Inside HEMLOCK GROVE: Scoop from stars Dougray Scott, Famke Janssen, Aaron Douglas and Kandyse McClure
By: Tiffany Vogt
Date: April 19, 2013
Source: The TV Addict

Note: This is a snippet of an interview cast members from HEMLOCK GROVE during WonderCon 2013 (March 29, 2013). I have included the parts of the interview with AARON DOUGLAS below. To read the full interview, click HERE.

During press interviews at WonderCon in Anaheim, stars Dougray Scott, Famke Janssen, Aaron Douglas, and Kandyse McClure provided some insight into murder, mystery and intrigue that layer HEMLOCK GROVE.

Do you see your characters Sheriff Sworn and Dr. Chausseur as the bad guys on the show? They are investigating a beast attack and yet they have fixated on Peter pretty fast. What’s up with that?

AARON: My character doesn’t think there’s anything supernatural to these attacks. But Kandyse’s character comes at it differently. That’s a different story.

KANDYSE: For as long as it is necessary, she certainly plays along with that reasoning. She’s also certainly obsessive. She has her own ideas about things. She struggles with her own intuition, whether to believe it or whether to follow the status-quo line of reasoning. She’s a scientist on one hand and tortured on the other. I think that constantly interweaves in how she approaches this case and how she interacts with Sheriff Sworn.

What motivates her to come at this case so hard?

KANDYSE: I think she is a deeply troubled soul. I think she was somehow wronged in her life and she wants justice for everyone else and she thinks it’s her duty to simultaneously atone for the hurt she’s caused or the hurt that’s been caused her — and to make someone pay.

AARON: But there is also a very specific reason, that I’m not sure we’re allowed to talk about.

KANDYSE: (Laughs) I think “atone” is a good word.

How did you hear about and get involved with HEMLOCK GROVE?

AARON: Netflix/Gaumont, they could not be more supportive and more excited to do things out of the box. To start things off in their own way. I was excited to do this show, first of all because it’s Mark Verheiden (he ran the writer’s room for BATTLESTAR GALACTICA for the last few seasons, and he and I are really great friends), and he read the book and when they called him to do the show, he said, “Aaron, I read the book and I thought of you for the sheriff. So will you come and do the show?” And I said, “Absolutely.” What I love about it is this is how I consume TV. I’m a Netflix subscriber. My family all subscribes to Netflix. I watch things when they are done and I just power all the way through them. As I saw BATTLESTAR as a ground-floor show of how TV is made and consumed, this is going to be the same thing. Netflix is changing how TV is made and how it is consumed. So the idea of going and being a part of that, as opposed to going and working for the traditional network and waiting week to week and you’ve got 42 minutes to tell a story, but you’re not really telling anybody’s story, other than the story of the week. It is so much more compelling to be a part of this. I mean, what would you rather do: LAW & ORDER or THE SOPRANOS? For me, it’s that. DEADWOOD is the greatest show in the history of TV and to be able to build something that is serialized as a 75-hour movie is genius, and working with incredible people. It’s going to be a difficult show to watch in the sense that it’s going to be very challenging, and that is so much better than HAWAII Five-O. (Sorry, Grace!)

Have you read the book which the series is based on?

AARON: It’s the first thing I did after Mark called me ’cause I read a lot. So as soon as I rewired my brain on how to read — ’cause it’s like reading if Yoda wrote a book. So the first thing I did was read the book and then I called Mark and said, “That’s unbelievable. It should be a show.” And he said, “You know, we’re making a show, why don’t you come and do it with us.”

KANDYSE: I read the book as well. It was Mark again. He thought of me — I learned that afterwards. It came as a regular audition and I immediately fell in love with it. I was obsessed with the sides. I got them 4-5 days before the audition and I could not put them down. I think I was driving my boyfriend crazy ’cause I kept saying the monologue as I was in the shower and I was walking around. He was like, “What are you doing?” and I was like, “I love this woman. There’s something about her.” It’s a different kind of role for me as well. I’m always excited when it’s a person. She could be a “he.” It could be so many things, but she happens to be this doctor, this personality, this role in the group of players. That’s always interesting to me. And it’s not an opportunity I get all the time. I felt like there was room for quirkiness. And that’s what they were looking for.

AARON: For me, it’s Mark Verheiden and Deran Sarafian, who is really the reason the show looks the way it does. In terms of directing it was Fernando Arguelles. Together they built this unbelievably beautiful world.

Will we be seeing Dr. Chausseur and Sheriff Sworn interact with Dr. Pryce at the Institute?

KANDYSE: My character interacts with everyone. She gets under everyone’s skin. There isn’t a rock she leaves unturned or no nook and cranny she doesn’t look into.

On the Set of Hemlock Grove: Interviews With the Cast & Crew
By: Bryan Cairns
Date: April 19, 2013
Source: Shock Till You Drop (New Link)

Note: This is a snippet of an interview with the cast and crew of HEMLOCK GROVE during a press set tour on December 12, 2012 in Toronto. I have included the parts of the interview with AARON DOUGLAS below. To read the full interview, click HERE.

