FROM Season 3 has brought one terrifying revelation after another for Fatima (Pegah Ghafoori) and her pregnancy. First, all she could eat was rotten food. Then, it was an ultrasound that showed nothing, despite the very real changes her body was experiencing. After killing Tillie, she winds up out in the shack in the woods, waiting for Ellis, when Elgin shows up and tricks her into following him to the root cellar. By the time she realizes something is very wrong here, it’s too late.
When we had the chance to interview Pegah Ghafoori about Fatima’s journey this season, we started by asking for her take on the murder. “I’d like to think something else was controlling her, and she just lacked the energy and the strength…to stop it,” she told us. From there, we wanted to know what it’s like to play a pregnant woman, who’s being told “this is for the best” by a man as he’s dragging her, kicking and screaming, back into what is essentially an underground prison. After all, in the current political climate, that final scene with Fatima and Elgin in FROM Season 3 Episode 8 might just resonate with viewers a little bit too much.
Ghafoori referenced the many “images and videos [that] have been burned into [her] brain from the past couple of years,” due to “everything going on with women’s freedom of their body, and their rights, and their existence.” Sure, a large part of what we see “was playing a role,” but some of it “was just instinctual.” Because, as Ghafoori put it, “going much further than our fight for our rights, it’s been just fighting to survive, and to live a normal life, and to be able to kick and scream and get away. Or just the idea of needing to get away from something, which rings extra true…in this FROM world.” She also told us it was “very empowering being able to speak on that” through Fatima’s story.
Given this real-world struggle and the long legacy of genre shows and movies doing these sorts of pregnancy storylines, some of these images, especially with Elgin telling Fatima her baby doesn’t even belong to her, may be hard to watch. So, we wanted to know if Ghafoori was at all worried about how viewers would receive everything that happens to Fatima this season. “Yes and no,” she told us, noting that she had “a very extensive talk” with the series creator as well as one of the writers. During the discussion, they “talked about wanting to be very careful with the storyline, not wanting to send the message out there that we don’t necessarily mean to.”
The actress also noted that they made sure Fatima’s arc in FROM Season 3 was “toeing the line very carefully to keep it within the realm of ‘this is fiction; this is story,’ and to not speak on things that we really didn’t have the place to be speaking and making statements about.” After all, “there’s a time and place…and a responsibility that comes with speaking those things. And I don’t think a TV show that lives in this world has the capability to do it properly. So, we tried to steer very careful and clear of that.”
Watch our interview with Pegah Ghafoori here.
Don’t miss Pegah Ghafoori in the remaining episodes of FROM Season 3, which stream Sundays on MGM+. Oh, and her advice for viewers for the rest of this season? “Buckle up, grab your spit bucket, and good f—ing luck to me, mainly.” And to loop things back to the Tillie of it all: “[Fatima’s] trying her best. Don’t hate me. I love Tillie just like the rest of you.”
