Servant star Toby Kebbell breaks down that horrific kitchen disaster

Cooking has been an important part of Servant since the beginning. The character Sean Turner (Toby Kebbell) is a trained chef, so Kebbell put in the hours to learn the craft with the help of Philadelphia chef Drew DiTomo. The result has been that Sean's cooking doesn't just look realistic, it's also beautiful, visceral, and cinematic. But in the most recent episode of the Apple TV+ series produced by M. Night Shyamalan, things went wrong in Sean's kitchen. Very wrong.

In the episode "Ring," directed by Dylan Holmes Williams, Sean and his assistant Tobe (Tony Revolori) are working on a big cooking project with the help of Tobe's girlfriend Sylvia (Nadia Alexander). But they're all stressed out (Sylvia from wanting to impress Sean, Tobe from enduring his girlfriend's stressful anger, and Sean from all the weird things that are always happening to his family), which is not a good headspace to be in when lots of sharp objects are being wielded in complicated patterns.

The stress starts to eat away at everyone, leading to a bowl of ceviche getting put down in the wrong spot. It is then knocked over, and no one notices until Sylvia slips on the spill — which causes her ring finger to catch on a hook, cutting her finger right off her hand as she falls to the ground (hence the episode title). Surgeons can reattach fingers ... but not when a stressed-out boyfriend accidentally knocks the severed digit into the garbage disposal. Sheesh!

"Hats off to Dylan, it was very adventurous for a young director to come into an established season and have such a complicated sequence," Kebbell tells EW. "He wanted to do these excellent shots that follow everyone around the kitchen and we see the different stations and the movement. Me and Drew were doing our best to help him with that and make sure he kew 'so this is the timing of that, and this is the most interesting part of this prep,' and so on. It was great to work with the director in that way. And of course I love screaming and shouting at Tony's character. It just was a lot of work cause the timing had to be absolutely perfect. There were a lot of overhead slips and falling into exactly the right place."

Kebbell and DiTomo even provided Williams with ideas about where in the cooking process to place the bloody accident: "We were talking about what could be the major cause, and there are so many dangerous elements in there. Actually the mandolin is the number one, because it's just a blade on a flat edge. Tobe's doing that thing with the radishes at the beginning of the scene. Me and Drew have been using those mandolins so much over the previous seasons. Whenever Drew was running around doing so much, I would just run those radishes through the mandolin."

Kebbell says he loved filming "Ring" in particular because it involved a lot of cooking, which helps him de-stress on set. That's exactly what makes the episode's horror so tragic. When cooking becomes stressful instead of calming, bad things can happen.

Kitchens are all about this calm nature, so there shouldn't be any of that," he says. "She's trying to be ambitious and do the right things and it's all wrong. It's all very meditative, it's very focused and calming. So yeah, it's the wrong thing. So she starts to amp up everybody, and it's this new force in the kitchen. She gets the salute, she gets the downfall of it."

New episodes of Servant season 3 currently premiere every Friday on Apple TV+.

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