The new supernatural series
Haven premiered on Universal Channel on Sunday (17 October) at 20h00, in a double bill - which is how it's airing for a 13-episode run, with the Finale solo.
It stars
Emily Rose as lead character Audrey Parker,
Eric Balfour (of Six Feet Under and 24) as Duke "Bad Boy" and
Lucas Bryant as Nathan, Haven's local police officer.
Left to right: Lucas Bryant, Emily Rose, Eric Balfour.
The relationship between them: a combo of stormy, tempestuous, mysterious, supernatural, an undercurrent of attraction - and troubled. Most everyone in the town is troubled. It's where troubled people go.
I chattered with the threesome for us to get their insiders take:
Tashi: What's been the highlight of filming the series for you?
Emily: I think it's being able to portray Audrey, and be at the beginning and watch a series grow and be one of the main parts to the story.
I've always played supporting and recurring roles and I've been able to watch a lot of people lead shows so for me the highlight has been - even though it's been a lot of work - to work on a character and watch her come to life and then watch the show grow and to finish the season, it's been a great experience. All of it.
Tashi: Duke's so entwined in the fabric of Haven, the place - whereabouts is the show filmed?
Eric: It's filmed in and around Halifax, Nova Scotia and it's an amazing part of the world. The Maritimes are different than anywhere I've ever been. I grew up in Southern California, which is a desert - geographically not that different from Cape Town, where we have the mountains and oceans - Nova Scotia, it's in the North Atlantic and it has a lot of ... I keep using this word, it has a lot of emotionality.
Tashi: What happens to the people in the town when you're filming? Are they extra's and so on?
Lucas: They are. There were some people from the town - Rosy and her son Cameron, they were on a shoot with us and I always remember her because afterwards she kept finding us and saying: *in an old ladies voice* “I don't know if you remember me. I was on your show the other day - my son Cameron, he played a dead body."
Emily: Everybody's very excited about the show being filmed there.
Eric: My favourites are ... there's an episode where my character- I guess, you could say ... conceives a baby. It's an episode where I age, so the parents of the baby that we used as my baby in the show - all of a sudden I became their daughter's extra daddy.
Emily: Like me, I became I her extra mommy.
Eric: Whenever we were filming in town, they'd come with their stroller and they'd bring her around and want me to say "Hi," to her, make sure I saw her. They actually brought me the cutest picture of me and her.
Emily: They brought me a picture of her and me too and we signed them. It was great.
Tashi: So the whole community's absorbed you into their Troubled town?
Emily: At least that's better than them hating us and running away!
Tashi: Do you stay there while you're filming?
Emily: Yeah we do - well, Eric not as much, he goes back and forth, but Lucas and I lived there - in separate places - for five months.
Eric: I opted to get a place in the city so I commuted every day.
Tashi: Stephen King - have you met him?
Eric: No, not yet. Apparently we've had to earn the right to meet him. He said that if the show gets picked up for a Season 2, then we'll get to meet him. He basically said: "No, no - unless you get a Season 2 you don't get to meet me."
On 7 October, Syfy announced that the show has been renewed. Eric on Season 2: "When we wrapped shooting on the season, we all felt that it wasn't the end. You can usually tell in your gut and it really didn't feel like it was the end so we're excited and looking forward to it."
Tashi: I've always wondered what he's like, if he's as creepy as his books.
Eric: But there's other books that he's written that I think are really indicative of our show, more like Stand By Me and The Green Mile. He has this whole other sensibility, that yes, it has this supernatural element but, like with our show, it has a great amount of heart and depth and really interesting characters.
Tashi: I'll never forget reading an interview with him where he said he wouldn't sleep with his legs dangling over the edge of the bed because he didn't know what going to come out from underneath.
Eric: I used to sleep under his bed sometimes.
Tashi: Oh! okay, so that's where it came from obviously. Emily, what's your favourite sci-fi show of all time?
Emily: Lucas and I always laugh about that and say it's Alf.
