At this year’s San Diego Comic Con, we got to sit down alongside Seat42F, 3BlackGeeks, The Fandom, and others, for a series of roundtable interviews with the cast and creators of Syfy’s upcoming apocalyptic horror series Van Helsing. In attendance were series co-showrunner Simon Barry (other co-showrunner, Neil LaBute, couldn’t attend in-person), executive producers Chad Oakes and Mike Frislev, and actors Jonathan Scarfe, Christopher Heyerdahl, and Vanessa Helsing herself, Kelly Overton.
Here’s the IMDB description of the show: Vanessa Helsing, distant relative of famous vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing, is resurrected only to find that vampires have taken over the world. She is humanity’s last hope to lead an offensive to take back what has been lost.
Believe me, from what we saw, that description is just the tip of the iceberg. The show picks up three years into the Rising, the vampire apocalypse. Vanessa Helsing has been in a hospital lab, comatose this entire time, with just a few marines to protect her. The reason they’re there is she has something special about her: she can cure vampirism. Don’t worry about spoilers, you’ll get all that before the first commercial break when the pilot airs commercial-free after Sharknado 4 on Sunday, July 31, before kicking off for real on its official premiere date of September 23.
It looks to be pretty brutal, bloody, and violent — as a vampire apocalypse probably should be.
Here are the interview highlights (all photos by Dave Hearn)!
CHRISTOPHER HEYERDAHL
SEAT42F: Is it a coincidence that both you and Jonathan were both in Hell on Wheels and now you’re co-starring in this Syfy series?
CHRISTOPHER HEYERDAHL: I don’t know that it’s so much a coincidence as because of Chad. Chad had a lot to do with the casting of the show and he’s worked with a lot of very good people. I think he drew them in. He said, I’m doing this show and most of us just said ‘Yes’ even before Neil was on-board or knowing Simon was on-board, or knowing the other actors were on-board. Chad’s got a way of drawing in good people, and this ensemble is awesome. Truly remarkable.
SEAT42F: Besides Chad, what else was the big appeal for you?
CHRISTOPHER HEYERDAHL: Well, Jon, Kelly, Neil LaBute… I’ve always wanted to do a Neil LaBute play and here I have the opportunity finally to work with him and I don’t really say anything! I don’t get to say the words. I say them with my hands and with my face.
But it’s still the same kind of twisted mind, you know. Neil has just a wonderful way of looking at human nature and twisting to our darker tendencies, our contradictions. And bringing that into this world makes the vampires more interesting, more three-dimensional, and it makes the human beings more about questioning their place in humanity.
What is it to be human? What is the difference between us, just because you’ve got that blood hunger, why is that any less viable as a living entity on this planet? Do we blame the animals higher up the food chain because they pick us off? We’re already intruding on their territory. It’s always an interesting question.
And in this world, suddenly a very viable thing happens in the world that creates an opportunity for vampires to not be burnt up by the sun. That completely changes the game and now they no longer have to hide in the shadows. That, I found fascinating!
THE FANDOM: You’re playing a deaf character. What were the challenges of being able to communicate with the rest of the group?
CHRISTOPHER HEYERDAHL: Well, it was always a challenge, because not all of them were able to communicate with sign language. There was one character, Mohamad (Trezzo Mahoro), who we decided would learn ASL (American Sign Language) through spending so much time with Sam and they have a very close relationship. And that allowed him to communicate through Mohamad so that he didn’t have to speak.
But it was always an issue of remaining true to the reality of someone who can’t hear, and if everyone is communicating orally, it doesn’t do him much good unless he’s able to see the person’s lips moving. So that was always a challenge with the piece. You know, if I can’t see you I can’t hear you. That became a fascinating challenge.
And just learning another language! ASL is a very complex language and to try and gain a fluency so that I could be understood, but there was also an alacrity with my hands, with my face, with my body that hopefully the deaf community would be able to look at that and go, okay, I buy it. It’s like speaking another language and having somebody not hear an accent. So that’s the goal. Hopefully most of the time I achieve that.
SEAT42F: Could you comment on some of the relationships between the characters? Just to introduce that world.
CHRISTOPHER HEYERDAHL: The world we come into with Jon’s character, with Kelly’s character, they are in one place, in an enclosed space along with an actress named Rukiya Bernard, she plays the character Doc, and she’s also in that same place. Those three, they’ve been in this one spot for months, then there’s another character who is part of a group that I’m a part of, who comes back because he knows Jon’s character. Once we have those three with the added five, suddenly there is a dynamic shift — who do you trust? You don’t know these people, so do we trust that, do we not trust that?
