The Passage has slowly started filling in the different characters’ backstories of how they got to Project Noah, where scientists are studying a virus that gives carriers regenerative powers but turns them into vampires called “virals.” Last week we found out what made Dr. Jonas Lear (Henry Ian Cusick) want to study the virus (his wife has early onset Alzheimer’s and he hopes the virus will cure her). In this Monday’s episode, “That Never Should Have Happened to You,” we’ll find out how viral Shauna Babcock (Brianne Howey) ended up on death row, which in turn brought her to Project Noah.

In this exclusive sneak peek, Babcock arrives at Project Noah and meets Agent Clark Richards (Vincent Piazza), who is the first person to show her any form of kindness in maybe her entire life. That kindness is a lie, of course, because he’s turning her over to literally be made into a monster. When she asks him, “Whatever they’re gonna do to me in there, is it gonna hurt?” and he answers “Not one bit,” he’s making a false promise that’s going to hurt both of them very much in the long run.

Discover your next favorite show: Watch This Now!

This scene was the one Howey auditioned with. The Passage‘s pilot process took longer than usual for a network series, and she was cast in the show about a year and a half before it premiered. So by the time this scene was filmed, she was extremely well-rehearsed. “Shooting that, I was like, ‘My god, this scene has been in me for so long now,'” Howey tells TV Guide. “Because when you audition, it’s not just one audition, it’s a handful of appointments, and you’re doing it over and over and over again.” After that she did chemistry reads to see how she worked with other actors, which meant doing it a bunch more times. And then she shot it for The Passage‘s first pilot, which got reworked into the one that made it to air. So by the time she shot it for the second time, which is the version you see here, she had done it roughly a thousand times.

“Vince and I were constantly joking about it,” she says. “It had nine lives. It just was never gonna go away.”

Check out how precisely they nailed it in the video above.

The Passage airs Mondays at 9/8c on Fox.