Tonight's premiere of ABC's American Crime is so dark and gripping, it may leave you speechless. And you aren't alone.
We sat down with stars Felicity Huffman and Timothy Hutton, who play the divorced parents of a murdered man, and they revealed that they didn't really interact with each other behind the scenes while filming, because they had to keep their tension real.
"It's a dark place to be in," Felicity tells E! News of her role, "so it took concentration and it took sort of keeping my eye on the ball. You have to be in a very concentrated place. You can't play at lunch or in between takes or anything like that."
"The entire time we were doing the show," Timothy tells me, "we never spoke to one another. It wasn't intentional. We just had to, based on who we were playing, had to kind of stay in our own bubble."
"The director thought we hated each other!" Felicity adds with a laugh. "At the end of the shoot, he was like, ‘Do you guys actually hate each other?'"
American Crime is without a doubt the darkest series ever to air on ABC. A stark look at race relations in America, and how a single crime can have a devastating ripple effect on people from all walks of life, it is helmed by John Ridley (12 Years a Slave).
Huffman and Hutton play the divorced parents of a man who is killed during a break-in at his home. And if you don't feel completely rocked to your core when you see Hutton's character react to identifying his son's body, well…There's no hope for humanity.
"Each character is its own very deep portrait of an everyday person," Hutton explains, "an everyday life and what happens when a tragedy just kind of grabs hold of everything you thought you knew."
So when will we find out who the killer is?
Ridley explains that it will take a while, because in real life, "these things take months, they take years" and the series will explore what that would feel like to a grieving mother and father.
However, the killer will be revealed by the end of episode 11, and viewers can expect full resolution, because the whole story will wrap up.
"It's an anthology series," Ridley tells me. "So in this 11 episodes, we hope we have a really strong, impactful ending at the end of it. And if we come back for another season, it will be a new place, new set of circumstances. We'd like to bring back as much of that cast as possible, but see them in different places and in a different set of circumstances."
Felicity and Timothy also revealed the one moment when the cast DID let loose and why they "looked like Muppets." Check the exclusive video above!