The people choose to trust that, but those who don’t suddenly create a rift in the original group. So there’s a constant shift in the relationships based on who they trust, who they don’t trust, who is now changing allegiance…
SEAT42F: It sounds like Vampire Chess.
CHRISTOPHER HEYERDAHL: Well, ultimately it’s Human Chess, right? With the vampires being the opposing team. So maybe the bishop is using a pawn and you don’t really feel like being a pawn today.
SIMON BARRY
SEAT42F: We were just talking about Vampire Chess. Do you guys equate your show kind of to playing chess a little bit with your characters?
SIMON BARRY: Yeah, we have the benefit of a show that’s almost about a revolution, so there are factions within factions, there are objectives, there’s an existential crisis within the vampire community itself, so there is a lot of chessboard storytelling, a lot of moving pieces, too.
SEAT42F: So how would you describe in general your new characters?
SIMON BARRY: Well I think we wanted a full spectrum of human characters that would reflect different points of view on this nightmare scenario, so that we weren’t just one-note in how our central characters deal with problems and solve problems, and there is no central control structure in this show. Everyone is sort of equal, therefore the way humans deal with each other is rife with problems, and what Neil’s expertise is is the darkness of human behavior and that reflects against the darkness of vampire behavior quite well.
So in essence, we wanted a show where maybe the most dangerous thing wasn’t the vampire, but it was the person next to you, that you’re surviving with; that there was a greater chance of being fucked over by them than a vampire that happened to find you. So we were trying to make sure that by drawing a very specific group of people who were very different, that you wouldn’t be able to predict what would happen in scenario to scenario.
And I think early on you realize because this is a show about self-discovery, Vanessa doesn’t know about the mythology, she doesn’t know about her powers, she’s discovering with the audience what’s happening. Not only what’s happened to the world, but what’s happened to her. So, in a way she’s quite neutral in her perspective, but also she’s neutral in the way people want to use her. She’s kind of like this atom bomb, you know, and the vampires can use it, and the humans can use it, so she becomes a tool and a weapon and no one’s really asked her if she wants to be. No one’s asked her if she wants to be a messianic character in this story, so her struggle is much more interesting as a result.
THE FANDOM: What was the challenge of creating something from original source material with a male lead instead of a female lead?
SIMON BARRY: It was interesting because we knew it was going to be contemporary out of the gate which eliminated so many of the things from the Van Helsing mythology, because once we went contemporary we knew we were free from a lot of things like crossbows and hats, you know, pitchforks and torches, so immediately it gave the show a different tone in terms of the world, and we felt like an audience wanted it to be, would rather watch a show where if this happened, how would people react as opposed to an extreme version of a universe where it’s theatrical or operatic.
We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to ground it in more of a way, I guess, the Walking Dead did it with zombies. Sort of be a bit more ‘real world’ which is a big change from the Bram Stoker/Transylvania world of Dracula.
Q: You mentioned The Walking Dead; does this show have a potential outcome or is it just about the survival?
SIMON BARRY: Half of our story is spent with the vampires actually, dealing with their existential issues, which is they’ve basically won the battle but they will lose the war if they’re not careful because they’ve taken their food source and killed it. And so they have to actually re-think their long view of what they’ve done, because if they don’t, they’re going to die off as a result of killing everyone.
So it’s kind of a complex sort of situation with no central leadership really, in a traditional sense. You have factions among factions of vampires deciding what’s the best course of action and there’s disagreement within those vampires as to what to do.
So we get to spend quite a decent amount of time in our show looking at how the vampires are going to deal with their own problems and successes as characters, so we have a spectrum of vampire characters that echo our human survivor stories in the sense that they have different intentions, different goals, there are rivalries, there are back-stories that come into play. So it’s a little different from just a pure constant survival story. It really becomes more like a civil war story, almost a revolution.
We won this battle against the humans. Now what?
That, to me, is much more interesting than the next battle. It’s like what do we do with this win? How do we sustain it? How do we win against also, potentially, a weapon that could neutralize us? Which we can’t allow to happen. So I think those dilemmas from the vampire perspective we can make as interesting as our human dilemmas.
Q: So is it more of political story then on the vampire side?
SIMON BARRY: There’s soft politics, yeah. I wouldn’t say it’s politics on a large map; I’d say it’s politics on a small map. So you have politics within groups, and you have politics once we’ve established our feudal environment of humans and vampires, because even the humans have a split amongst themselves.
