‘Beyond the Gates’ stars, showrunner break down 3-part shocker (exclusive)

This story contains spoilers for the May 1, 2, and 5 episodes of Beyond the Gates.

Fairmont Crest will never be the same.

The three-part arc that concluded with Monday’s episode of Beyond the Gates has already transformed the show. Mother has been turned against daughter, husband against wife, and the Duprees — the powerful family at the core of CBS’ historic new daytime soap — have been brought to their knees.

“We’ve had many climaxes in season 1 so far, but to me this is the first huge climax of the show,” says Trisha Mann-Grant. Mann-Grant plays Leslie Thomas, the unpredictable villain at the eye of the storm that just crashed over the fictional town of Fairmont, and its elite gated community, Fairmont Crest.

Ambyr Michelle, who plays Leslie’s conflicted daughter Eva Thomas, concurs, predicting, “this is going to elevate our show so much.” Michelle, Grant, their costar Daphnée Duplaix, and Beyond the Gates creator and showrunner Michele Val Jean spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the bombshell revelations from the past three episodes, which, in Mann-Grant’s words, “pivots everyone’s world into a whole different aspect… this changes everything.”

Nobody who’s been keeping up with the Duprees since Beyond the Gates premiered in February expected to be surprised by the recent revelations. Indeed, Leslie has been at work for weeks on her scheme to reveal that Eva is the product of her secret affair with Ted Richardson (Maurice Johnson), the husband of Duplaix’s character Nicole Dupree-Richardson, who also happens to be Eva’s boss.

But her dropping that bomb during Nicole and Ted’s anniversary party, while the happy couple were surrounded by family and friends? “That’s diabolical,” Val Jean jokes. “I don’t know how I ever even came up with that.”

The worst day of several characters’ lives is just a Tuesday for Val Jean, however, a veteran of daytime TV who spent over a decade a piece writing for General Hospital and The Bold and the Beautiful, and was even staffed on Generations, the last and only other Black soap opera to air on a major broadcast network. “If you have a big secret that you want to drop to blow up somebody’s life,” Val Jean says, in the wise tone of a seasoned hitmaker, “you have to do it in front of the entire town, right?”

Heading into this run of episodes, Nicole seemed the perfect mother with the perfect job in the perfect relationship; Eva seemed the dutiful assistant, rising through the ranks thanks to Nicole’s tutelage and Ted’s kindness; and Leslie seemed the local crazy lady, donning new wigs each week with new aliases to match — the mysterious Anna, the mental patient Sherry, the coquettish Lulu.

But the seismic impact of Leslie’s bombshell instantaneously turned all that to dust. The chivalrous Ted, Leslie reveals, not only pressured her to abort their child, but enlisted former brother-in-law Bill Hamilton (Timon Kyle Durrett) to threaten her to keep away. That leads to a chain of explosive arguments between Nicole and Ted; Ted and his son Martin (Brandon Claybon); Eva and Kat (Colby Muhammad), Martin’s sister who’s extremely reluctant to now call Eva the same; Eva and Leslie; and Leslie and the entire Dupree family.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

“I legit cried as I was reading it. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is so powerful, and there’s going to be so much pain,” Michelle recalls. Eva has been trapped in one of the most difficult positions of any character on the show, torn “between two worlds,” as Michelle puts it. “She loves her mom, but [Leslie’s] also negative, and very controlling and manipulative. And she’s starting to see there’s a different way to be a different kind of woman. I think that’s why she starts to love Nicole,” the actress explains.

Duplaix also felt the pain (Val Jean says watching Duplaix “standing there in her dignity, in her pain, not saying anything… just made me cry”), but reading through the heated confrontation that ensues between Nicole and her cheating husband for the first time thrilled her. “As an actor reading it, I was like, ‘Oh, now we get to play.’ You want those roles as an actor, you want to dig deep, you want it to be meaty… I was just so excited to finally feel like Nicole is getting her turn.”

Mann-Grant, meanwhile, was touched to be able to show that “deep down inside” Leslie, underneath the rage, “she’s so hurt.” The actress reflected, “Me personally, I was that mom struggling with two little kids by myself… I was mad, I was broke, Christmas shopping at the 99 Cents Store, buying them Christmas gifts, hoping they wouldn’t know the difference. So I really could, in that scene, relate to what Leslie was going through.”

Mann-Grant, Duplaix, Michelle, and Val Jean all believe that beyond whatever impact these episodes have on the show, what really matters is the impact on the fans.

“There are going to be so many people who can relate on a painful level to betrayal, infidelity, all those themes,” Michelle says. Mann-Grant adds, “We’re also thinking about how many mothers and daughters out there have problems. But they love each other, and there’s all this stuff that they’ve got to work through to get to really have that true, pure relationship.”

In a moment of striking resemblance to her abidingly empathetic psychiatrist character, Duplaix said of shooting Leslie’s big reveal, “I remember being Daphnée, being Nicole, listening to her words and being like, ‘F— yeah. I get it, I’d be mad too!'”

After a round of laughter from her costars, Duplaix explained, “She’s hurt. She’s a woman scorned and she got left. She raised this child by herself and they’re living paycheck to paycheck, which most women do.” Reciprocating the gesture, Mann-Grant reasoned that Leslie wants to be Nicole as much as she wants to destroy her. “She wants to be a Dupree just as bad as she wants her daughter to be. Let’s just keep it real. Leslie wants Eva in the community, but Leslie wants to be a part of the community too,” she said.

But that doesn’t mean Nicole’s going to lie there and take it. After Leslie crashed the anniversary party, she went looking for the Duprees for a little more beef — and found everyone but Nicole. Mann-Grant promises that Beyond the Gates fans won’t have to wait long for their eventual confrontation, and spoiler alert: the pendulum always swings back.

“Let me tell you something. Honey, you ain’t seen nothing yet, because there is a scene down the road. She is going to let me have it!” Mann-Grant teases. “I have a feeling that everybody’s going to stand up off their couches and their chairs and cheer when they see this moment that we have together. Because she has finally had enough of me. She’s like, ‘I’m over it. And you are going down.'”

When Val Jean is asked if she can reveal anything about what comes next for Leslie, Nicole, Eva, and the rest of Fairmont, she responds carefully. But with a wicked flair in her voice, she notes, “Nothing is going to go smoothly.”

Beyond the Gates airs weekdays on CBS at 2 p.m. ET/1 p.m. PT, and is also available to stream on Paramount+.