Barry Sloane Breaks Down 'Passenger’s' Most Inscrutable Character

BritBox’s Passenger is a difficult series to quantify. A cross-genre mash-up that blends a slow-burn mystery with small-town politics and the sort of high-tension horror that makes you nervous to turn your lights off at night, it’s an ambitious project that aims to do more than simply tell the story of a village with something nasty lurking in the woods. Created and written by former Broadchurch actor Andrew Buchan, Passenger follows the story of Riya Anjuwa (Wunmi Musaku), a former Metropolitan police officer who relocates to the small Northern village of Chaddar Vale. 

As is traditional in stories like this, weird things are happening around town: Unexplained disappearances, inexplicable weather patterns, and random animal dismemberment in the local woods. But as Riya attempts to figure out if anything supernatural is going on, she’ll also have to deal with an all-too-human problem: The early release of a local murderer, whose unexpected return further roils the town.

But Eddie Wells (Barry Sloane) is another sort of mystery altogether. Sentenced to a decade in prison for a brutal murder he doesn’t remember committing, he’s out five years early for good behavior, and the locals are reeling, from the family members and friends of his alleged victims to his own daughters, who aren’t sure how to feel about him or his return. The circumstances of the crimes Eddie supposedly committed are a question only the season finale can answer, but it’s clear he has an important role to play in whatever dark doings are happening in Chaddar Vale.

Telly Visions sat down with Barry Sloane, who plays the complicated and mysterious Eddie, during New York Comic Con to talk about what makes his character tick and the dark themes at the heart of Passenger 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Spoilers ahead!

Telly Visions: Passenger is more than a bit hard to explain; that must go double for you since your character doesn’t even know half of what he doesn’t know most of the time. How would you classify or quantify this show and what it’s trying to do? 

Barry Sloane: Passenger takes elements of things we all feel very familiar with, but with an undercurrent of something deeply, deeply wrong happening at the same time. The major elements of this feel comfortable to me as someone who grew up in the north of England, these characters and their stories, and all our little ethnicities and quirks, but then you’re stomach’s going…yeah, but no. Oh no. 

TV: Did you grow up in a town with a weird curse or a mystery?

Sloane: Not necessarily a weird curse, but aren’t all towns cursed by their history in some way? 

TV: Wow, that’s insanely deep for our second question. 

Sloane: I mean, I’m a really deep guy! [laughs] But, no, really—what defines so much of this show is fear, and what you do when you’re faced with it. Most of us know when something’s going on when there’s a problem like this, but we tend to think that someone else will fix it or it’ll somehow be fine. Well, maybe you should take a f*cking look, is what I’m saying. 

TV: One of the things the horror genre does best is to use the scary and the supernatural to explore things we’re wrestling with in real life. What’s the thing that people in Chaddar Vale are afraid to look at, metaphorically speaking? 

Sloane: Aren't we all afraid of what might lurk underneath the surface? You know, we all wear a mask every day. We all play a character to hide away from the truest form of ourselves. Bravery is the reward for facing that up, but nearly none of us can do it. And so probably most people—and definitely the people in this story—are hiding away from something that needs to change within them in order for their lives to move forward. It ends up being something manifesting into a physical form, here. 

TV: What drew you to being involved with Passenger and to playing this character specifically? 

Sloane: It didn’t feel like anything else I was reading at the time. It felt like a great mixture of genres that I love. It wasn't just one thing; it was kind of tipping its hat to many different things. It was written by an actor and a new voice in writing. The whole thing felt new and exciting. 

I thought doing it was something I would like—and lately, I’ve just started taking things that I’d want to do rather than worrying if people are gonna like it. If they do, then that’s a fucking great thing.

TV: Tell me how much you knew about Eddie coming into this show. Did you know where his story was going from the beginning? Or did you find it out along the way as you were filming?

Sloane: To start discussions, I had Episodes 1 and 2. Something I knew I wanted to do, just aesthetically speaking, was a tip my hat to the greaser badboy characters from several different things we’ve seen. I didn’t want to place him in any particular time, so I set everything, from his costume to his tattoos, everywhere from the 1950s to modern times. 

I wanted him to feel like someone we knew, someone anyone could have met. And I think that’s helpful. You can put whatever you need to put on him, right? And he needs to be that for the community. He needs to be that for you, the viewer. It’s fluid... Yeah, I enjoyed playing this character an awful lot. 

TV: I can tell! So, Eddie doesn’t remember the crime he was convicted of committing. Is it challenging to play someone whose own idea or awareness of himself is so unstable and constantly shifting?  How do you find a North Star for the truth of who he is in the middle of all that?

Sloane: I think you just need to know your objective throughout. I don’t want to share what that is, because it will give away too much. But I knew clearly what was important to him, and as long as I drove toward that in whatever scene was thrown at me, as happens in episodic television, I’d be fine. So I knew what my star was, but I can’t share that—it’s too early. But I admire your question!

TV: Passenger’s first few episodes lean into the idea of Eddie as this sort of menacing, almost nameless threat. But over time, I found him quite sympathetic in many ways, especially in his scenes with Kate and when he let some of the other townsfolk beat him up on purpose. How did you balance the conflicting aspects of Eddie’s character? Because I do think his hatred of his neighbors is quite genuine and probably earned! It feels like he contains multitudes, is what I’m saying, which I will credit to you.

Sloane: Thank you. Yeah, you know, when someone is in so much pain, they sometimes need it to manifest into reality. He felt like he needed to be physically beaten on by those guys to feel something, And I think that level of hatred comes from becoming the thing you always feared you would become, you know. Not being the father you wish you could have been, the husband you wish you could have been. 

You know, something very important about Eddie is that on both his wrists, he has his children’s date of birth, and his wife’s names are them. His family is incredibly important to him. All the stereotypes here point to—this guy must be a scumbag, he must not give a fuck. No, this guy wanted to be the best version of himself he could be, but circumstances just didn’t allow him to be that. So that was another interesting, complex bit of writing. And, look, I just always try to friend the interesting guy underneath the dark, weird characters I tend to play.

TV: What are you most excited for viewers to experience about Passenger for themselves? I was rather shocked by how much of a slow burn this is. 

Sloane: I love the bravery of that. The story that came from Andy, it didn’t feel like he had—God bless the gods of television—like fifteen or twenty executives behind him saying no, you must do this or change that, which is the kind of thing that just dilutes the fucking water until you end up with bland soup. This felt like they allowed his vision to run and the stories to jump and change and they go. I liked that. It felt new and fresh and different.

TV: It’s clear how much you loved working on this project. I love how much you love this character; that makes me, as someone who covers a lot of TV, really happy because it’s genuinely rare. 

Sloane: You know what? it’s nice when you can sell something you genuinely like from day one. I mean, I've done lots of stuff that maybe I haven't liked as much, but Eddie was like child’s play for this. Just let me play this guy and tell his story. 

TV: There's still way too much story and stuff left to do in this universe for one more episode—which, admittedly, I haven’t seen yet—to wrap all this somehow up. 

Sloane: It could be a really long episode. 

TV: I mean, it’s streaming, so maybe! Do you think the show can go on past this? I ask this not having seen the end of it. 

Sloane: I think I felt satisfied with where we ended, but I love the character, and I could happily play it for 15 years, but that's never down to me.

Passenger continues on BritBox with two episodes a week on Thursdays through October 31, 2024.