So the politics of these relationships sort of reveal themselves as the show goes on, it’s not something that’s in your face early on, but once you start to understand why things are happening, then you start to see the politics kind of emerge.
And also we slowly parse out the vampire story because we didn’t want to burden the first half of the show with their politics and the palace intrigue of vampires. We felt that was something that would be best served till once our human characters started to integrate with the vampires in a way that allowed it happen.
JONATHAN SCARFE
SEAT42F: Can you introduce your character and tell us why fans are going to fall in love with him?
JONATHAN SCARFE: I play Axel Miller on Van Helsing. He’s a marine, he’s a guy was assigned to go and collect Vanessa right before all the wheels came off and the apocalypse began. So he managed to get to the facility where she was, and then boom, the apocalypse happens and I end up being stuck there for three years trying to keep her alive. She’s been in a coma this whole time. That’s where we begin our show.
SEAT42F: That’s dedication!
JONATHAN SCARFE: Yeah! That’s why they’re gonna love this guy. Because he’s so damn dedicated to keeping her alive, to that mission. He’s kind of singular in that way. It is crazy when you put yourself in the mindset of that. They’ve had to barricade themselves into this hospital. Two and a half years have gone by before the last group of marines decided that they were going to risk trying to make it to the military base that’s something like thirty miles away — seemingly impossible. One of them makes it back six months later with another group of stragglers and I let them back in. And that’s when the vampires get in with them, she gets bit, she wakes up miraculously having been in this coma for three years, and that’s literally in the first five minutes of the show.
So that’s how we get introduced to her, this project, and take it from there and realize that she might be the answer to this epidemic, because the vampire that bites her, that wakes her up, immediately collapses and then regains his humanity. So there’s something about her, there’s something in her blood that counteracts the vampirism.
THE FANDOM: How were you able to relate to your character, were you able to build it and make it your own?
JONATHAN SCARFE: Oh yeah! Well you know, Neil LaBute is super collaborative in terms of trying to build pieces of personality and character into the guy. I just love the idea of given the situation that he’s just never going to give up, no matter what, and is very self-reliant and capable.
I had this adventure with my family where we’d gone off for two and a half years and lived totally off the grid, sailed 18,000 miles, we crossed the Pacific ocean twice, and we had all kinds of insane experiences you know. I mean living three months on a totally deserted atoll, getting blasted by a huge hurricane that came through there, tearing off our bowsprit trying to figure out a way to repair it with nothing, in this kind of Robinson Crusoe existence, finding this old washed up derelict outboard on the outskirts of this little atoll and pulling the driveshaft out of it and using it to rebuild the dolphin striker on the bowsprit, taping it all together in this Mad Max kind of experience, so having something you can feel like you brought some of that experience to, having come back to the world. I was just tickled by the idea of being a dude in that circumstance.
SEAT42F: Simon had mentioned they kind of created the role for you and Chris after knowing you, and knowing what they wanted from the characters based on you. Do you think they probably drew on your personal experiences to mold that character?
JONATHAN SCARFE: Oh yeah, positively. They do that. They have this really long history with Chris. Chris Heyerdahl is one of my favorite actors that I’ve ever seen, never mind got to work with, and the fact that they could take a character who was deaf and mostly mute, he almost never speaks, and know that he was going to be able to kill it. I think he’s the most interesting thing on the show. He’s unbelievable. Every time the camera’s on him, you’re just begging for them not to cut away.
So yeah, I think they had that in their back pocket. They were like, yeah we can totally write the deaf guy. We’ll just have Chris do it. It’ll be fine!
SEAT42F: What kind of bad ass stuff do you get to do on the show?
JONATHAN SCARFE: Kill all the vampires! (laughs) I get to demolish vampires in every way you can possibly imagine with every available item or tool. Screwdrivers, spoons, broken mop sticks, machine guns, bombs, booby traps, it’s hilarious.
SEAT42F: How do you kill a vampire with a spoon?
JONATHAN SCARFE: You have to destroy its heart! It’s a slow process. (Makes repetitive thrusting, scooping motions) It’s just determination, that’s all! (laughs)
THE FANDOM: Did you get any kind of martial arts training, or any fighting skills?
JONATHAN SCARFE: We didn’t have enough lead up time, you know. They were on such a scramble once they got the show green lit, and had a very compressed writers’ room, so it was all just go go go and hit the ground running as soon as we knew we were doing it, so I’d love to say we had lots of martial arts training. That would have been really cool, but no, we just built those fight scenes as quick as we could.