Emily: I think people wouldn't consider this a main sci-fi show but I'm a huge Lost fan. I think my sister and I realised one day that we were probably created by two nerds - we realised that our parents are big nerds.
Eric: My favourite is Mork & Mindy. *laughs* That's my number one - and probably the original Battlestar Galactica from the late '70's, early '80's. I remember being terrified of cylons as a kid.
When I was a kid, at Universal Studios, on the tram tour, there was a section would you go into a Battlestar Galactica show and the cylons would come out and start shooting laser guns and I would crawl to the bottom of the tram and hide from them I was so afraid.
Oh wait! ... I take all that back - Battlestar Galactica was great but Buck Rogers was way cooler. There was that woman in the white, tight outfit and the guy with the feathers, and there was Biddy, the little robot guy who carried the voice: "biddy, biddy, biddy."
Lucas: I like the recent Battlestar on Syfy. I was also a big fan of Alf.
Tashi: If you weren't in Haven but a viewer, what would you enjoy most?
Lucas: I'd say that two of the people on screen, Eric Balfour and Emily Rose are smokin' hot. That's a plus.
One of the things that I'm very proud of about the show, and very impressed by, is the look of the show - it looks quite stunning and not like many of the things you see on television.
The location really helps with that - they don't shoot much television out there on the edge of Nova Scotia, our DP (Director of Photography) is exceptional and we get to shoot on film which is very lucky and not too common these days.
Just the look of the show, it's really special and as it defines exactly what it is, it becomes even more spooky, even though it looks so perfect - it's got that Stephen King kick to it.
Tashi: Yes, it has a mist to it almost. Why is it that Nathan's Trouble is his inability to feel things physically?
Lucas: I have no idea - I can't really tell you, I have no clue. What it does is, sets up a guy who is a manifestation of his psyche. His inability to feel his alienation from people - his outward inability to feel, but he feels a lot on the inside. As he moves through the first season, he gets to see how he makes that transformation.
Tashi: Eric, what's Duke's most troubling Trouble?
Eric: So far, Duke's most troubling Trouble is Nathan. I think the hardest thing for Duke in this world is to balance his own self-interest with his growing desire to build a relationship with Emily.
Emily: With me? With Audrey?
Eric: With Audrey, excuse me. *laughs* It was a Freudian slip. I think for Duke, his most difficult thing is trying to balance the life he's accustomed to, which is very selfish and self-serving, with becoming part of a proverbial family.
Tashi: Emily, if you were Audrey's agony aunt - what would advice would you give her?
Emily: Well, what I'd tell her, I feel like I'd tell her: "It's going to be okay," *laughs*. That's what I feel like I want to tell Audrey all the time. I don't know if I'd tell her necessarily what to do because for her, where she is and what she's doing is what she needs to be doing but just to hang in there, it's going to be okay.
Tashi: I don't care what anyone says, when it comes to threesomes the relationship is
never platonic.
So. Who's going to get Audrey? Duke or Nathan?
Lucas: I think it's something that's going to take a really long time to play out.
Emily: I think what I enjoy is how many times we get that question and how many people want to know the answer. I think that speaks to what the writers have written and what we've tried to create on the show, these questions. I think I like that you're asking it.
Tashi: The theme of women with two guys in their lives, it's been coming through in so many TV shows (e.g. Gabi Solis in
Desperate Housewives, Elena in
Vampire Diaries) - do you think it suggests that women ultimately want more than one man in their life?
Emily: *laughs* I'm newly married, I don't know if I can answer that *laughs*. I guess I've never thought of it like that, I think that there's just a ... I think that there's been a switch and that you're seeing a lot of female leads in television recently.
For a while there's been a lot of leading men and there still are and when there's leading men everyone asks the same question: if ultimately the man wants more than one woman, so maybe that's just a human question.
I don't know ... I don't know if Audrey really finds herself in that predicament yet because I think she's kind of concerned with other things.
Lucas: In some ways it's a very classic story, we've always seen characters torn between different sides of their own personality and you have that in this situation.
Ends