a lot of love between them. But I also think where there’s love like a family, you kind of fight like a family, and that’s what you’re seeing with both of them—they’re very headstrong and they believe what they believe. And clearly at that moment in time, they’re not agreeing on the same thing, but I think they want the same thing. At the end of the day, it’s just he thinks his way is better and she thinks her way is better.”

As for Angeline’s character, all Perrineau would say is, “You’ll see more of their relationship together. And I think that they have a very cool story that gets told.” She was equally—and understandably—obscure when requested if she thinks there’s an overarching theme for Westworld season 4. “I think there is. I think people will see that themselves. For as far as what I can say about my character and the group that I’m with and all that, I think that it’s kind of similar to what the show is always about: the throughline of what free will really means. For these people, free will is what they’re still trying to hold on to. But I think that the show has a bigger message that we’ll all find out.”

Westworld drops new episodes Sundays on HBO Max.

Want extra io9 information? Check out when to anticipate the most recent Marvel and Star Wars releases, what’s subsequent for the DC Universe on movie and TV, and every thing you should find out about House of the Dragon and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.