After three episodes of talking behind a door, we finally get to see a little more of Steve Zahn on Silo this week. Not much — it’s just a stinger at the end of the episode when Solo finally steps out from behind the door, the promise of something more. But you get some; Solo’s further out than he’s been in what seems like a good long while. Which is great, because both Zahn and showrunner Graham Yost spent a lot of time dialing in the early scenes with Solo, even if all we got was a glimpse of his eyeballs.
“I remember […] I did a lot of talking about that, and when you would see my eyes and how close that camera would be, and if it was just the voice at times. And it was very specific,” Zahn said at a junket ahead of the show’s premiere.
The prolonged and restricted meeting is a change from the books, where Solo grabs Juliette’s foot as she’s climbing up a ladder; as Yost tells Polygon, he wanted something a little more “built up” compared to the novel. Having Solo’s curious world — “Moon River” and all — tantalizingly encased behind the vault door gave the season a bit more to play with as a means of setting up this important relationship for season 2.
“It’s probably a little more dramatic than Solo would be, because he’s much more of a hesitant kind of guy; a little shier. But Steve Zahn, he managed to still communicate that,” Yost said. To his mind, it’s Zahn who managed to encompass the wide-eyed push-pull of Solo’s character in the show, whether from behind a steel door — putting the fear of god into Juliette by briefly wondering if she had been poisoned before sheepishly admitting he just wasn’t sure she was real — or shying away from an embrace out in the open. “You get that cast, and you get him doing it, and it’s like, OK, well, that works.”
Zahn felt a bit more of the pressure, even when locked away in Solo’s bunker. “As an actor, especially a character actor, you go in and you’re like, I hope this is right,” Zahn said.
To help him get in the mindset, he not only worked with the production designers on what would be in his vault (his thought: puppets, which the set designers made sure to get for him), but also what living as Solo really looked like.
“Is it real? Is it not? What’s swimming? What’s an elephant? What’s birds? I think I know what they are, because I can describe them to you, but I’m describing them as somebody else that saw them, or maybe didn’t see them,” Zahn marveled about Solo’s limited world. “I would think about what are the things we do that we just naturally do because we’re human beings and there’s another human being, and what are the things we learned how to do?”
Ultimately the best way in was just to really inhabit Solo’s childlike mindset in whatever way he could — whether we could see him fully or not.
“I acted for an entire week without you seeing me, really. But I wore my costume. I got into hair and makeup,” Zahn said, wryly. “It was really important to go through that; I was nervous, because playing somewhat of a broad character, you go to work and you’re like, Well, this is the guy. I hope you all like him.”
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