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SPOILER ALERT: Reading further will reveal spoilers about the recently released third season of “Outer Banks”, so proceed with caution.
The third season of Netflix hit “Outer Banks” dropped last week, and one of the season’s biggest plot twists involves Ward Cameron (played by Charles Estes), father of Sarah (Madelyn Cline).
While Ward has been a nemesis for the Pogues in their quest for gold, he makes the ultimate sacrifice to save his daughter’s life when Ryan (Lou Ferrigno Jr.), henchman of villainous Carlos Singh (Andy McQueen), threatens to kill Sarah, leading Ward to lunge at Ryan and send them both careening off the edge of a cliff to their deaths.
For Esten, best known for playing Deacon Claybourne on “Nashville”, Ward’s heroic exit was a fitting one.
“It’s been very gratifying to me because it’s not often that the bad guy gets any kind of emotional arc. But from the very beginning, they put it in the lines, and they allowed me to run wild with it, is that other side of Ward that makes people not exactly sure they hate him (laughs) — where they might just see a human being under there,” he explained in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
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“It was gratifying to get to explore that, but it also made total sense to me because, at the end of season two, Ward has everything — all the gold, the cross, he got away. Once he recovers, he won. And meanwhile, the Pogues have nothing — literally the shirts on their back, and they’re on a deserted island — and they have everything. Because they have each other,” he added.
“They have the family that Ward has supposedly always been fighting for, and to my mind is the real treasure of the show,” Esten continued. “We’re all chasing this gold, but in the end, they walk away with that, and Ward walks away with nothing. Not only that, he’s walking away with these horrible memories of laying his hands on his daughter, choking her.”
Esten also revealed that he wasn’t told of his character’s demise until “very late in the game,” and recalled that there were “different outcomes” of how that scene played out.
“To my mind, we landed on the one that is by far the most meaningful and the most interesting,” he said. “Sometimes things just work out, and a lot of it is the writers being utterly available to what’s gonna work in that moment and what’s gonna really make the audience feel something.”
According to Esten, he got the job because producers were familiar with his work on “Nashville”, and were looking for a nuanced villain.
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“From the very beginning, the writers weren’t looking for just a full-on bad guy twirling his moustache,” he said. “In the beginning, they wanted somebody that the audience would think was a good guy. But later, they were also very excited that there could be some good in this bad guy — enough to be a little confusing, but a little interesting to watch.”
As for how final Ward’s death is, Esten confirms the character is a goner.
“I would say it’s a flat-out impossibility that I come back, short of a flashback,” he said. “Not only did we already do the head fake, it’s intentional that it wasn’t off of a cliff into the ocean, where nobody knows anything. They could have done that. It was intentional that there he is, right there, and then they buried him.”
