Interview: Degrassi & Terra Nova Vet Landon Liboiron Goes Werewolf In Hemlock Grove

Was it really only a few years ago that Landon Liboiron was romancing Holly J as “Declan” on Degrassi?

This week, Liboiron takes on a much more adult role in the Netflix original series Hemlock Grove, which sees all 13 episodes released at once on Friday, April 19. From director Eli Roth (Hostel) and based on a novel by Brian McGreevy, Hemlock Grove explores what happens in a town after a girl is murdered near a steel mill. But it’s not just another Twin Peaks: the series, which also stars Famke Janssen, Dougray Scott, and many other names, has some serious supernatural elements, including Liboiron’s gypsy Peter Rumancek having werewolf-like tendencies.

“He’s this kind of morally grounded, but kind of impulsive vagabond gypsy, so he travels from town to town, and he doesn’t really have a home, and he doesn’t have any real friends, so when Christina [Wandall, Freya Tingley’s character] shows an interest in his character, it’s kind of humbling and sort of gratifying that someone is taking a genuine interest in who he is and what he is without the whole immediate disgust that he’s a gypsy, or that he’s a grungy kid of whatever,” Landon told us at a Hemlock Grove press room at this year’s Wondercon convention. As mentioned before, Peter has a transformative side, which you can see below:

“I was really kind of terrified to see it,” Landon admits about the transformation. “When I was doing it, I didn’t know what I was doing. It’s one of those things where you can’t really conceive what it should be like, and you want it to be unique and different from what’s already happened in film and everything. We also shot it [over] a long period of time. We shot the outside scenes, and then some insert shots two months later, like the actual skin falling and all that stuff. It was scary to do it, because you didn’t know if you were looking foolish… we were putting faith into the guys with the CGI.”

There was makeup involved in addition to the CGI to make the transformation happen. “There was makeup. There was some hand makeup. There were the fingers… we did makeup where it was kind of the halfway process of that, with the nails coming out… [the snout] was all CGI,” he admits.

When asked if it’s enjoyable to play a more adult character after playing roles that were busy either pining for girlfriends from the future, or, well, Holly J, Landon praises the many layers of Peter. “It’s funny. In the book, Brian [McGreevy] uses a really amazing description of Peter. It’s like of him having not so much maturity, but a nature’s consciousness where at times, he’s exactly of his age; and others, a soul out of time wearing a boy’s mask. The thing that’s funny about Peter is that he is this sort of old spirit, but he still has the desires of a child. To have a friendship, he’s lonely… he’s becoming a man… all of those things are still there, but it was fun to have that kind of spiritual wisdom that the wolf gave him as well. It was really fun, and I was really grateful to have the opportunity to play something a little more mature,” he says.

You can subscribe to Netflix and see all 13 episodes of Hemlock Grove starting this Friday, April 19 at Netflix.com. Stay tuned to KSiteTV in the coming days for more about the series!