Also on hand was Battlestar Galactica’s Aaron Douglas, who had already wrapped his role of Sheriff Tom Sworn for the season. Nonetheless, the Canadian actor, who specifically came in to speak with us, was obviously fracking excited to be a part of such a ground-breaking show.

“I’m the Sheriff of a small town and I’m holding on to 10,000 kite strings in a hurricane,” reports Douglas. “As things spiral out of control, I try to figure out what’s going on, how it’s going on and who is making it go on. I’m sort of the Columbo, but with both good eyes. He’s really kind of the heart of the show.”

“Tom has a good relationship with everybody,” he adds a few minutes later. “He’s the Sheriff, so he has to be that politician. There’s no mayor, so he’s sort of the leader of the town, or at least a political-type figure. The Godfreys tend to run things otherwise. I would say if he had a best friend, it would probably be Norman Godfrey, who is played by Dougray Scott, and who is absolutely phenomenal.”

‘Hemlock Grove’: Everything You Need To Know
By: Chris Jancelewicz & Annette Bourdeau
Date: April 18, 2013
Source: The Huffington Post Canada

Note: This is a snippet of an interview with the cast and crew of HEMLOCK GROVE during a press set tour on December 12, 2012 in Toronto. I have included the parts of the interview with AARON DOUGLAS below. To read the full interview, click HERE.

1. It feels more like a 13-hour movie than 13 one-hour episodes. “Like a novel, it’s designed to work as a whole,” explains McGreevy.

“The cool thing about doing it for Netflix is there are no act breaks,” adds Douglas. “You don’t have those shlocky breaks where you have to watch a soap commercial and then wait to find out what happens. It’s seamless in that way.”

“This is something completely fresh and new,” agrees Skarsgard. “You hear ‘werewolf’ and ‘vampire,’ and think ‘Oh, God, this is something I’ve seen a million times before.’ But our show takes that and reinvents it and makes it a weird, special, unique show. I hope people appreciate this as something that’s completely different.”

4. There’s plenty of family drama mixed in with the murder and monsters.

“[The Godfreys] really do argue over what’s for dinner,” says Joel de la Fuente, who plays Dr. Johann Pryce.

“I feel like humans are ultimately worse than monsters,” says Liboiron with a smile. “The town has normal people, like the sheriff [Douglas] … they’re all reacting to this supernatural energy that they can’t explain. You see them slowly progress into their deeper, darker spots and they can’t fully grasp the seriousness of the situation. As soon as things get a little out of control, humans can do some pretty wacky things.”

6. “Hemlock Grove” is not a show about werewolves and vampires.

“I don’t really see it as a vampires-and-werewolves kind of show at all,” says Douglas. “It says it right on the poster: ‘The Monsters Within,’ and it’s a human hand coming out of a creature … it’s more (at least for me) about the dramatic human interaction and how human beings are with one another when strange things start happening.”

“We get asked the ‘Twilight’ question a lot,” says the book’s author. “There are unavoidable parallels between my work and that series, but in no way did I write the book with that franchise in mind.”

INTERVIEW – Aaron Douglas upholds the law in ‘Hemlock Grove.’
By: Kyle Wilson
Date: April 18, 2013
Source: The Nerd Repository

Odds are the majority of our audience on NerdRep.com will recognize Aaron Douglas for his stellar work as Chief Tyrol on Battlestar Galactica, but he’s a veritable “that guy,” having made appearances in numerous television projects over the last decade. His next role is in the third original series from Netflix, the supernatural family drama Hemlock Grove. Netflix and Aaron were cool enough to carve out some time for us to talk about all things Hemlock and a bit about the nerdy…

Talk to me a little bit about your character, Sheriff Tom Sworn, and how he fits into the overall mythology of Hemlock Grove.

The sheriff is the moral center of the show. When everything else starts spinning out of control the audience will always be able to go back to him as the touchstone of what’s right and wrong because he is…he is the sheriff. He’s a very everyday guy, a normal guy, likes to have a beer at the end of the day. He’s a father of twin teenage daughters and they’re the love of his life, but they’re also menaces, whirling dervishes. He’s a single father so he has that going on.

When bad things start happening in the town he’s the lawman that has to figure out what’s going on, and he doesn’t have any sort of understanding or belief in supernatural B.S. so he comes at it purely from a nuts and bolts, as a cop would, investigation: “Okay there’s a been a killing and let’s see who did it. If it’s not a who then a what, maybe a bear or a pack of dogs.” He’s really just a simple normal sheriff kind of guy holding on to a thousand kite strings in a hurricane. It’s a very small town that bad things start to happen in, and it really spirals out of control.

Netflix has really changed the landscape recently on how we view and consume television series. Do you think it’s beneficial to a show like Hemlock Grove that the audience gets access to the entire season on its premiere date?

