Actor Tyler Labine, who is currently starring in New Amsterdam, has a large body of work with several horror-related entries. Before his role as Dr. Iggy Frome, he was in the sitcom Reaper, about a young man who learns that he must be a bounty hunter for the devil; the cult hit horror-comedy Tucker and Dale vs Evil about a pair of hillbillies mistaken for killers; and recently in Escape Room, a film about the popular group activity, but with deadly stakes.

During Labine’s recent appearance as a guest at Creature Feature Weekend, he took a break from signing autographs to talk with Scoop about those projects, as well as his earliest foray into the horror genre on Are You Afraid of the Dark.

Scoop: It’s the first night of the convention; how’s it going so far?
Tyler Labine (TL): I just got here – so far, so good. Friday hasn’t had a lot to offer by way of excitement, per se, but I’m just gearing up.

Scoop: Let’s go way back to Are You Afraid of the Dark. What was your experience like being on that show?
TL: Oh wow. It was like a quintessential Canadian experience for me. I was 15 and my dad had to come as my chaperone to Quebec. We were in Montreal. Shooting the show was one thing, I think the director was a French-Canadian guy. I remember that was the first show that I ever got busted on sounding Canadian. He was like, “You are saying ‘oot.’ You need to say ‘out.’” I was like, “uh…okay” and everyone laughed at me. I figured that one out pretty quick that that was going to be something I had to eradicate. The show was a really fun thing for me to do. That was a big right of passage in Canada, doing Are You Afraid of the Dark.

Scoop: What did you enjoy most about doing Reaper?
TL: Reaper for me is the moment in my career when I figured out that I could be as disgusting and deplorable as I wanted to be, and people would still like me. (laughs) It was the writing too. They wrote a character that was essentially a scumbag. He strategically had left himself open for f---ery. I think the thing that I realized on that show is that I’m going to try everything. If I think something is funny, I’m going to try it. They gave me carte blanche to do pretty much everything I wanted, within reason for a network TV show, and it was just like a long experiment of figuring out exactly what I could get away with and what I couldn’t get away with. I left everything on the floor. I just went in there and didn’t hold anything back. I love it. It’s a big moment in my career, realizing what I could do.

Scoop: Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is one of the best horror-comedies out there. What drew you in more: the comedy or the horror?
TL: I call it a horromedy because I believe… No, I think the comedy more than anything. I was saying earlier that I think this movie is like a parody, like a lampoon of all the other horror tropes. All the fans here for horror movies love those tropes and this movie makes fun of them, and yet here I am at a horror convention. So, it’s like really meta. It folds in on itself. Is it a comedy, is it horror, does it matter anymore? It’s become canon, it’s become part of the culture and I love that about it. Initially, I thought it was just a comedy, I thought it was a really funny comedy. It was one joke that we had to make work for the entire movie. (laughs) Then I got there, and you realize, oh yeah if a guy jumps into a woodchipper – there’s no blood when you read it on the page – but when you’re there, you realize that a man going into a woodchipper is going to produce a large amount of blood. I started to realize, oh yeah this is like a gory movie. Doing that stuff was really fun too, but I think of it as more of a comedy than horror.

Scoop: You and Alan Tudyk had great chemistry. It was gold.
TL: Alan and I, initially, were not set to do the movie. I was set to do the movie and Jason Sudeikis was going to play Tucker. At the last week or two Jason bailed, he backed out. We had to find Alan in, like, four days. As soon as they told me they had Alan I was so excited. I love Alan Tudyk. He showed up and I was like, “Hey man, I’m a big fan of yours.” And he was like, “Yeah, I’m sorry, I don’t know any of your work.” (laughs) I was like “Oh, that’s okay, I’m not really anybody, but I’m a big fan of yours.” We went into it with this…I was a fanboy and he didn’t know what I was going to do. He had no idea what to expect.

When we started doing it, I think we both got really like “Oh my God, this is how we’re going to do it, we’re going to play it like this.” We were adlibbing. We were both big drinkers at the time and we had a lot of time on weekends and after shooting where we would go back to our respective apartments together and we would drink and write backstories for our characters. I’d never really done that before and we were both like “This is really cool, real actor s---.” Alan and I, I think we really informed each other a lot through that process and became really good buddies and we’re good buddies still.

Scoop: A few years later, you did another horror-comedy in Cottage Country. Do you tap into the same energy for horror and comedy or does the differences of the genres appeal to you?
TL: I like the dichotomy of the genres. One of my favorite things about horror through the years, like absurd comedy-horror flicks, my favorite horror flicks have always been funny. Even Poltergeist or House – just movies that are that intense and that scary, I think have to have a reprieve. They have to let you off the hook. Why not make it absurd comedy? Cottage Country is more of a dark comedy, but I love the combination of horror and comedy mixed together. I feel like the energy is very similar. It’s like an elevated place to exist in that funny world or that horror world. Neither is really, real. They’re still both very genre. Very similar energy. Yeah.

Scoop: Was Escape Room as physically demanding as it looks?
TL: Uh huh. That was a really hard shoot. We were in South Africa, so even just getting there took 21 hours of flying. We were there for 16 weeks, which was a long shoot. It was a lot of effects driven, stunt driven stuff. I haven’t done a ton of that, but it was really fun. It was exhausting. I actually had to get vocal surgery after I finished that movie from all the shouting, and on the indoor/outdoor set, all that fake snow was made out of stuff the FDA would never approve in the United States or Canada. It was like silica based product that ended up giving us all nosebleeds. I could taste blood in my throat, and we were all coughing. It was gross.

Scoop: Did you have a favorite set from the game?
TL: Yeah, that one. (laughs) Or the upside down room. That was one of the moments while shooting where we came into the set and I thought, “I think we’re making a cool movie.”

Scoop: Jumping out of horror, what can New Amsterdam fans expect to see in upcoming episodes?
TL: Season five is our final season and we really pissed off a lot of people with season four. I think it took people down a path that was misleading, and I think season five is going to be like we recognize that and we’re saying goodbye to everybody on the show. There are no throwaway episodes. Everything is really important to us, and we want to leave the fans with a feeling of satisfaction not with disappointment. I think that they can expect to feel some of that joy we promised in season four.

Scoop: What else are you working on?
TL: Um, nothing. (laughs) I am selling a podcast right now – I don’t want to talk about that too much because it’s top secret. I’m collaborating on a few things right now, writing-wise, one of them is with Alan Tudyk. I can’t say anything more about that. I’m writing another feature of my own right now. I’m getting ducks in a row right now. I can’t do anything until January.

Scoop: Well, thank you so much.
TL: You’re welcome, thank you.

To read more about Creature Feature Weekend, jump to our Main Event.