We had an amazing stunt coordinator, an amazing stunt team, and you know we just built them the best we could.
And again, my guy, he’s out of the motor pool. I wasn’t playing a Navy Seal superstar. I’m playing a grunt, basically, who had the personality type that he was going to step up when he was needed.
CHAD OAKES and MIKE FRISLEV
3 BLACK GEEKS: Going into the Van Helsing mythology, did you have a bible of what you were going to do or not going to do or was it kind of more freestyle?
MIKE FRISLEV: There was an initial concept document which was three or four pages that had been pitched by Dynamic Television and Echo Lake to Chris Regina at Syfy Because Chris has developed about three hundred movies at Syfy he really has an idea of what the audience wants and then he had his own spin on that, at that time he said I’ll green light this project if you do it with Chad and I. And then it was finding the right show runner, and Chad can speak about that. Neil LaBute was working with us on Hell on Wheels. We wanted to take what we had from our world, which is largely outside the Sci-fi genre and dive in with our own take on the subject.
SEAT42F: We heard that you guys were responsible for doing the casting for Jonathan and Chris. What was the thinking with bringing them on board?
CHAD OAKES: Well, we’d worked with both Jonathan and Chris on Hell on Wheels. They’re both brilliant actors. Our company, Nomadic Pictures have done 650 million dollars in production, we do lots of series, and you know, it’s kind of cool when you actually get a group together of people, and you know, let’s grow Chris’ hair long or let’s cut off Jonathan’s hair, let’s give them, first, it’s gotta be on the page and its gotta be great characters for them to even say ‘yes.’
These series, some of them aren’t huge paying jobs, so they need to be loved, respected, and given some material that they can chew on. And it was right from the get-go, when we started writing the characters, a part of my job that I enjoy is the casting process. It started with Kelly, Jonathan, Christopher, David Cubitt, Paul Johansson, Tim Guinee, and it’s people that Mike and I have worked with before, maybe not on series, but M.O.W.s (Movie of the Week), features, and it’s again, kind of like putting the band back together.
MIKE FRISLEV: Having Neil LaBute as a show runner, and Simon together, building the richness of those characters, that attracts those actors. You know, if it’s thin on the page, it’s likely they’re taking another job, so it’s a lot about what’s on the page.
CHAD OAKES: So that’s why we hired Neil LaBute. He’s not the first name you would think about that would be, hey! Vampires! Neil LaBute! He’d be great for it! So it was something that, again, what Mike and I like to do is think outside the box and we’re just thankful that Chris Regina at Syfy felt the same thing.
So literally after going through that whole list of great, wonderful genre show runners, ones that we’ve worked with before outside the sci-fi world and then coming down the list and what if we kind of strayed off the reservation a little bit. And thankfully when I called him, his words were, “Fucking brilliant. Go for it.” And that’s how Neil came into our lives.
And again, no guns were put to anybody’s heads, they all had a choice, they all had agents, they all had managers, they had lawyers…
Q: You guys had said before that you’re not used to the sci-fi genre, so what kind of challenges did you have going into that?
CHAD OAKES: Well, leading up to this we had only delivered one…
MIKE FRISLEV: Yeah, we did a picture called Mutant World. It was a young writer that I had met with in the Toronto Film Festival, and he introduced us to Karen O’Hare, at that time at Syfy, and she just wanted to work with us. She said, “Well, you want to do a zombie western?” It ended up not being a zombie western because there were too many zombie shows. They said, “Let’s do mutants” and so that’s how it rolls. I had optioned a zombie western, but now I’ve got to get that same writer to a mutant show. And yeah, it was just kind of fun. And we delivered that show and Chris liked working with us and when he got the pitch for this show, he said I’ll do it if Chad and Mike do it. So we weren’t deep on sci-fi experience by any means, but we did the one M.O.W. and then dove into this.
It’s fun, and it’s our first Comic Con and the energy and everything, it’s just wonderful. It’s a great audience.
CHAD OAKES: And I personally love the genre. I grew up loving sci-fi, it just never came through our 600 million dollars in production, you know? And that’s okay, we’re very fortunate to have won Golden Globes, Emmys, and Producers Guild Awards for our westerns, our period pieces like Klondike, and Broken Trail, and Hell on Wheels, and Fargo in a way is actually a period drama, it’s you know, six years in the past or thirty-five years in the past, or what’s going to happen here on Season Three here of Fargo is a little different, but you know what? It’s a fun genre and I think coming to Comic Con, just seeing a dedicated, passionate audience member, that gets me excited. We could be in this a very long time.
