Jayme Deerwester

USA TODAY

This story contains spoilers about Monday's Season 3 finale of AMC’s Turn: Washington’s Spies. Stop now if you haven’t seen it; just know this being a history-based drama, the information has been out there for, oh, 235 years.

Poor John André. The British intelligence officer left his house in Manhattan thinking he was just going on an overnight work trip. He never came home.

André (JJ Feild) went upriver to close the deal with turncoat Gen. Benedict Arnold (Owain Yeoman) to surrender West Point, a move he expected would win the war for the British and net him titles, land and the blessing of his girlfriend’s father.

Instead, it got him captured by Washington’s troops and hanged after plans for West Point were found in his boot. Meanwhile, Arnold made it to safety behind British lines but found himself labeled a turncoat and treated with resentment by officers who would have preferred to trade him for André.

Owain Yeoman: From 'Mentalist' to Benedict Arnold

“I always knew that was going to happen,” Feild tells USA TODAY by phone from Brooklyn, N.Y. “You just have to read the history books.” Three years, he says, “was the perfect amount of time to get in and out.”

He says he relished the scene with Yeoman’s Arnold. “Owain is a force of nature and I didn’t get to do anything with him for a couple of years. So when we finally got to meet, it was great. It was this fantastic scene of those two just searching each other and negotiating. He’s a big guy and it’s fun to play against him.”

He’d also been anticipating the carriage scene in which André converses with his American intelligence counterpart, Benjamin Tallmadge, on the way to his execution. “It’s a scene about people with nothing left to hide so they can just speak plainly. But we were still protecting our sources until the end because it would endanger them. There’s a feeling of ‘I know that you know that I know.’ That, to me, shows a mutual respect between them.”

The execution scene took place on a Virginia field on a “brutally cold and windy” day in late winter. “The chattering and fear in my voice? No acting required.”

But unlike the condemned mutineers on Game of Thrones or even his own co-star, Jamie Bell, Feild did not have to get up close and personal with a noose. “I simply ducked out of the shot and they cut to a wide shot of the stuntman swinging.”

On the upside, André‘s demise means that Feild is finally free of waistcoats, riding breeches and boots. “Never again!” he swears. But that’s also what he said before signing onto 2013’s Austenland.

‘I said, ‘I’m never doing a costume drama again. I’ve had enough!’ If a movie had a tophat and a horse, I’ve been in it. Then the guys from Napoleon Dynamite came along and wanted to make fun of all that. So I went, ‘Great, perfect sendoff!’ That will be the end of my costume drama days. But while we were at Sundance for Austenland,” he recalls, “AMC approached me about Turn. And I thought, 'I’m never going to get away from costume dramas!'”

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But ultimately, the story was alluring enough to make him suit up in period attire again. “It wasn’t just all evil or heroic redcoats. There were good people and bad people on both sides of this occupation and conflict. And that must be acknowledged. And for that reason, I wanted to find André’s individuality.”

He sums up his doomed character as “a great man on the wrong side of history.” How great depends on which version of history you’re reading. “Some American books paint him as very nasty and others paint him as nicely as the British,” who had his remains dug up and reinterred in Westminster Abbey. “That’s normally reserved for kings and queens,” says the actor, who has an English father and American mother and who unwittingly spent a fair amount of time around his character’s memorial as a student at London’s Westminster School.

Feild adds that the middle-class André, the son of a Swiss merchant father and French mother, “was as much European as he was British.” And for that reason, he wanted the character to stand out among the aristocrats who made up the British officer corps. “I wanted to show that he worked his way up and didn’t have the perfect powdered white wig.”

He did have the wig early on, but Feild was able to ditch it after asking executive producer Craig Silverstein, “‘Do you really want that for your seducer/lover for the next three years? And he said, ‘No, not really.’”

While on the subject of André’s hair, we felt compelled to ask about the character’s signature rat-tail braid, which he eventually cut off and gave as a keepsake to Peggy Shippen, the Philadelphia socialite he’d hoped to marry. “There was a lot of backlash against the braid!” he says. “People said it was ridiculous and looked like a Jedi braid. But if you look at the official bloody portrait of John André, he had the braid.”

But like the braid, André’s mane — which, save for a few extensions was all Feild’s — is now history, thanks to the demands of producers of his next film (currently called The Etruscan Smile), which he started immediately after wrapping Turn. “I fought to keep my long hair for the film and they said no. And with one quick snip, it’s all gone. But you get other jobs and you get on with life.”

Feild says he is open to the idea of more TV work down the line. “But for me, it’s not something you do just for the money. It’s a long commitment.”

How about easing back in by doing a guest spot on The Americans alongside his Austenland love interest Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, whom Feild calls a “dear old friend?”

“There you go,” he laughs. “I could be a Russian spy!”