In the FROM Season 3 finale, Jade (David Alpay) finally unlocks the hidden meaning in the bottle trees’ numbers — and it’s not what he, or we, expected. Those numbers don’t create some sort of mathematical code that explains everything. (Or, they kinda do…just not in the strictest sense.) The numbers represent notes, and when Jade goes to the bottle tree to play the melody those notes create, everything changes. During our interview, when we brought up the difference between Jade’s very rational approach to the puzzle and the artistic one it turns out he needed, Alpay basically summed up our reaction: “How crazy is it, right? That this thing that he grew up with becomes the key to unlocking the mystery that is the greatest obstacle in his life. How nuts is that?” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
But was Alpay at all surprised by this huge revelation? “I watch a lot of TV, and I feel like within the first three minutes, I can sort of guess how an episode is going to go. Or what’s going to happen by the end of the story, or a mystery, or whatever.” But, he admitted, “I didn’t see this coming.” Then again, the actor told us, “it wouldn’t surprise me if [creator] Jeff [Griffin] and [showrunner] John [Pinkner] had sort of put hints in there.” Reminding us that actors learn key plot points episode by episode, script by script — with no hints — he told us the writers are “very good about keeping their secrets under lock and key.” But “it might be worth re-watching again, especially Season 3 to see how the pieces line up. Because it is — it’s like you’re saying. It’s a giant, very intricate puzzle.”
And speaking of that big puzzle, Jade has spent all of FROM Season 3 looking a wee bit insane to everyone around him. To his credit, though, he refused to give up. But what was that like playing the guy who’s right, yet everyone else thinks is delusional? Well, for David Alpay, Jade’s journey this season has been “like having the word on the tip of your tongue, and everybody’s giving you the space to try to remember it. But then…the clock’s running down, and it’s been about 90 seconds. And you still can’t think of the word, and, like, people start looking at you funny…That’s kind of the feeling.”
Alpay continued, “he can feel it. He can feel it instinctively. He just doesn’t have all the pieces to be able to make it make sense. That’s why it annoys him when people say, ‘oh yeah, there’s numbers in the bottles, but they don’t mean anything.’ Well, how…do you know they don’t mean anything. Have you looked at them? Have you analyzed them? Have you done regression analysis? Like I don’t know — whatever! Why would you just discount a clue before you knew what it was?” And, well, it doesn’t just frustrate Jade. “You can see I’m losing my mind right now just thinking about it,” Alpay concluded.
MORE: Read our interview with Corteon Moore to learn more about Ellis’ FROM Season 3 arc. And feel free to let us know if you think the FROM Season 3 finale lived up to his teases for it. You can also check out our Pegah Ghafoori interview for more on Fatima’s storyline.
On Jade Playing Violin in FROM
That brings us back to the clues that, thankfully, Jade never dismissed as just meaningless. In FROM Season 3 Episode 10, he not only has his big breakthrough. That leads him to playing Victor’s violin — not for the first time — during one of the series’ major, major moments. Because David Alpay is a musician in addition to being an actor, we had to ask about that experience. Not just in this finale but just…how he approached these important musical moments that were so very different in tone.
“For me, it was important to find a hook and make the music personal,” he told us. “Especially the first time you see Jade playing violin, he’s by himself. He’s thinking about his grandmother. There’s this whole thing. John and Jack and I thought about a couple of songs that Jade could play, eventually settling on ‘La Bohème,’ the Charles Aznavour song, because it’s a song about someone who left his old neighborhood and comes back to it later in life. And everything is gone. Everything has changed. And it’s about not being able to come back to the same place again.” So, there’s a parallel to what people are going through in FROM. “And when we realized that, it was like, ‘yes, that’s the song. That’s the song he has to play.'”
Alpay also confirmed that the song Jade plays in the FROM Season 3 finale “is a new piece of music that our very talented composer [Chris Tilton] wrote for the show. And if you watch Season 3 back again, you’ll see it weaving its way through the entire season. It’s a theme that’s almost too subtle to notice, but it comes and it goes. So that, by the time you see it again in that last episode, it’s like…it sounds familiar and you don’t even know why. So, that was genius on their part as well.” Some advice? “If you get a chance, go back and watch it again.”
Just like how “La Bohème” is important for Jade as he remembers his grandmother and the new song is vital to solving the mystery of Fromville, “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” which Jade plays for Victor in Season 2, is “very important for Victor” because “that’s the song that he needs to hear so that he can feel connected to his mother again.”
David Alpay told us “it was…a privilege to be able to be the actor — but also to be the character — but to be the actor who gets to…bring music to the show. Which, for me anyway, music has always been my meditation. It’s always been my way of going inside, and connecting to something, and resisting all the noise from the world. It’s spiritual. It’s as close as I can get to spirituality, really, is through music.”
He initially didn’t even tell the creators he was a musician, but “when it came out, they were like, ‘well, how do we incorporate this? How do we make this part of the show?'” He considers it “a testament to” the series’ creative team “that they found ways to incorporate people’s lives into the characters that they’re playing. So that, over time, the distance between character and the person playing the character, I think, gets narrower and narrower. And all of a sudden, it’s hard to tell what’s what, and it becomes that much more rich.”
MORE: We interviewed Catalina Sandino Moreno about Tabitha’s quest for answers. Also check out Ricky He on Kenny’s grief, and Scott McCord on Victor’s big reunion with his dad.
Watch our full interview with David Alpay here.
You can watch David Alpay as Jade in FROM Seasons 1-3, now streaming on MGM+.
