FOREVER Finale Post-Mortem: Ioan Gruffudd on the Finale’s ‘Jaw-Dropping’ Shocks

[This post contains spoilers for FOREVER’s first season finale. Please don’t read this piece until you’ve seen “The Last Death of Henry Morgan.”]

FOREVER’s Henry spent all of the season trying to hide his immortality from Jo — much to the chagrin of Abe — but the jig may be up: after Adam shot Henry (in an attempt to either kill him or out his secret), Henry survived and popped back up in the water. Unfortunately for him, when he died, he left behind his watch, and an old photo of himself, Abe, and Abigail…which Jo found, and confronted him about.

Though the season ended with Henry, reluctantly, telling Jo, “It’s a long story,” fans don’t know exactly what he’ll tell her. And for FOREVER star Ioan Gruffudd, getting to that final scene was a shocking experience for him, too.

“My initial instinct was jaw-dropping, mouth agape,” he laughed. “Which was the right instinct to have. You want the audience to have that feeling of, ‘How on Earth is Henry going to explain himself?’ That was my first instinct. My second instinct was, ‘Oh, no! Does he have to reveal the secret to her? How are we going to do a second season if she knows his secret?’ And then the third was, ‘Of course we’re going to find a very clever way of getting him out of this, and I can’t wait to see it.'”

“The end of the show is what should happen,” he continued. “That we, the audience, are left salivating for more.”

If Gruffudd has his way, he does hope Henry finds a way to keep his secret on the down low.

“Here’s my point: where is the tension of the show if Jo knows his secret?” he questioned. “If Jo knows his secret, we just go on these great adventures and solve crimes every week, and she rolls her eyes, and Henry’s an immortal. The important thing is this secret doesn’t come out. What we’ve said in the past is that someone who has a special power that is exposed, they become the fodder of media attention, the scrutiny of scientists, and they become a guinea pig or a lab rat. Henry has been hanged, he’s been burned at the stake, he’s been thrown in prison, he’s been thrown into an asylum. So it’s very important that this secret doesn’t come out.”

Complicating matters is the fact that Jo and Henry have been inching together, romantically.

“I think it would be interesting, if they were to get together, that she doesn’t know his secret,” Gruffudd said. “How fun would that be to be together in a relationship, but hold this lie? That would be a whole other different relationship. Would that make Henry an empathetic character, would we start to dislike Henry because he’s lying to her the whole time? Or would we delight in the fact that he’s keeping it from her when they’re together? If the lie were to be exposed when they were together, what a horrible, horrible state of affairs that would be.”

As for Henry’s other big event in the finale, Gruffudd admitted he was a little bit bummed that Henry was able to get one over on his nemesis, Adam, and made him “locked in” via a coma.

“It’s sort of disappointing in a way, because one of his greatest adversaries is taken care of, to a point,” he conceded. “He’s managed to subdue him for the time being. It opens up the question of are there other people like him? Now that he knows Adam exists, are there more out there of immortals? I think that would be an interesting exploration for next season.”

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What did you think of FOREVER’s finale?

Related:

FOREVER: Ioan Gruffudd Previews Henry’s Attempt to Protect Jo in the ‘Emotional’ Finale
FOREVER Season 1 Finale Photos: ‘The Last Death of Henry Morgan’
FOREVER: ‘The Night in Question’ Teases
FOREVER: John Noble to Guest Star

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