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The Following: Kevin Bacon and James Purefoy Tease "Terrifying" Season 2 and Joe's Duck Dynasty Beard

Exclusive! The Fox serial killer thriller returns on Sunday, Jan. 19 and we talked to its stars about fans can expect at the 2014 Winter TCA Press Tour

By Tierney Bricker Jan 17, 2014 3:00 PMTags
Watch: Kevin Bacon Teases "The Following" Season 2

After The Following's bloody first season, only a handful of characters lived to see just how Joe Carroll (James Purefoy) would come back from the dead.

And E! News caught up with three of the Fox hit's season one survivors, including Kevin Bacon, to find out what mayhem's in store for their characters when Kevin Williamson's serial killer saga's second season premieres on Sunday, Jan. 19. 

(Fans, don't panic over Shawn Ashmore's absence just yet as he couldn't make it due to his filming schedule and they are currently working on episode 11. So Mike Weston lives! Huzzah!)

Watch: James Purefoy Wanted "Duck Dynasty" Beard

Though the cast and creative team behind The Following are notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to spoilers, Bacon was pretty blunt about one of the finale's major cliffhangers: "Claire is dead," he spilled of Ryan's (Bacon) season love played by Natalie Zea, who happend to be Joe's ex-wife. 

And while some would think this would cause Ryan to spiral out of control, Bacon revealed the former FBI agent is actually in a good place when season two kicks off a year after the events of the "horrific" finale. 

"I'm sober. I'm running, my heart is in better shape. I'm no longer obsessed with Joe Carroll and the case," he previewed. "I'm no longer with the FBI...I've seemingly turned over a new leaf, but pretty quickly we find out that's just a mask."

Watch: Valorie Curry on Emma's Extreme Look

Speaking of masks, gone are the creepy Edgar Allan Poe masks donned by Joe's followers last season. Instead, they've been replaced with Joe Carroll masks. So yeah, even creepier. In the premiere, a group of followers, wearing the masks, make a gruesome attack on a subway car, which actually leads Ryan to a new romance with Lily, Connie Nielsen's new character. 

"She is a victim of a horrific subway attack. She's stabbed, but didn't die in the subway attack," Bacon spilled. "And there's this kind of strange dichotomy to his character, which is he's drawn to victims. He has this desire to protect them. She also falls into the category of the type of person Ryan Hardy aspires to be."

Of course, there's no Ryan without Joe Carroll, so it should come as no surprise that the serial killer survived the seemingly fatal explosion in the finale. 

"If anybody's got a plan and thinks ahead, It's Joe Carroll," Purefoy explained. "So the whole dying in a big explosion, fire thing, he would've thought those options through; what he'd do if any given circumstance."

David Giesbrecht/Fox

So what has Joe been up to this past year, aside from letting the public believe he's dead? Growing a beard, obviously. 

"It's a luxurious beard. I was going for kind of Duck Dynasty look,  but they wouldn't let me go that far. I really wanted to go that far," Purefoy said. "We just kept going and I didn't shave it or cut it or style it. It was only when I got into makeup that they took shears to it. I said, 'Hey, what are you doing?!' And they were like, 'No, they don't want it as big as that.'"

And Joe isn't the only sociopath sporting a new look as Emma (Valorie Curry), Joe's most loyal follower, will also be changing things up in season two as she's on the run. 

"What was really, really fun especially after last season where Emma has such a plain, simple look, I mean, 20 minutes in hair and makeup everyday, is she's the most wanted criminal in America now. She's on the run, so she plays with a lot of different disguises and a lot of different looks," Curry teases. "I got to have some extreme, extreme looks that I think fans will enjoy."

The Following season two kicks off with a special preview event on Sunday, Jan. 19, on Fox, before moving to its regular time slot on Monday, Jan. 27.