Actually we can’t announce it yet, but we have another sci-fi series we’re about to announce next month. Closing finance right now. It will be with Syfy, and it will be with some lovely big names, so we’re enjoying it. We’re hooked!
PSYCHO DRIVE-IN: From what we saw at the preview panel, there was a lot of brutality. A lot of just physical, brutal violence. Is that something you had to kind of negotiate with or did you have to find a middle ground?
MIKE FRISLEV: That’s an interesting thing, because you know, when you’re financing these things, Syfy Channel is only like out of the New York office, is only in for a smaller license fee compared to a lot of networks, so you have to serve some other masters, and it’s quite… I mean, we thought we were going to have to version the show, but… We just kind of stuck to our guns. We stuck to our guns to tell the story and it’s all working out for us.
Not without a few bumps, but… We’re not serving two masters, we’re telling a straight-up story, and it’s a brutal world we’re in. We’re not pulling any punches.
CHAD OAKES: At the same time, in this post-apocalyptic world, there is humanity, there’s love, there’s a group of ragtag human beings that are trying to be a part of a resistance to take the world back over, and that’s not going to be done by negotiating, you know, by playing cards. It’s going to be done by physical violence, it’s going to be done by brutality.
That being said, you know, it’s funny you say that, because that’s what the teasers and the trailers are, but when you actually sit down and see forty-five, forty-six minutes, there’s an act out, a murder, a killing, or a fight, but really the majority is not. I think that’s the reason we hired Neil LaBute. We hired him not for his penchant for blood, but because he writes great characters.
PSYCHO DRIVE-IN: And there’s that emotional brutality in a lot of the stuff that he does.
CHAD OAKES: Exactly!
MIKE FRISLEV: Exactly right!
CHAD OAKES: You got it.
KELLY OVERTON
3 BLACK GEEKS: How was it going from True Blood to Van Helsing, from one show that’s brutal to this show that’s brutal?
KELLY OVERTON: There were some similarities, just her being really strong, there being that physical aspect to the role. The character I played on True Blood did not like vampires. (laughs) Those things were similar but there were also so many differences. I play a mom and she wakes up after being in a coma for three years, realizes that the world has gone to shit, it’s post-apocalyptic and it’s ruled by vampires. They want her, the humans want her, but all she cares about is finding her daughter. She wakes up and she’s in the middle of all this.
So that was very different compared to Rikki the werewolf, and there was a vulnerability that I found really important for Vanessa, that Rikki doesn’t have.
SEAT42F: Jonathan said that his character watched over her for the three years she was in the coma, and he’s like her protector. So what’s their dynamic or their relationship once she comes out of the coma?
KELLY OVERTON: Well, when she comes out of the coma, it’s like very primal. And then it’s survival, it’s self-protection, I think there are core things about who she is that she remembers and she can hold on to, but then it’s about figuring out the facts: where is she, what happened, where’s her daughter, who are these people? And she doesn’t trust anybody, and there are some issues there, there are reasons she doesn’t trust them that much. So I think with Axel, there was some fear, you know, is this someone I can trust? The vampires want me, the other humans have issues with me too, but he’s protecting me, and I’m kind of like, why? And so I thought it was a really cool relationship story of how she begins to trust him.
THE FANDOM: I know you’re using a machine gun. What other weapons will you be using?
KELLY OVERTON: I have an axe at one point, a shotgun. I have a knife, a rifle, a sword, I have a katana sword…
PSYCHO DRIVE-IN: Do you have the spoon? We heard about a spoon maybe? No?
KELLY OVERTON: No? What’s this about a spoon?
PSYCHO DRIVE-IN: Killing vampires with a spoon!
KELLY OVERTON: Tell me!
SEAT42F: Jonathan said he killed a vampire with a spoon. I don’t know what he was meaning by that, but he seemed serious though.
KELLY OVERTON: (laughs) I have no idea what he was talking about. (laughs) I’m trying to remember that. I must have not been in that scene! But it sounds pretty intense! What like, in the eye, or what?
SEAT42F: So he gets the forks and spoons, you get the knives and guns! Alright! Bad ass women!
KELLY OVERTON: Yeah, totally bad ass woman, but he’s totally bad ass, too. Don’t get it twisted, he’s like yeah!
SEAT42F: Can you describe a little bit more about your character’s family life? Obviously you’re looking for your daughter. Where’s the husband in this picture?
