The goddess Easter is one of the strangest in Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods. She’s an Old God who almost pretends to be a New God with her behavior — and in a new clip from Bryan Fuller and Michael Green’s television adaptation, the character abandons her sweetness for annoyance when Mr. Wednesday arrives.
It would be understandable if you confused the goddess Easter with the contemporary holiday. After all, her own followers in the story do. Played by Kristin Chenoweth, Easter is an ancient Germanic Goddess of spring and fertility. The story of American Gods centers around a clash between Old Gods from mythology and New Gods like technology and media. Easter is one of the Old Gods that Ian McShane’s con-man Mr. Wednesday is trying to recruit for this brewing war.
Easter is set apart from the other Old Gods by her apparent adaptation to the modern world. While others struggle with dead-end jobs when their believers fade away, Easter is prosperous — at least, from the outside. She uses the confusion with the holiday in order to maintain the notion that she has followers and nothing has changed in the world. Of course, this placid life is upended when Wednesday and his bodyguard Shadow arrive to crush her delusions of grandeur.
In this new character spotlight clip, Easter welcomes a crowd to a sumptuous meal only to lose her smile when she spots Wednesday and Shadow. In the book, Easter is the Old God with perhaps the least antagonistic relationship with Wednesday. The show looks like it might be amping up their tension.
American Gods premieres April 30, 2017 on Starz.
