A dish best served cold

For three seasons of Revenge, fans watched on as Emily Thorne, real name Amanda Clarke, caused havoc in New York’s playground of the rich and famous, the Hamptons, to avenge the death of her father, David Clarke.

Emily (Emily VanCamp) executed take-down after take-down of anyone she believed had played a part in framing her father for a terrorist act and his subsequent death in prison, with the wealthy Grayson family the main target of her cunning plans.

And who could blame Emily, having lost her family, her home and her innocence to years spent alone or in juvenile detention?

In the season-three finale, viewers were stunned to learn that David Clarke was alive and out for a bit of revenge himself, stabbing to death his nemesis Conrad Grayson (Henry Czerny).

As season four opens, Victoria Grayson (Madeleine Stowe) is languishing inside a mental-health facility and Emily has taken possession of Victoria’s prized Grayson manor, unaware her father is alive.

Emily’s only true friend and confidant, the flamboyant tech billionaire Nolan Ross (Gabriel Mann), has always had her back but even he begins to question Emily’s ongoing lust for revenge as the season opens.

Will she ever be able to reveal to everyone her true identity and move on with her life?

“I am so excited for you guys to see season four, in a lot of ways it feels like this year is a kind of a return to the classic Revenge storytelling we established early on,” Mann said in Los Angeles last month.

“It is such an amazing story point we have; that Emily gets to explore what happens when you find out your whole life has been based on something that is not true, that your father is alive, that you have taken down an endless number of people in a quest to avenge this man.

“It is so immensely complicated. I really want to commend Emily and James Tupper, who plays David Clarke, they have some incredibly complex emotional, beautiful scenes. I read these scripts, I am around the set and when I watch those episodes she had me crying like a baby. Their work is gorgeous this year.”

Mann said a new family from the south would arrive in the Hamptons this year and quickly become entrenched in the world of Revenge.

“One of them will figure hyper prominently in Nolan’s life,” he teased.

It will be a few weeks before Emily catches up with the audience and learns her father is alive. Given David helped Nolan on the path to IT success and asked him to keep an eye on Emily/Amanda, is it fair to assume David will come searching for Nolan for some answers about what happened to her life?

“The thing that is so beautiful about having a character like David actually in the show is that he is connected to every single character’s world, so the ramifications of the realisation he is alive go crashing through every single person and Nolan is no exception,” Mann said.

“I think one of the first people David is interested in talking to is Nolan because Nolan was supposed to take care of his little girl and you are going to find out very quickly in the season that the things he imagined are not actually what happened.

“So David and Nolan are going to go head- to-head very quickly.”

Revenge’s writers have never shied away from bumping off cast members and this season is no exception.

“You know we always go big on this show. You can’t have a show like this unless you make the stakes exponentially high.

“I think as always with this spoiler death, I am not going to say who it is, we show we will and are willing to go anywhere with anyone, so no one is safe.

“I was having a laugh the other day with Nick Wechsler (who plays Jack) because the two of us were the most convinced we were going to be killed off this show first and yet here we still are in season four and bodies are dropping left and right.

“There is a major death coming mid- season and I am going to tease you all the way to the end of the season.

“No one is safe. If this script the producers have been teasing us with comes to fruition ... you talk about Kim Kardashian breaking the internet, I think we will have a Twitter meltdown.”

Revenge airs today at 9pm on Seven/GWN7.