By Christina Radish
Toronto native Tyler Labine currently stars as the scruffy conspiracy theorist in the ABC suspense drama Invasion, which explores how humans, in their lack of success to discover alien life, realize that their struggle of discovery may be due to the fact that aliens already live amongst us. From famed writer-producer Shaun Cassidy, the show tells the tale of a blended family trying to recover from a devastating hurricane and its mysterious aftermath.
For dedicated park ranger Russell Varon (Eddie Cibrian), a divorced father of two -- teenaged son, Jesse (Evan Peters), and young daughter, Rose (Ariel Gade) -- who is expecting a third child with his new wife, local television reporter Larkin Groves (Lisa Sheridan), the hurricane proves to be merely the beginning of a long journey into the unknown. Although he initially dismisses the paranoid conspiracy theories of his brother-in-law Dave (Labine), Russell begins to suspect that something is very wrong with his ex-wife, Dr. Mariel Underlay (Kari Matchett), and her Sheriff husband (William Fichtner).
In what is now the series finale, viewers can expect the storylines that have been building all season to reach a high level of intensity, before the end of the hour. “It’s all coming down,” says Labine, in an exclusive interview with MediaBlvd Magazine via cell phone, while he is making the 20-hour trek from Los Angeles to Vancouver, B.C. to visit his fiancée and his family. “Jesse gets pushed, as close to the edge as a teenage boy can be pushed, without losing his mind. He definitely takes a stand for himself. My character is clearly vindicated. He gets pushed only so far, and then he can’t take any more. The new villain in town, Eli Szura (James Frain), is up to some pretty nasty shit. You’re going to see a whole new Sheriff Underlay. You’re going to see a hybrid man, instinctually protecting everything he loves, to a degree that no human can. And, there’s going to be a big cliffhanger, at the end, that’s going to be a shocker. It’s not something any of us expected.”
{quote_top}Originally made aware of the series at the very beginning of pilot season, Labine was willing to do whatever it would take, so that he could be a part of Invasion. “I was in Toronto shooting Kevin Hill because I had just gotten offered a new regular role on that show. I was sent two scripts -- Invasion and some half-hour multi-camera piece of garbage. I was like, ‘Fuck, I don’t want to read this half-hour,’ because I did one the year before and I hated it, so I just grabbed Invasion. About two pages into it, it had its hooks in me. Shaun has this really weird, ethereal, very particular way of writing that immediately grabs you.”
“Anyway, I read it and then went out and paid to put myself on tape and sent it to Shaun in L.A., while I was shooting in Toronto. That’s how much I really wanted to do the project. They hadn’t even asked me to come in to audition. I just sent the tape. And, the funny thing is that they never even got it. About a month and a half later, I got an audition for it, and I thought it was my callback. I thought, ‘Oh, great, they saw my tape.’ I went in there and, in my opinion, I just blew it. I walked out and thought, ‘Okay, well, at least they saw the tape. I know the tape was good. Sometimes, you can not do as good of a job on your callback and they’ll still bring you back in.’ And then, my agent said that they never even got the tape, so I was like, ‘Fuck! Okay, so I blew my favorite pilot of the season.’”
But, things were not nearly so bad, as Labine realized when Cassidy and executive producer Thomas Schlamme (The West Wing) called him back in again. “I went and did a screen test, and then they found out that I didn’t have a valid passport or a work VISA, at the time, and we were going to start shooting in 11 days. Everyone told me that I wouldn’t be able to do it because there just wasn’t enough time to obtain them. But, they really wanted me to do it. And then, I found out that there were two other pilots that were willing to wait for me to get my permit and passport, but I didn’t want to do those, I wanted to do Invasion. They said, ‘Well, you can either do these two, for sure, or throw everything to the wind, turn down those other two pilots, and see if you can get a passport and VISA in 11 days, which will be impossible.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m going to see if I can get them.’ So, Tommy Schlamme, because of The West Wing, has all these political contacts, and he got somebody high up -- I’m not going to say who -- to personally sign for my work papers, so that I could do the show. I got a work VISA in six days. From the beginning, I felt like there was something a little bit special about doing this project.”
