Freeform welcomes viewers to The Greybourne, one of the most expensive residential buildings in Manhattan, on Monday, January 30th in The Watchful Eye. This new mystery follows Elena, a young woman who didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in her mouth, who becomes the nanny to a young boy named Jasper, whose mother recently passed away. The circumstances surrounding her death are suspicious, but then again, so is everything about Elena. The cast and executive producer recently got together during the TCA Winter Press Tour for a look inside The Greybourne.
(Freeform)
“He's a single dad dealing with something,” Warren Christie revealed about his character, Matthew. “When he hires Elena as a nanny and she comes in, she has this instant connection with [his son] Jasper, which maybe makes him overlook some red flags that come along. But he sees this person, and she's, in this moment, in a world he's trying to traverse himself because he's not of this uber-rich world. He married into it, and now he's alone in it with his son, trying to figure it out. When she comes along, she alleviates so much. She has such a connection with him that I think a lot of times we see what we want to see.”
“Tory sees [Elena] as a threat,” explained Amy Acker, who plays Matthew’s sister-in-law and neighbor. “She wants to have a stronghold on the family and the apartment building, on everything. Elena doesn't always play by Tory's rules and isn't afraid to stand up to her, and so it causes a little bit of stress and anxiety in Tory's realm. She's probably taking a few more meds because Elena is in the building.”
The Greybourne may be elite, but not everyone in the building is of means. “When Elena and Elliott first meet, they strike up almost an instant friendship,” Lex Lumpkin explained about his character, who lives in a small attic apartment down the hall from Elena’s new room. “Elliott sees her as, like, an older sister because she's older and she has more experience. So, she's able to help him through his teenage troubles, you know, talking to girls and stuff like that, but on the flip side, Elliott has also lived in The Greybourne his whole life. So, he's able to fill her in on some of the tenants because Elliott has all of the tea. He's ready to spill it.”
“There's a really beautiful friendship that starts there,” Aliyah Royale said of her character Ginny, one of Elena’s friends. “Ginny is the kind of person who is loyal to a fault, and the more Elena's intentions start to show, the more Ginny has a decision to make. Do I stand by this person that I have this connection with, or is there an alternative here in which this should not be a connection for me? We all have friendships that we have to reevaluate at some point.”
And then there’s Scott. “They have multiple types of relationships going on,” Jon Ecker shared about his character. When Elena interviews to be Jasper’s nanny, she tells Matthew she’s single. But we later see that she is at least romantically involved with Scott, who seems to be in on whatever it is she’s after. “The conflict is in those two, you've got a couple different relationships going on. Let's say professional and personal… And they kind of get in the way of each other. So, it's wrestling that, maintaining those relationships without sacrificing one and, I guess, deciding which one is more important.”
We’ve heard everyone else describe Elena, each with their own point of view and take on her. But now it’s time to hear from Mariel Molina, who plays the central character in The Watchful Eye. “I was really interested in the duplicity of her character and the mask that she presents with the family in The Greybourne and the two sides of her that she has to juggle because, as we find out, she's kind of working a grift, and there's something going on that we don't quite know,” Mariel explained. “It was really fun to kind of figure out, who is the real Elena? What is she like when she's with her family or her boyfriend? What is she like when she is at work? It was fun to play with the New York aspect of it as well. She's a girl from Queens, and so sometimes she taps more into her accent when she's at home, and then she has a little bit more of an enunciated talk when she's with the family.” Even though Mariel Molina plays a character at the center of the mystery, she wasn’t given any insider knowledge about how the events would unfold. “It really wasn't necessary for me to know what was happening or what these residents with their ulterior motives had. Because in essence, I knew that I needed to go from point A to point B, and then everything else that happens I like to be surprised. I don't like to know exactly what's coming. So, I think it actually really helped with the mystery. Up untilthe end, Elena still doesn't know what's in store for her, so it was really fun.”
“It's not just a whodunit; All the different pieces need to be assembled over the course of the series,” explained showrunner and executive producer Emily Fox about the puzzle that Elena needs to solve. “It's a chess game, and it has a lot of different moving parts… It's sort of got that little bit of glamour and sheen to it that also feels like Hitchcock.” The cast and creative team can’t wait to welcome viewers into The Greybourne. “There's just something really compelling about the idea of an apartment building and the fact that it does contain so many stories and that all these people are so close to one another. There's privacy and, yet, there's this community inside of the walls of the building. And, of course, the building is gorgeous. It's familiar, but it's our version of a castle. And the palace intrigue is what's so fun to play with… Each building has its own personality and its own literal and figurative secret passageways. It will be fun for everybody to really get to know how The Greybourne lives and breathes.”
Join Elena as she navigates the complicated world of The Greybourne in The Watchful Eye, premiering Monday, January 30th, at 9/8c on Freeform. Episodes will be available to stream a day after they air exclusively on Hulu.