Absolutely. Netflix does TV the way that I consume it. Game of Thrones is on right now but I won’t go near it until it’s done because I can’t wait week-to-week. I will literally watch it on a rainy day. I will power through all thirteen hours of it. Because like that, Hemlock Grove is a thirteen hour movie, and you wouldn’t sit down and watch Lord of the Rings in 15 minute snippets – you want to watch the whole bloody thing. So every episode is ten minutes of a two hour movie.

Which makes it tough for you guys because you only saw…three [episodes]? The press has been telling me that they saw three, which is tough because the first three are really just introducing everyone and what’s going on. It really finds it feet and gains momentum in the fourth and then it’s off and running.

It’s going to be a much better way of viewing it, to be able to just power through it and pause it when you want to pause it, you could be in the middle of the episode or not, you really need to treat it like it’s one thirteen-hour movie. I think that’s really going to help us because if you sat down and watched one episode at a time, there’s so much left unsaid in this show because we don’t spoon feed the audience, that there would be a lot of head scratching week-to-week.

On the creative side of things, how was it working with [executive producer and director]Eli Roth?

You know what? I didn’t have a lot with him. He was there for the pilot and then he had to go off and do a movie down in South America. My experience with him was one or two days on set maybe? Super nice guy. Friendly. Good director, obviously, had his obvious real vision for it.

But then he was gone and the person that really took over and drove the ship was Deran Sarafian and Mark Verheiden. Sarafian from the directing and executive producing standpoint, sort of keeping the train on the tracks and moving along and took out his giant iron and smoothed out the wrinkles, and Verheiden on the writing side, which was a little bit more of the creative in terms of story and arc and all of that kind of stuff, but together those two are the reason this thing is going to be special.

You worked with Verheiden on Battlestar, correct?

He’s the reason I’m on this show. He called me and asked me if I’d do the show and I said “absolutely.” Which was an opportunity to be on the ground floor of how TV is going to be produced and consumed going forward with Netflix, and I see Battlestar Galactica as a ground floor show in terms of sci-fi and how people view it and how people see it. Battlestar was always in the top three of downloaded TV shows on iTunes and DVR’d so that really changed how people watched TV shows, and now I think Netflix is going to do it again. I’m just feeling very fortunate to have done two shows in one career that are really changing the way things are done.

And did Verheiden write your episode of Smallville? I’m a huge Superman nerd so I remember your appearance…

Yeah! That’s exactly it. I did his first episode of Smallville. He reminds of that constantly. I say “Yeah, I’ve worked with Mark twice now…” and he says “No, no, no… three times. You did my episode of Smallville.” Yeah, way back in the day.

Did you read the novel Hemlock Grove before approaching the role, or do you prefer to stick with what’s in the script and how the director guides you along?

No, I’m a big reader. I read a book every couple of days and that’s what got me hooked to this thing. Mark called me and said “I’m doing this show and it’s based on a novel, go get the novel.” I powered through this novel, which I thought was just fantastic, and I called him back and said “Why?” and he said “Because I want you to play the sheriff.” I said “Yes! Done! Tell me when and where.” And my character is a lot bigger in the show than he is on the page.

What sets Hemlock Grove apart from other shows and movies that have a similar supernatural premise?

Everybody keeps asking me about the werewolf and the vampire thing, and if we’re saturated with too much of that, and my answer to that is we’re not really a werewolf/vampire show. It’s really about the human drama and the poster says “The monster is within” and there’s a hand coming out of a creature’s mouth and that represents the monster within all of us.

So our show delves into how people interact with each other and how people deal with each other when things start going horribly wrong. It’s very much like Battlestar, it wasn’t a sci-fi show about aliens and stuff it was about how those people dealt with each other, and how they took care of each other, and how they were awful to each other when things got really stressful and things went wrong. Our show is very much the same, the fact that one person seems to have come from a lineage of werewolves is really not much to do with the show. The mythology is more about the family and what they do and how they do it to each other than it is about anything else.

Lastly, NerdRep.com is all about nerding out on pop culture things. What are some things that get you to nerd out and get excited?

Oh yeah, I like Game of Thrones. I just marathoned all four seasons of Justified, I quite like that show. I do not miss and can not miss Archer or Bob’s Burgers. Those shows absolutely kill me, especially Archer. I love Mythbusters and my wife and I like to watch the cooking shows.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for you, Aaron. I appreciate the time. Come visit us next to time you’re out here for Phoenix Comicon.

I’m trying to remember if I was out there last year or the year before.. but I think I’ve been to that show two or three times and I’m sure I’ll be back next year after this show goes… I’ll be right back on the Con circuit doing the rounds for Hemlock Grove.

That’d be great, and hopefully we can talk about a Season 2 renewal.

Yeah, we’ll do it in person. Sweet!

Hemlock Grove premieres its entire first season Friday, April 19th, exclusively on NetFlix.