Actor Greg Hunt entered the first season of The White Lotus in a small role, one that he (and we!) considered romantic. Little did we know, and neither did the actor. That’s right, Jon Gries said he was surprised like the fans when, in the second season, we see that Greg – who now goes by “Gary” – is a terrifying villain.

The radical change came now, in the third season. Until then, the actor kind of defended his character and thought that he was “remotely involved, but not that deeply involved” and only discovered that he had planned his wife’s death when he watched the second season, in which Greg was suspiciously out of the picture. Before cutting his vacation in Sicily, Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) overhears him talking to someone on the phone, saying, “She’s totally clueless, as usual. I’ll call you when I get home,” she sighed. The next day, Quentin (Tom Hollander) enters her life.

With no explicit prompts from showrunner Mike White, Gries set out on his own to rewrite Greg/Gary’s trajectory and personality and work on it. Unsure if he was headed in the right direction, he seized his chance when he bumped into White on the way to set. “I ran up to him and said, ‘Hey, Greg — psychopath or not?’ And he said, ‘psychopath,’ and walked away,” Gries recalled in an interview with The Wrap. “And I went straight back to my room and spent the next four hours just writing the story and changing things, and it really gave me something to work with.”

While he didn’t reveal the con artist’s future, we’ll learn more about his past tonight in Episode 4 when Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) does some online research. At this point, we can only speculate about what he did, who he did it with, and how Belinda is at risk. Spoiler alert: She is. “He’s immediately planning something, whatever it is. She’s not going away. He’s not sitting there looking at her and saying, ‘Hmm.’ He’s thinking, ‘This could mess up my life plans, so maybe I’ll have to figure something out,’” he warned.

Now it makes sense that in the season opener, when Belinda’s son heard the gunshots, he was immediately worried about her. So were we.

As for Greg, who has been on hit shows like Lost and Criminal Minds, Greg can be compared to Ted Bundy, but that doesn’t mean the character is a serial killer; he’s a manipulative psychopath who came into Tania’s life with his eye on her money. I mean, Gries still defends him and says that it’s not like that, that he may have liked her at first, but it was only when he found out that her illness wasn’t terminal that everything changed.

“I think he thought, ‘This would be a great way to end my life, to be with someone who I really care about and who, despite all her drama, is really endearing and really funny and sweet and fun, too.’ I don’t know if he really loved her, but I think he had fun with her,” he explained in the interview. He says that Greg/Gary, like Bundy, has “a distant side” that spared his wife but killed multiple women. In this case, “between Season 1 and Season 2, there was a shift, either because he just couldn’t handle the drama anymore, or, some of the things I wrote was that once he realized that he wasn’t going to die directly from this episode that he was having, maybe he became a little less philosophical about his life and a little more opportunistic,” Gries explained.

In the end, Tanya’s death was indeed accidental, but it could have been prevented. Two years later, as her heir and a millionaire, he is “moving on with his life.” And Belinda could ruin everything.

We, like Jennifer Coolidge, want Greg/Gary to pay for what he did. Will his Karma take his toll? According to him, the journey will surprise us. Will it?

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