‘Locke & Key’s Darby Stanchfield Discusses The “Incredible” Response To Netflix’s Fantasy Drama

After seven years on ABC’s Scandal playing lawyer turned White House Press Secretary Abby Whelan, actress Darby Stanchfield tackled something completely different: playing grieving mother Nina Locke on Netflix’s hit Locke & Key. The series, which dropped all ten episodes of its first season (a second has yet to be officially announced) has been topping the charts on sites like TV Time (which track social interest in shows), and was well received by critics. But launching a weekly broadcast series, and a bingeable one, are two entirely different things.

“The thing that I keep hearing and seeing over and over again is people binged it,” Stanchfield told Decider when she visited our offices earlier this week, “and then they binged it a second time, or a third time, and that’s, more often than not, that’s the common scenario.”

In the series, Nina Locke is still reeling from the shocking murder of her husband, Rendell Locke (Bill Heck). She uproots her family and moves to his old home in Matheson, Massachusetts – partially to get a fresh start, and a larger part to try and find out more about the man she had three kids with, but still didn’t know that well. As she investigates Rendell’s mysterious teen years, her kids, Bode (Jackson Robert Scott), Kinsey (Emilia Jones) and Tyler (Connor Jessup) are battling a mysterious, supernatural woman named Dodge (Laysla De Oliveira), who is after them for possession of the magical keys littered throughout Rendell’s childhood home.

If you haven’t watched the episodes, they’re a well balanced mix of supernatural shenanigans, light horror, family drama, and teen angst — with a ton of humor thrown in at the same time. That’s all taken directly from the source material, a six volume comic book series of the same name by writer Joe Hill and artist Gabriel Rodriguez, who were both involved in the production in different ways.

Following up on the launch, Decider discussed the reaction to the series, working with actors Sherri Saum and Bill Heck, and whether Stanchfield would ever want to direct an episode of Locke & Key, if it does go to Season 2.

Decider: The last time we talked about Locke & Key was for the press day, which was well before the show launched. Now that it’s actually been out there for a few weeks, what’s the reaction been like on your end?

Darby Stanchfield: It’s a little overwhelming. Social media has been, especially Instagram, has been pretty incredible. It’s dropped globally, and so we’re getting messages from all over the world, in different languages, people loving the show. The thing that I keep hearing and seeing over and over again is people binged it… And then they binged it a second time, or a third time, and that’s, more often than not, that’s the common scenario. For us, that’s the best compliment ever, that they found Locke & Key to be engaging and that they want more; and then that they’re fans and they want to go back and drill down on all the details of the magic keys, or their favorite character… It’s a fun time.

And coming from network TV, where episodes would roll out once a week, this is also a very different experience of… You’ve just given them the whole season and anything goes on social media, you don’t have to worry about spoilers because it’s just out there and people can just consume all of it.

I did want to ask you about that… I know it’s a little inside baseball, but having been on a network show for seven years where it’s week after week after week versus this, what has the press tour been like? What’s been different for you?

It feels much more like when a film comes out and you talk about it all at once. With a network show, we would shoot ten months out of the year, and because it would come out every week there was this steady or dull roar of press. You would do it every so often and you were always sort of teasing the next episode. Whereas this, it’s talking about the body of the work, the whole season and it’s more holistic and about the character or the adaptation of the comic, bigger ideas… It’s a great kind of press, I love it!

View this post on Instagram

Did you know LOCKE & KEY star Darby Stanchfield has a key collection?

A post shared by Decider.com (@deciderdotcom) on Feb 21, 2020 at 7:14am PST

I was really surprised that one of the biggest responses we got to our coverage of the show was a piece that we put up about where it was shot. And I know it was shot in Nova Scotia, at least partially, and Toronto — but what was it like shooting in Lunenberg?

[Laughs] It was amazing. First of all, I was born and raised in Alaska, so Lunenberg reminds me of a fishing town that I lived in, I’ve lived in two different ones. It has this same sort of feeling as Kodiak, Alaska. It’s a marine town, everybody knows each other, it’s a very small place… You fall in love with it when you get there, but not everybody knows about it so it still sort of feels like a secret. It was perfect for our show, it’s the perfect Matheson, Massachusetts, um, and a fun bonding experience, a fun field trip for the cast. Because we all jump on the plane and then we fly to Nova Scotia and then we take a two hour, two and a half hour van ride out into the middle of nowhere. When we went there for the winter there was only one restaurant open in the whole town … so we’re all eating together every night. The whole thing, from behind the scenes to the shooting was charming and quite special.

