An oral history of the show's greatest hour, "It's a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World."

From extensive conversations with people who worked on the episode, we learned that, like the show itself, The Leftovers crew is something unusual and special. There’s a stunning reverence shared between the writers and the actors, and a sharp-but-at-times-freewheeling vision from the show’s creators. And for a series that can be as sad and bleak as The Leftovers is at times, the writers’ room tends to make its boldest decisions by what gets the most laughs—even when it comes to killing God.

"It's a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World" represents The Leftovers at its strangest, most beautiful, and most brutal. Also, it’s a journey of faith that involves a boat, a lion-worshipping orgy, and a man who may or may not be God himself. Naturally, we wanted to know everything we could about how it came to be, so we spoke to everyone we could get our hands on: actors, writers, and showrunners.

Even for a show renowned for its bold, divisive storytelling, it was immediately clear Episode Five of The Leftovers' third season is something exceptional. In arguably the entire series' best episode, the perpetually misfortunate Matt Jamison (Christopher Eccleston) finds himself on yet another mission of faith, to deliver Kevin Garvey back to Miracle, Texas for the seventh anniversary of the Departure. Of course, as the press release for the episode puts it, "God gets in the way"—this time a little more literally than Matt's previous two ill-fated episodes.

Byock: There was an attraction to doing a planes, trains, and automobiles episode. You know? I mean obviously in the first season, the first Matt episode is called “Two Boats and a Helicopter”? And in this episode we’ve got a nuclear submarine, a cargo plane, and a ferry.

Lila Byock (writer, "It's a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World"): That was a big Nick Cuse idea [another writer on The Leftovers]. He often would come in with the most completely off-the-wall pitches. We felt, in the middle of this final season, we wanted to kind of ramp up the sense that people are starting to lose it a little bit. To put some pressure on the characters.

Nicole Kassell (director, “It’s a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World”): You’re watching like, “Oh my gosh, is he doing that? Can he really do that? How can he do that? What am I seeing when he does that?”

As if to deliberately disorient us, the opening scene this week takes us deep underwater to a previously unseen submarine. Without explanation, a man strips naked, assaults his captain, and, after displaying a feat of human flexibility by turning two keys at the exact same time, launches a nuclear missile.

Eccleston: I originally taped for the lead role, but not surprisingly they gave it to Justin Theroux , so I asked my agent to ask Damon about Matt Jamison. He met me in London and he told me he had no intention of using Matt Jamison in the series. And we then started talking about why I thought Matt Jamison should be used. We had a huge conversation about faith and we also laughed a lot, which I think was the key thing for both of us. He decided to introduce Matt into the pilot and I went over and I think I had two lines in the pilot? And then he ran with it.

Kassell: I love working with Chris. I feel so lucky to have gotten to do such in-depth episodes [having also directed the Season Two Matt Jamison episode, "No Room at the Inn"] and to really do this character study. It’s just a treat. We have lots of long conversations, really analyze where he is and what he’s going through. And then by the time we’re on set, he brings in the performance and then for me I just have to give little notes to occasionally modulate it slightly.

Eccleston: Matt jumped out at me as a dramatic character because you've got a strong religious figure living through a huge, phenomenal event and that's a staple of drama, that kind of character. I was very drawn to Matt's belligerence, in a way—his willingness to be physically and spiritually beaten in order to tell the truth as he perceived it.

Tom Perrotta (co-creator and executive producer): There's a very simple answer to [why we fuck with Matt so much] which is: he is Job. We're fucking with him the way God was fucking with Job.

Eccleston: That's not true. I'm not that smart. I wish I was. And really I shouldn't take credit for these things. It was my idea to go naked for Season Two. I will take the credit for that. I didn't have the kind of body that needed to be naked on national television, but no, I think Nicole and Damon have been too kind to me.

