Zoe Kazan’s new limited series adaptation of East of Eden spreads from the woods of Connecticut to the valleys of California, with a sprawling cast of characters to match its epic reach.
In casting those characters, Kazan and co-showrunner Jeb Stuart searched for specific traits. “There’s a kind of porousness of thought in Steinbeck’s work where you can, even with minor characters, get very close to their innermost thoughts,” Kazan tells Tudum. “That is not a thing that you can easily transpose into a dramatic medium.”
The job of channeling Steinbeck’s innermost thoughts fell to the cast of East of Eden. Fortunately, they were more than qualified for the assignment. At its center is Florence Pugh as Cathy Ames, the dark star around whom the men of East of Eden revolve. Kazan never considered another actor for the role. “I didn’t have a backup,” she says. “Truly, and I don’t use this word lightly, I think she’s a genius.”
Pugh leaped at the challenge. “One of the things I’ve taken pride in is being able to give unlikable characters another chance,” she tells Netflix. “It gives me an opportunity to try and understand these characters, understand their decision-making, have empathy for them, and try and allow for their story to be bigger than just the fact that they made evil decisions at some point in their lifetime.”
Cathy is a tornado upending the lives of the denizens of East of Eden, including Adam Trask (Christopher Abbott), Charles Trask (Mike Faist), and others. Pugh, who also executive produced the series, found herself at the heart of that storm. “An element that I’ve come to really appreciate was Zoe inviting me to create this with her,” she says. “For someone to see that in me and to trust that I was someone that they could rely on to help create this world with them was such an honor.”
Read on to meet the cast that populates East of Eden’s world.
Cathy is the unforgettable antihero of East of Eden, a character whose motivations have been debated by readers and Steinbeck scholars since the novel’s original publication.
Kazan is one of those readers. “I fell in love with this book when I was a teenager,” she says. “Cathy was really the person who stayed with me the most, the character I carried around and puzzled over.”
For Academy Award–nominee Pugh, playing Cathy was an unforgettable opportunity. “She’s probably one of the most incredible characters in literature in the way she handles herself,” she said. “I was already on the hunt to find something that was going to challenge me, that was going to push me, and that was going to be something that I really had to work for. So to have something like this land in my lap was, well, it was answering everything.”
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Morose Army veteran Adam Trask finds love at first sight with Cathy — but when they journey west to California, everything changes.
“He’s a character that has lived a lot of different lives, and he’s sort of changed his personality throughout it,” Abbott says. “He starts off, like, hopping trains and living like a vagabond and stealing stuff and then becomes a different human when he has son. It’s a big epic arc to track.”
Pugh found Abbott the perfect scene partner. “He’s just got those beautiful, deep, sad eyes, and it was mesmerizing to work opposite him,” she says. “He’s got a brilliant set of skills and just taps into whatever he needs to get to immediately — and then hears ‘cut’ and says something really silly, which is kind of how I work, too.”
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Adam’s brother, Charles, stays behind to mind the farm while his brother joins the army; his feelings about Cathy are considerably more complicated than Adam’s.
“He’s such a conflicted man,” Faist says of Charles. “This is a story about people that are dealing with their own inner demons and trying to keep them at bay, and some do a better job of that than others throughout the story. Charles is a man who has all of these traumas, and he’s very much aware of them.”
Faist was cast after Kazan chose Abbott as the series’ Adam. “We had to wait until we cast Adam to cast Charles, because they exist in contrast to each other,” Kazan says. “If we had had a different Adam, maybe we would have had a different Charles. But almost immediately after casting Chris, it felt like Mike was the person we wanted more than anyone. There’s a kind of binary between them.”
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Loyal Trask family manservant Lee conceals a brilliant mind behind a pidgin disguise, helping the bereft Adam raise his sons in a quickly changing world.
Lee is the secret heart of Steinbeck’s East of Eden. “When I first started investigating the role of Lee for the audition for this I was struck by several things,” Lee says. “There’s an interesting contrast which is drawn in him explicitly because he initially presents as what we would consider almost a caricature of a Chinese character. And so coming to see that he’s this fully fleshed out 3D person with as much humanity as anyone else in the book, in a book full of incredibly rich people — that’s not something you see a lot.”
Lee and Abbott share a rich dynamic that the actors were thrilled to build. “It’s just the most beautiful platonic romantic relationship,” Abbott says. “I can’t say I’ve ever seen it. I think it’s extremely unique. There’s so much nuance there that it was one of the fun trajectories to go down.”
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Adam and Charles’s father, Cyrus, is a harsh taskmaster who has very different expectations for his two sons — and a few secrets that will outlive him.
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The boisterous madame of a Salinas Valley brothel, Faye falls under Cathy’s spell after the young woman stakes out a new career for herself in the hills of California.
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Trask family neighbor Samuel Hamilton makes a living drilling wells and spinning yarns; he strikes up a friendship with Adam and Lee that will change all three of them for the better.
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Adam’s son Cal struggles to escape the shadow of his family legacy while grappling with the identity of his missing mother.
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Cal’s twin brother, Aron, is the light to Cal’s darkness, but history repeats itself as the brothers’ relationship is complicated by their father’s divided affections.
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