'Westworld' actor says few people on the show knew about Sunday's shocking turn of events for his character

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Warning: Major spoilers ahead for "Westworld."

"Westworld" delivered back-to-back shocks in its seventh episode — aptly titled "Trompe L'oeil." Not only was Bernard Lowe revealed to be a host, but the series had its first human death at the hands of a robot. Working under Dr. Ford's control, Bernard murdered his former lover and the park's Quality Assurance director Theresa Cullen.

INSIDER spoke with the actor behind Bernard — Jeffrey Wright — about the epic reveal and his role in "Westworld." 

Wright said he first learned that Bernard was actually a host, and not the human we were all led to believe, pretty early on during filming.

"I'm just finding out now, so thank you! Really?!" Wright joked. "Give me a minute to gather myself [laughter]. But seriously — I didn't know while we shot the pilot oh-so-many eons ago. Then when we came back into production to begin the season with episode two, Lisa Joy pulled me into her office in the middle of rehearsals and dropped the bomb on me."

Lisa Joy and her husband, Jonathan Nolan, are the two creators of "Westworld." They planned Bernard's reveal carefully, and made sure Wright was in on it almost from the start.

"Prior to that [Joy] had been saying here and there 'Oh Bernard's a very complicated character,'" Wright said. "So she would say that periodically and then finally she couldn't hold onto it any longer. And it was also necessary because there are narrative moments, obviously, in which we drop breadcrumbs, so it was necessary that I be aware of that."

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We asked Wright to tell us more about those "breadcrumbs," since many fans were looking out for clues about Bernard being a host starting as early as the second episode.

"I would say perhaps there are subtle moments where Bernard is in, or has just come out of, sleep mode, when it seems he might have been doing something else. We played with those ideas a little," Wright said. "I think a lot of the underlying answer is relative to when Bernard is acting on directive from Ford. When throughout these seven episodes is he following specific instruction? That's kind of a fun exploration."

Though Wright knew early on about Bernard's true identity, many of the "Westworld" crew were left in the dark.

"I was the only co-conspirator with the writers among this massive crew so yeah they'll all find out [this] week," Wright said. "The core cast knows but there's a fair number of people for whom this is going to be news."

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By knowing in advance about the reveal, Wright was able to imbue more layers of meaning in his character's actions.

"It made it clear that his detective work in trying to unravel the origin of this aberrant behavior and glitches is also a journey towards self-discovery," Wright said. "So then the question becomes for me, and now ideally for the audience — What is he looking at and what is he seeing? Because he's seeing, simultaneously perhaps, the origin of things and the origin of himself. And so that process is a pretty titillating metaphor for our own missions of self-discovery and self-awareness and that's what became really meditative and contemplative for me."

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Curious to learn more about Wright's perspective on Bernard, we asked why he thought Ford gave Bernard such a specific backstory with the death of his son.

"Um ... I don't know," Wright said. "I haven't seen the last three episodes so I guess I'll find out then."

We thought this question was straying into spoiler territory, so we simply asked if we would find out more about that in future.

"You might rabbit, you might," Wright said.

HBOWright described how the process of playing Bernard as a host became rather meta, since he is a human playing a robot who is programmed to believe he is a human.

"For actors trying to piece together the components that make up a character — components that we borrow from observations of humanness — we try to recreate human behavior and impulse and emotion and thought," he said. "We are playing entities that are after the same mirror-reflection answers that we as actors are after as hosts are after as … you know it just spirals out of control in a really satisfying and trippy way."

The process of stepping into Bernard's character became one of reflecting on Wright's own career and work as an actor. 

"It inspired a lot of questions that weren't linear but were more — not to sound pompous — but philosophical and contemplative in what were obviously measurably ways because again this is process that we go through as actors, as artists," Wright said. "So it's cool sh-t for me. [laughter] It's just a wonderful gig in that respect. And so finally having these things opened up and shared with the audience, this is what we have been waiting for. Because we dig it as much as everybody else seems to be."

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Wright admitted that he, and some of the rest of the "Westworld" cast, are tracking the conversations fans are having about theories and analysis.

"In between my obsession with this half-circus election, my obsession is spending time keeping an eye on this full-blown circus of 'Westworld' interest," he said. "We shot the pilot over two years ago, and so it's been a long process of delivering this for everyone involved."

The hyped up fandom and prolific theorizing is exactly what Wright and others were hoping would happen.

"I think we would be pretty bummed if people were blasé about this thing, and I think we would all probably have to circle back and do self-diagnostics," Wright said. "We were convinced that this was some pretty rad stuff we were working on, so if we were that far off we all might have to self-exile to cold storage somewhere."

Thankfully Wright and his fellow cast members won't have to worry about cold storage anytime soon. The "Westworld" fervor is alive and well.

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