by Matt Sernaker, Managing Editor
Dirk Gently returns! Season 2 kicks off this weekend, and ComicsOnline is pleased to share our interview with the latest cast additions: Alan Tudyk (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) and Tyler Labine (Voltron: Legendary Defender). Alan and Tyler joined us at San Diego Comic-Con 2017, and after a brief (and hilarious) detour to enjoy some of the various British candy provided by BBC, Alan helped us to kick off the interview:
Alan: So tell us about your character Tyler. Sheriff “whats his name”?
Tyler: His name is Sheriff Sherlock Hobbs.
Alan: That says a lot.
Tyler: Named after a famous detective…Guess which one.
Alan: Clyde Hobbs.
Tyler. Exactly! The infamous Clyde Hobbs! My character basically goes along for the ride. He’s the Sheriff of this fictitious town in Montana, and for all intents and purposes, he should probably just arrest this gang when they come into my department….But I don’t and I inexplicably go along for the ride. Then me and my deputy enable them. We use our badges to get them into places that they couldn’t normally go. Hobbs and Ferrah (Jade Esthete) have a real “law enforcement love affair” and I kind of enable her to go after those law enforcement tendencies that she has and that she hasn’t been able to explore fully. I literally give her a badge.
CO: Alan, welcome to the show as well. Can you tell us about your character?
Alan: I am sort of a Sherlock in my own way. I’m…darker.
Tyler: You shoot people.
Alan: I shoot people. There’s a great little exchange that I think I can share, where someone is telling me to track some people to bring them to justice. I say at one point “I’m gonna kill some people” while I’m talking to my supervisor. He’s like “NO. NO NO. Don’t kill anybody!”, and I’m like “…we’ll see…”. He’s sort of on his own and he likes to be his own man…and I have a machine gun! So that’s been different. You don’t even need to act when you have a machine gun, you just need to pull the trigger.
Tyler: The machine gun does a lot of work for you. I hope you went “BANG BANG BANG BANG” while you’re shooting it.
Alan: No, I went “PEW PEW! PEW PEW!”.
CO: Do you think that any of your previous roles prepared you for this character? Anything from previous roles that you might pull from?
Alan: On Dollhouse, Joss Whedon’s show, I played a character called Alpha. He was a killer, but he had like forty personalities crammed in his head so he was mental and could flip and had issues. AND he had “Joss Whedon words”, so it was a different kind of crazy. There’s definitely crazy in this show.
Tyler: There’s definitely “Max Landis words” here.
Alan: I don’t think Alpha would ever say “we’ll see…”. He would have a way of saying “we’ll see…”. At the heart, they don’t have a conscience about killing. I guess there’s a through line. I wore better suits and clothes as Alpha. Like three and four thousand dollar suits.
Tyler: Pretty sharp guy that Alpha.
CO: Did you get to keep any of your suits?
Alan: I got one!
Tyler: He’s wearing it right now. It’s a four thousand dollar suit.
Alan: I lost half of it….I don’t know how that happened.
Tyler: In a fire? In the divorce?
Alan: No…but it was a beautiful suit.
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Special thanks to Alan and Tyler for their time at SDCC 2017.
