From Wetpaint:
Wetpaint Entertainment: In the premiere, it seems you get to perfect your evil stare!
Keegan Allen: Yeah, the evil stare! I’ve been working on that.
Where do we pick up this spring, from where we left off at Halloween?
Life in Rosewood, for the girls and for everybody, is just going to change a lot after all of the tragedy and all of the events that happened recently. Emily [Shay Mitchell] is dealing with killing Nate. Aria [Lucy Hale] and Ezra [Ian Harding], they’re going to have a whole bunch of drama, and Caleb [Tyler Blackburn] is going to be dealing with a lot of family issues. One of the girls feels the change more than others — and I won’t say who that is — but it gets very apparent towards the end of the season.
Mona [Janel Parrish] is cleared from Radley, and she returns to Rosewood High. The big question would be, is she cured, or is she just playing even more intensely? And in the next 11 episodes it really gets intense with the “A” team. They fight dirty. You get to see a lot of Toby and Mona together, and the “A” team pushing all the girls to their breaking points. The collective “A” messes with Spencer [Troian Bellisario] so bad and pushes her so far. Troian is such a talented actress. Actually all of the girls are so wonderfully talented, but I get to work with Troian the most, so I’m able to see the process of what she goes through, and this season, towards the end, her character goes through so much.
Marlene King has said that Spencer finds out that Toby’s “A”, and it is such a betrayal on top of a betrayal, and it twists the knife. It’s so sad the way that she finds out. It’s so sad that if I was involved in this — like, if it was Keegan and Spencer and Toby, I would beat the sh*t out of Toby. I would lose my mind because it’s so wrong. It’s so terrible and just mean, and we find out why. We find out so many answers, and there’s closure to a lot of questions that have been asked since season one.
We know what he is, but we don’t know exactly why Toby is evil. Are you saying we’re going to find out why he’s been terrorizing his girlfriend?
You’re going to find out why he’s been terrorizing everybody. When I found out about Toby being “A”, I was very troubled for a long time. He’s such a moral compass for this show. Marlene has made him into this perfect boyfriend, this truth-sayer, and you’re literally going to dismantle that?
I think it’s brilliant. I think it’s so smart because it flips everybody on their side, which is the show’s main purpose — to make everybody watch and completely lose their minds and want more of it. But it troubled me in the way of ‘what is my motivation?’ and I didn’t really know right away. They wouldn’t tell me because it hadn’t been written yet, but also because we hadn’t really discussed where the character was going. When I found out what the motivation was, I was like, ‘Whoa, okay. That’s insane. That’s a lot of baggage to be carrying around.’ And we find out what it is, why Toby decided to do what he’s doing. It goes back. It’s not just a quick thing that happened. There are reasons and motives and ambition that was driven into him. It’s really interesting.
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