The fourth season of Bates Motel premieres this Monday, March 7 on A&E, and a few weeks back, KSiteTV was one of a small group of media outlets to visit the Vancouver shooting locations and studio where the show is brought to life. As such, we have some interviews to share with you between now and Monday, with the first spotlight going to the series lead, Freddie Highmore, whose multi-layered performance as Norman Bates has been a highlight of the series.
“At the end of Season 3, the great tease of what is to come a lot more in the fourth season was where we see Bradley being killed and Norman sort of comes around the car and then there is this switch and we see ‘Mother’ Norma, as Vera, take Bradley and sort of bash her into the ground. We see that Mother Norma physically kill — seeing it from Norman’s perspective, I guess — and there are lots more scenes like that this season where both Vera and I sort of interchange in playing the role of Mother during one particular scene,” Highmore teases. “Often I watch one take that she does, and she will come back to the monitors and what the scene that I am doing, and there’s this great sort of fun sense that I have never done before, of collaborating closely with someone else to create this one singular character. That has been great fun,” he says.
And, of course, the show is getting closer and closer to the Norman Bates that is known and enjoyed from the movies. “I like these little moments that ultimately culminate into creating the world of Psycho,” Freddie enthuses. “There is a sense this season of more of those objects or artifactual places over even people that you know you’re going to meet one day in Psycho, and you start to recognize from that world, as the end draws nearer.”
For Season 4 of Bates Motel, Highmore has had an added but welcome responsibility: the chance to write an episode of the series. “I’m so lucky and grateful to Kerry [Ehrin] and Carlton [Cuse] for allowing me to write an episode and to spend time in the writer’s room with the other writers, too, and sort of pitching out ideas for the season and for my particular episode,” he says graciously. “I guess in a way, because the show is very much character driven as opposed to this mystery of the week or the kill of the week, the way the writers approach Bates Motel is somewhat similar to the way that, as an actor, that I approach making that arc of Norman, because it is very much getting inside and getting to know that world so well. I am fortunate to have that knowledge of what we are doing,” Highmore says.
With Freddie Highmore writing an episode, and cast mates Nestor Carbonell and Max Theriot directing episodes, it seems that Bates Motel is a very collaborative effort that allows its actors to branch out more. “I think it’s a very small cast of characters, and so everyone knows the show,” he says of the opportunity to expand. “Everyone who’s been on it since the beginning knows it so intimately. I guess all people on a television show, after a while, I’d imagine most of them talk about a family dynamic and ‘we’re all each other’s best friends.’ But I think that that’s particularly true on Bates Motel, because it is such a small core group of people, which I know from the writing perspective makes it tricky, because it always depends on those intricate, nuanced things between a small group as opposed to having this massive cast that you can create endless storylines from.”
Bates Motel returns March 7 on A&E. You can take a look at a teaser spotlighting Freddie Highmore below.