Damon Lindelof (showrunner, writer, "It's a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World"): Matt Jamison was in [Tom] Perrotta’s book, but was a very minor character. I felt like there was real opportunity to have a character who was a “man of God” as a regular fixture in the show. But I feel like "the priest who has lost his faith" as a trope is a cliché. I thought, Wouldn’t this character be more interesting if he was a priest who doubled down? Who stayed faithful or in fact became more faithful as a result of an event that technically should have disproven his faith? And that idea mostly came from Eccleston when I first met with him in the UK.

Christopher Eccleston (actor, Matt Jamison): Yeah, and abusive at times. [laughs] He is both repellant and sympathetic and certainly that's the way I've experienced life. I've behaved badly and I've behaved well. I mean, Tony Soprano is a great example. He's pretty repellant in many ways, but he's deeply human. There's a real appetite in audiences for that character, and certainly from an actor's point of view, that's what you want to play. You want to play rounded individuals and that's down to Damon really—the brilliance of his writing.

This is the final entry in an unofficial "Matt Jamison Trilogy" of episodes, in which Matt feels "tested" by God in some way. In a show full of downtrodden characters, Matt might just be its most mistreated.

"I experienced absolute ancient, primal terror."

Fittingly, Matt's story ends similarly to Job's: he quite literally confronts God (Bill Camp), who we knew previously as the man on the bridge who whispers something to Kevin, and, yes, makes him do karaoke.

Lindelof: In the finale of Season Two, we had a line of dialogue that we cut out of the show where Kevin asks him at the karaoke bar, “Who are you?” And he says, “I’m God.” And he winks. We definitely talked about it at length in the writers’ room and we put it in the draft. So that idea of Bill Camp as God, or at least claiming to be God, was there at the end of Season Two. And clearly, he's an Old Testament God.

Byock: Patrick Somerville said something really astute in the writer's room. He was like, "What I crave was almost like an Agatha Christie; all these people are in a confined space with limited time. And something happens that sets a chain of events in motion." That was how we got to idea of Matt seeing God push somebody overboard. That really kind of gave an engine to the episode, as opposed to just, Chris Eccleston chasing God around the ship for an no reason.

Eccleston: I felt like an enormous responsibility [in the final confrontation scene]. How do you portray a man's entire life changing in one moment? I learned a great lesson from Keith Gordon [director of "Two Boats and a Helicopter"] on the first season. He got hold of me and Carrie in that huge scene when Matt tells Nora about her husband’s affair, and he said the worst thing we could do now is approach this as a big scene. I think that I approached that scene and that moment the same way. And it helped that me and Bill Camp fell in love with each other.

Lindelof: The ending of the Book of Job culminates in an actual conversation between Job and God, where Job asks some version of, “Hey, now that I’ve gone through this, I’m just curious as to why,” and God answers in a very lengthy, Ayn Randian monologue, “I don’t have to explain myself to you, I’m God.” He just says that over and over again and then leaves. And then Job gets everything restored to him. And the moral of the story is... what, exactly?

Eccleston: Damon and Tom love life, I think. They love people and they believe in character and they believe television audiences want—yeah they'll want their occasional explosion—but really they just want human connection and The Leftovers is about that.

Lindelof: And so we decided, well, let’s just do the ending of Job. What does it look like if Matt Jamison is having a conversation with God? Literally, not figuratively. Literally. And how can we subvert that in a Leftovers-y way where it’s probably not the actual God but someone claiming to be God who might have some importance but it’s probably just an egomaniac? [laughs] What would that look like? And that became the kind of jumping-off point, pun intended, for Episode Five.

Kassell: That scene took around eight hours. I don’t think it was a whole day’s work. I think we had some other scenes on that day as well. That was fun because we had the real lion to keep us company.

Byock: I’ve learned so much about how to be a better screenwriter from working with Damon. He puts everything on the page and then he just completely walks away and leaves it in the hands of the director and the actors. But he lays it all out and it’s like, “Here’s what our intention is.” Then he obviously tones the shit out of the episodes with the directors. But then it’s like, "Okay, you guys, you’re on your own now." And somehow it works. I think it requires a huge amount of faith in your cast and in your directors. Fortunately that basically always seems to work on The Leftovers. It did in this case with Nicole and Chris.