I think certainly in the pilot, I had no clue where this was all going. And that was sort of the point. David was just kind of trapped in this institution, and that could have been the rest of his life, just going back and forth, popping pills. And so we see him dragged out of that, and into this voyage of inner exploration and self-definition, which is changing all the time. So yeah! It certainly got more comfortable as the season went along, but the pilot felt very, very strange.

Michelle Faye/FX

Right—one moment you're in a mental institution, the other moment you're doing an all-cast dance number.

Right! Yeah, we had a week or two weeks' dance call, rehearsing this piece, and everyone was looking around, like "What the—?! What's going on?!" Because all it said in the script was: "They dance." That was it! There was no, like, And suddenly the room is transformed! And everything disappears! And everybody in the institution is doing a Bollywood dance! There wasn't any of that. It just said "…They dance." So we had two weeks of a dance call, and it was fun. It's a great way to bond as a cast very early on, is to send them all to a dance call. Especially when they have no idea what it's for. "Just go and do a dance number, all together, everybody just shut up." [Laughs] I think that should be compulsory on every show. CSI, everything. Just go dance.

The surreal-ness of that moment is great. Is the trippy all-cast dream sequence going to be a motif?

So no, that's not the only dance-kind-of number that you will…. [pauses] Yeah! It's safe to say that's not the only dance number you'll see this season. Yet it's not the same—you won't see that kind of dance number again. But there's definitely room for these kind of fantastical elements. And everybody in the cast grew to appreciate that—"Oh, there's room for me to do this in this show. Normally I would have to compartmentalize these things." Noah and I like the idea of, if you're gonna do a show like this, and if it's gonna run, you want it to be a sort of playground. Where actors want to come and want to do something weird, directors want to come, different DPs want to come and try some crazy camerawork. It should be the sort of environment that encourages weirdly creative people.

'Legion' Has No Business Working as Well as It Does It's a show about a character who shouldn't translate to TV—but does beautifully.

The reviews have been pretty rapturous about the way this looks so different from typical superhero or comic book fare. Is there an extent to which you're consciously trying to raise the bar for what we expect from comic adaptations?

Yeah, I think it's certainly doing one thing which I'm very proud of, which is honoring the spirit of comic books. And I think a lot of comic book adaptations fall down feeling like you have to tie everything into the kind of "movie paradigm." And actually, the great thing about comic books is they're not movies, they're not films, its a sort of alternative space where you can bat around very, very big ideas, in a very playful way, and it'll still land. It'll still have the same kind of emotional impact, but you can have a sense of humor. So you can be very mischievous and cheeky [and still] take on cosmological ideas or theology, and not have it be kind of dry, dusty subject matter. So I think that's certainly something that Noah and I took from our comic book readings as kids—this sense of wonder and this sense of awe. And those are the kind of things that we wanted to replicate. You don't necessarily want to go frame-for-frame, "Oh, this is exactly what happened in Volumes One-Two-Three." It's more about the spirit of something.