Most important question about the restaurant though, how was the clam chowder? [Editor’s Note: there’s a recurring bit on the show about which restaurant in Matheson has the best clam chowder]

[Laughs] Really good, yes. It was called Salt Shaker, the restaurant, and they had very good seafood. And yes, excellent, stellar clam chowder.

Getting to the show proper, Nina very much has her own arc, her own mystery for most of the season, and an expanded role from the comic book… Was that always in place? Or was it tweaked once you came on board?

In the comic book she can hardly even look at her children because [they] remind her of Rendell, so she can’t even acknowledge their existence. That’s all the showrunners, that’s Meredith [Averill] and Carlton [Cuse], and I think that was a smart switch to make for a television series because at the heart of the show is this family … And in the world of the comic, the adults can’t see the magic so Nina just thinks her kids are being weird and grieving weird and being teenagers, or Bode’s just being Bode.

But I like that in the first season, it does go from the whole family grieving, and they’re all quite isolated from each other, to at the very end when they’re having breakfast together and then they have this moment over the cliffs with Rendell’s ashes, they’ve gone on this journey together. As an actor who executed it with these other actors, it makes me want to know what happens. I want to know artistically what happens next with this family, and the dynamic.

You seemed to really bond with Sherri Saum on and off set, who played Ellie Whedon. What was it like working with her?

I love working with Sherri, we became very close, she’s an incredible person. She’s just got the biggest heart, and she’s a very sort of salt of the earth human being… There’s very much that in Ellie and I feel like there’s very much that in Nina as well. And I couldn’t have asked for a better acting partner. She really grounds that role… Her work in the tail end of the series is mind blowing.

Actually, she and I and Laysla [De Oliveira] we used to have dinner together, Laysla who plays Dodge, we’d have dinner together every so often because we were more on the adult spectrum of the show. So if I wasn’t having dinner with the Locke kids, with the actors who play the Locke kids, the three of us women were having dinner… And we had dinner right before the two of them ramp up their arcs there and it was just, I was just so delighted, having read the scripts — and I’m not particularly in that world — just to see her excitement and to see the episodes and to see what she did… I feel honored to have worked with her.

Another person that you had a very interesting relationship with was Bill Heck. Because it’s only in flashbacks, you have to create this immediate bond — how did you approach that as an actor?

I feel fortunate in that scenario, too. He’s theater trained, as well as myself, so we had a shorthand coming into this. I mean we met at the table read, and Carlton Cuse was very concerned about the chemistry of this — and it was there so that was all great, but we just started to sort of text shorthand and fill in the backstory about who these Locke parents were, and their dynamics as husband and wife and what kind of parents they are… We shared everything from music to filling out little details of stuff that wasn’t in the script and even flashback stuff like, “What would your memory be of this versus my memory?” So we got really specific, to the point when we actually went to go shoot the stuff we were like, “That’s it?” [Laughs] It’s just a couple of scenes. We were basically gearing up for Gone With the Wind.

Any update on Season 2 at this point? Are they still just writing it, but no official pickup?

I have no update as of this moment. I do know that they’re writing and we should hear soon. But right now we’re just in the throes of, it’s out there and everybody’s bingeing.

You did a little directing on Scandal, you directed an episode and a web series. If Locke & Key did come back for a second season is that something you’d push to do? Would you want to direct on the show?

I’m always looking to direct. My experience of it was incredibly rewarding and positive… I haven’t had conversations at this point with my showrunners, it’s something that I’m definitely interested in; but I feel at this point it’s important to see what happens with this show and the popularity or the longevity, and then come to the table and have a conversation later. But it’s something that I am always looking to do, whether it be a show that I’m on or something that I’m not.

I do want to ask you about another project you have, Stargirl is coming up on Disney+ which is a very different sort of mom character. What can you tease about that?

It’s based on a best-selling young adult novel by Jerry Spinelli, it’s a really special read and it’s so funny. It’s a coming-of-age story about this boy, and he meets this girl named Stargirl and she turns his world inside out, as well as the town. I play the mother of this kid…

She’s very different from Nina. There’s a book called The Giving Tree, it’s a classic, and to me Gloria Borlock is the Giving Tree. She’s just this thing that has always been there for him, she will always be there for him, you see a lot of passage of time, so although everything in his life changes and turns upside down, Gloria Borlock is like the constant, rooted tree in his life. And that drops Friday the 13 of March on Disney+

And since it’s a Disney+ movie, did you get to meet Baby Yoda?

[Laughs] I have not yet met Baby Yoda, I’m hoping that I will, at our premiere.

He’ll probably come in all dressed up.

I’m hoping! That’s right.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Stream Locke & Key on Netflix