KELLY OVERTON: Um, the husband’s not totally out of the picture, they’re not totally estranged. But she’s divorced and you get a piece of the pre-apocalypse Vanessa, so you do get to see her with her daughter, you do get to see a piece of what that life was like. The dad is still in her life, but not a big part of it. Not a source of joy for her daughter, and for my character too, but…
SEAT42F: What, is he a vampire?
KELLY OVERTON: (laughs) No, he’s just Gary.
3 BLACK GEEKS: Is that something that sticks throughout the series, the use of flashbacks, is that going to be an ongoing part of the series or just an early on thing?
KELLY OVERTON: It’s an early on thing. It doesn’t happen the rest of the season, but I don’t know if moving forward, they would play with that more, but yeah, it’s not a big flashback show.
PSYCHO DRIVE-IN: I know a lot of the Syfy shows that have been coming out over the past few years have strong female leads, but they’ve had a good sense of humor about it too. What we saw in the preview, there wasn’t a whole lot of humor. Does it kind of walk that line?
KELLY OVERTON: It does, it does. It’s definitely more drama/horror. It gets dark psychologically. I think that’s just the team that came together with Neil, myself, and some of the other actors. We really wanted to create a world that you can buy into, since it was already so out there. We wanted to do something new and different, and I think that that was a part of it, too, of trying to make it as believable as we could.
That being said, there is levity, there are moments of joking and laughter, and tongue-in-cheek. You know, it’s not all stark, but it is dark. It’s dark and it’s really bloody. You know Neil’s not afraid to like, which I thought was awesome and I loved, not afraid to go into the darkness of the vampires and the gory aspect, but also psychologically as a human – those dark recesses of the mind, and that comes out in the inner dynamics of the characters.
And in order to pull that off, I don’t think you could make that campy. You know? We had to go there, and we wanted to, because we love what we do. And we’ve got some great actors, the cast is fantastic, I mean most of us have theater backgrounds, so…
PSYCHO DRIVE-IN: It’s one of the strongest casts that I’ve seen, in especially the Syfy Network stuff.
KELLY OVERTON: I know, I know. Thank you!
SEAT42F: What was it like working with Chris?
KELLY OVERTON: Chris is so great! You know we did True Blood together. We didn’t get to act together; he was the authority in the vampire world and vampires and werewolves stayed separate, but I was so thrilled when I knew that he was going to be a part of this because his pedigree is, I mean, I just find him very inspiring as an actor.
He just shows up so fully and he’s one of those actors that you’re in the moment with and anything can happen. And I think that’s, for me, really fun and what I love and what I appreciate in the people I’m working with. No one’s just showing up and saying their lines, and you know Chris is just a prime example of that. You show up and don’t know what’s going to happen, and that’s when I think the magic happens. He was just such a strong, strong cast member. We were so lucky.
SEAT42F: Even though he doesn’t say a word?
KELLY OVERTON: Yeah! Oh my gosh, wait till you see what he does in this show! Yeah, yeah. He’s brilliant.
SEAT42F: Did you ever envision your career being all about vampires and werewolves?
KELLY OVERTON: No. (laughs) Not at all. You know and I didn’t anticipate, and I’m so thankful that this happened, there’s been a lot of horror athletic supernatural work, from Stephen King’s Desperation, to The Ring 2, to Tekken, and it’s so fun. I’ve never laughed harder shooting a show than you do when you’re doing these kind of genres, because they’re so absurd! Because it’s like, this is the vampire apocalypse! Like, what? What are you doing? You’re puking blood on my face!
3 BLACK GEEKS: What was it like doing Tekken?
KELLY OVERTON: Tekken was crazy!
PSYCHO DRIVE-IN: I know, right? I’ve been dying to ask about that!
KELLY OVERTON: Thanks! Why weren’t we here for that?
PSYCHO DRIVE-IN: I don’t know! I want to honor this show, but Tekken! Come on!
KELLY OVERTON: Yeah, Tekken!
3 BLACK GEEKS: That cast was like, just seeing the amount of people in that cast, it was like how did they get this person and how did they get that guy!
PSYCHO DRIVE-IN: I know! It was insane!
KELLY OVERTON: I know! Extreme fighters! It was so amazing! We had so much time to work with the stunt coordinator, we were in the gym months before we shot. It was really one of my favorite experiences as an actor. I did all my own stunts. Like I used to do backflips and back hand springs as a kid and I hadn’t done them in so long, but being in the gym training for that show, I was able to get it back! It was so much fun!