{quote_middle}Although he wasn’t a computer geek, Labine says he was able to identify with the outcast aspect of Dave, having been what he would consider a drama geek, growing up in Vancouver. “He’s a very misunderstood guy. I thought he was an intelligent guy who people just really underestimated. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, by any means, but I definitely have my big questions about the universe. For us to think that we’re the only intelligent life in this giant universe, is just preposterous. I really identified with that, and the way that he did his own thing and danced to the beat of his own drum without ever placing too much stock in what people thought of him. I thought that was really cool.”
Having evolved from a scared geek into this guy who is really pushing for answers and putting himself in danger on a quest to obtain them, Labine loves the transition that Dave has taken, over the course of the season.
“When we started, there was a very strong, stereotypical archetype for my character. He was the weird guy who lived in the garage and was kooky, and I wanted to play him more real than that. I feel like Shaun, and all of the writers on the show, really started to write for me, to my strengths, as they did with everybody. And then, by the time these big changes started coming around, it felt like we were all being rewarded by getting really meaty stuff to do because we’d all shown that we could handle it. This is a very different Dave than you saw at the beginning. I feel like they’ve finally let me take some matters into my own hands, and take some initiative.”
Labine had some sci-fi experience prior to Invasion, having guest starred on a lot of the shows that made their way to Vancouver. But, none of that could have prepared the 28-year-old actor for having to face his partially formed, dying alien self, in episode 14, entitled All God’s Creatures.
“It was weird, man. The network said that they didn’t want it to be too emotional, but I was like, ‘Okay, I have a dying, half-made, carbon copy of me, in front of me, and that’s not going to be emotional?’ It was really bizarre, trying to imagine myself dying, and watching myself die. And, it was really uncomfortable. I had to get into 2 ½ hours of make-up every day, and do a full-body and face cast and mold. But, it was fun. I really dig that kind of stuff. The only time I’m ever going to get to do something like that, is in a job like this. I feel really lucky when I get to do stuff like that, especially in hindsight.”
{quote_bottom}In addition to his current small screen success, Labine will be seen this fall as Briggs Lowry, in director Tony Bill’s Flyboys, the story of a group of young Americans who were the first fighter pilots when they volunteered for the French military before the U.S. entered WWI. Hanging out, for more than three months, in England, with 15 guys, hanging out and going to pubs, was a lot of fun for Labine.
“It was really cool. I had a really great time with Jean Reno, James Franco and Martin Henderson. I play a really different character. These kids came from all over, and they were daredevils, wanting to fly, except for my character. My character was made to be there by his father. I’m a young, rich, snobby, racist guy, in the beginning, who comes around and becomes a good guy, in the end.”
As if the hours of a television drama weren’t consuming enough for him, Labine spends time in his home studios, in L.A. and Vancouver, as producer and MC of a hip-hop group, called Self-Dep, which also includes his two brothers. “My brothers are my best friends, so the fact that we get to do that kind of thing together, really makes it very important to me. I want it to be a bigger part of my life. Unfortunately, my little brother just moved to France to shoot a new TV series there, so he’s there writing rhymes. He’s writing in France, and I’m sending him all of the music I’m working, so he can start planning it out.”
Now that ABC has made the decision to pull the plug on Invasion, Labine is weighing his options, hoping one day that he’ll have the opportunity to work with Academy Award winner Philip Seymour Hoffman. Until then, he reveals the possibility of a series television version of The Big Lebowski, along with a couple other projects in development, are likely to happen first. “They want me to play Walter Sobchak, the part that John Goodman did in the film. That’s one of my favorite characters in film history. And, my brother is a writer and director in Canada, who has been writing a script for me and him, that we’ll be making this summer. It’s called Real Love, and we’ve got the funding and everything is going to happen. It’s a part that nobody else would offer me. On the surface, the character is a very put-together, computer geek, who eventually ends up spiraling downward. His girlfriend just dumped him and he ends up becoming a chronic masturbator, and then he ends up getting so hung up with Internet porn that he starts to realize that he’s not attracted to the pornography, but is instead attracted to the computer, and he starts fucking his computer. It sounds really ridiculous, but it’s a dark, symbolic comedy.”
