‘Bates Motel’ Season 5 Spoilers: Austin Nichols Talks Episode 6 Bloody Shower Scene

Austin Nichols’ “Bates Motel” journey ended in last night’s Season 5, episode 6, where his character, Sam Loomis, was brutally murdered by Norman (Freddie Highmore) in a shower scene that recreated the iconic death of Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film “Psycho.”

In an interview with TV Insider, Nichols said that he knew that Sam would be a goner when he signed up for the show. But what he didn’t expect was the fact that it was Sam who would die in the shower scene instead of Rihanna’s version of Marion Crane.

“I got on the phone with [executive producers] Carlton [Cuse] and Kerry [Ehrin] to learn about the character, and they told me Sam would die somehow,” he said. “[But] I had no idea that they would swap out Sam for Marion. That was a really cool surprise.”

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When asked how he reacted when he learned that it was Sam who would die in the shower, Nichols said: “I was silent, then I began getting excited because I felt that I was suddenly part of Hitchcock’s whole world! You feel that just by being part of the show, but then to reproduce maybe the most famous murder scene in cinema history is the coolest thing that ever happened to me in my whole career. There’s no words to describe how thrilled I was.”

Nichols said that filming the shower scene was “super technical,” because they tried to copy some shots from “Psycho.”

“There were certain things that we really wanted to duplicate [like how Sam fell from the tub when he died],” Nichols told Yahoo TV. “[Another] one was the hand coming towards the camera and grabbing the shower curtain — the way Sam’s fingers wrap around the shower curtain in a very specific way. … All that stuff, really just copying those shots, almost exactly the way they were in ‘Psycho.’”

Despite the technicalities, Nichols said that he had so much fun filming the scene. “In the final shower scene, I was naked and wet and fending off knife blows from Freddie,” Nichols recalled (via Entertainment Weekly). “Our director, Phil Abraham, just kept rolling. He wouldn’t cut. He was yelling ‘More stabbing! More grunting! More blood!’ And he had a can of fake blood and a paint brush, and he was flinging blood at us like we were making a student film in the backyard. A producer said, ‘You know we have professionals that can do that,’ but he wouldn’t have it. He was like a kid in a candy store. ‘More blood!’ He just kept flinging it at our faces. Great day.”

An all-new episode of “Bates Motel” (Season 5, episode 7) airs on Monday, April 3 at 10 p.m. on A&E.