Mike Faist and Christopher Abbott rehearsed their East of Eden characters’ childhood scenes even though younger actors would play them on screen. In his October 2 American Masters PBS interview, Faist describes how director Garth Davis helped the adult Trask brothers build a shared past before filming their reunion.
They practiced a past the audience sees with different actors
Davis asked Faist and Abbott to run the childhood scenes together. Those rehearsals were not a plan to have the adult performers replace the children in the finished series. They were a way to experience the brothers’ history before playing its consequences years later.
Faist says their first scene together was Adam returning home after a long absence. Having practiced the earlier material gave them something to remember when facing each other again. Instead of starting the relationship with that reunion, they had already worked through part of what happened before it.
Charles and Adam were cast as a pair
Faist plays Charles Trask; Abbott plays his brother Adam. Netflix’s cast guide describes Charles as the brother who stays behind to look after the farm while Adam joins the army. Cathy Ames, played by Florence Pugh, later brings very different responses out of them. Their disagreement is not simply about who gets to leave home.
Kazan tells Netflix that she had to cast Adam before deciding on Charles. The brothers needed to work in contrast to each other, so a different Adam might have meant a different Charles. Once Abbott was chosen, Faist became the actor she most wanted opposite him.
That helps explain why rehearsing together mattered. They were not preparing two separate portraits of unhappy men. They were preparing brothers who have known each other for years, with different memories of the same family and different expectations of each other.
Faist describes Charles in the cast guide:
“He’s such a conflicted man.”
Who’s who in East of Eden
Turning a character’s thoughts into a scene
Steinbeck’s novel can tell readers what a character thinks, including feelings that never become a conversation. In her separate Netflix interview about adapting the book, Zoe Kazan explains that television has to find those thoughts through action, dialogue and images. She added some material while trying to keep it rooted in the original text.
That is a useful way to understand the rehearsal Faist describes. A reunion scene needs the actors to respond to someone in front of them. The family history cannot remain a list of facts they know about their characters. It has to affect how they listen, what they expect and what they hold back.
Kazan also says the series does not replace the novel. Viewers can still have a separate experience reading it afterward. Her adaptation follows events across the decades between the Civil War and World War I, leaving room for choices to affect more than one generation of the family.
The offer was exciting and intimidating
Faist’s offer from Kazan also meant following a film he knew through his admiration for James Dean:
“It’s that feeling of hell yes and oh shit, you know?”
Where to watch the new adaptation
All seven episodes of East of Eden are now streaming on Netflix in the U.S. The limited series arrived on October 1. Kazan wrote and executive produced it, and Pugh is also an executive producer. It adapts a broader stretch of the 1952 novel than the 1955 James Dean film, which Kazan describes as covering only part of the book.
Alongside the three leads, the cast includes Hoon Lee as Lee, Tracy Letts as the brothers’ father Cyrus, and Ciarán Hinds as Samuel Hamilton. For viewers starting the series, the important distinction is simple: Charles is Adam’s brother, not one of his sons. Cal and Aron belong to the next generation.
