Thewaterfront character

 Topher Grace goes dark in first look at his The Waterfront character

"You just never know if he's going to hug you or shoot you," series creator Kevin Williamson says.

When you think of a powerful drug smuggler, you don't necessarily think of Topher Grace. And yet, when Kevin Williamson sat down to write the character of Grady for his upcoming series The Waterfront, he wrote it with the That '70s Show star in mind.

"I had known Topher over the years," Williamson tells Entertainment Weekly. "He brings sort of an unexpectedness to the role. He feels unpredictable. And so we were able to write toward that. So you just never know if he's going to hug you or shoot you."

EW has the exclusive first look at Grace's time as Grady on the series, which tells the story of the Buckley family as they struggle to keep their family's fishing business alive. Loosely inspired by Williamson's own father's experience, The Waterfront follows the Buckleys — led by patriarch Harlan (Holt McCallany) — as they get involved with some shady characters in the drug world.

Grady is one of those shady characters. "He comes from a very well to-do overachieving family where everyone's lawyers and doctors and his father was super rich and he was a failure," Williamson says. "He was sort of this tech bro who got into some money laundering and served time in prison, met some wrong people in prison, got out and decided that having a poppy farm was the way to succeed in life."

"He's an entrepreneur and he wants to succeed very desperately, but he's also a very broken, unhinged man who has clearly been damaged by his father," Williamson continues. "And, in a weird way, he's searching for this sort of paternal figure and he finds it in Harlan. But Harlan doesn't necessarily want to play that role. It's a very complicated relationship."

However, Topher's relationship with the character, and the material, isn't so complicated. "What I love so much about Topher is when I got on a call with him, he was like, 'Can I play with the dialogue a little bit?' I went, 'Thank God, yes, do whatever you want to with it,'" Williamson recalls. "He would give us so much material that I had to cut some of it out because it was like, 'This isn't a funny scene.' But he gave me so much gold. I can't take credit for a lot of his stuff."

The Waterfront premieres June 19 on Netflix.