Exclusive: Rick Howland Talks "Family Portrait" and Remembering Lost Girl

*SPOILERS* If you haven't seen tonight's episode, "Family Portrait," stop reading now.*

Lost GirlThe episode of Lost Girl, "Family Portrait," which aired tonight on Syfy, was quite devastating for a lot of fans. Bo (Anna Silk) lost both her mother, Aifa (Inga Cadranel), and her grandfather, Trick, played by Rick Howland,

Howland recently sat down with SciFi Vision in an exclusive interview to talk about his work on the series, including his last few moments on the show.




SCIFI VISION: Quite a lot happens in tonight's episode. Inga Cadranel returns as Bo's mother, Aifa. Can you talk about working with her again?

Rick HowlandRICK HOWLAND: She's great. She's a strong actor, a strong person, and wonderful to work with. We had some fun scenes, like the scene a couple of scenes before [my death scene] when I just get her out of the asylum, when I first meet Eric Roberts as Bo's dad. That scene was really emotional, and it was fantastic working with her. We were really connecting, and she really helped me feel those feelings that Trick was having for his daughter. She's fantastic.

Trick has been hiding keeping things from Bo. Can you talk about the strain that has put on their relationship?

He has had a strained relationship with her, just because he is keeping things, and he keeps trying to tell her the truth, and more of the truth, and then he finally gives her all the footage and stuff from Aifa. And then Bo then looks through all of that stuff and she finds that last little bit of footage that he had kept back, I think just for his own memory.

Will we see Bo find more there that Trick kept from her as the season progresses?

I'm not sure. [laughs] It gets kind of weird after my death, the way that it gets pretty crazy, and they are tying up so much. There's so much to tie up at the end of this season, from all these years, that they spend a fair amount of time tying up other characters' storylines and stuff.

Trick's last words to Bo are about her having his blood. Does this mean that she has his powers in her blood as well?

I don't know, maybe. I'm going to be as shady about that as Anna is. But what I could say, is in terms of playing it as an actor, my thought with that line was that their relationship is really important, and that it's important to him. They share the same blood; they're family. The episode is called "Family Portrait", and it's all about family.

Can you talk about the experience of filming your death scene?

It was very interesting in terms of all the blood and stuff and the portrait part, and it was cool the way it was crafted and built, a really great job by the crew, and by the writers for conceptualizing it, and the director realizing it.

And then the last moments were very difficult. I mean, it was very hard to say goodbye to that character and to that show, and I loved playing Trick. I really enjoyed that character, and I thought that there was a lot more that he could do, or at least you could go back in his life and see a lot more of it. Which I was kind of hoping for a spinoff [laughs], but it was difficult.

I mean, Anna and I always have fun working together, and we enjoy working together a great deal. We're good friends to this day, and it was very very very emotional, and, you know, there were lots of real tears, from both of us. But still it's fun, because you get to go to a certain place where, you know, we can still be friends afterwards, because one of us isn't gone [laughs].

Inga Cadranel and Rick HowlandIf Lost Girl had continued, is there anything in particular that you can think of that you would have liked to have seen happen with Trick?

There's so much...I liked the flashback of season two with the Garuda (Raoul Trujillo) and all that stuff, and I liked the flashbacks with Bo's mom and my wife and stuff. I liked the stuff that I did with the Truth Sayers where I told those stories, like the one where she gets me to tell the truth and I go and get the Barometz drug from her, and I have to tell the truth about certain things. And she says the line like, "Do you remember making love in the rain in front of the entire terra cotta army?" and stuff, and like these grand things that Trick did when he was younger. It would have been great to have done some of those, even if it had had to be CGI or something, to put an army out there in a field.

But there was so much there that they just could kind of keep going back to, and I would have loved to have done some of that.

Were you surprised by Trick's journey and where he ended up?

There were a couple of surprises along the way. It was always a lovely pleasant surprise to discover what was going to happen to him next as we went along every season, and each season was an interesting surprise to how he was going to be utilized. So that was quite nice.

Besides the people, what do you miss the most about working on Lost Girl?

I miss Trick's lair, and I miss the Dal. I miss those locations as like the world and the soul of Trick. All those books around him and stuff like that, in that room with the table. And, you know, even doing the scenes with writing in my blood, or when I use that egg to kind of do the old Fae GPS thing with the egg and the pendulum. Working with the props and all that kind of stuff was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed doing that.

What was your favorite prop on set?

When people have asked me about that, I'd often talk a lot about the Fae book, my Book of Fae, because it was such a cool book. It was like this big thick heavy, heavy book that was originally a furniture book, but as the show went on, they placed or glued pages in that were of Fae. And as the show went on, the book changed from a book about dovetail joints to a book about Morags and other crazy Fae creatures.

Rick HowlandDo you have a favorite Fae throughout the seasons?

I really like the one about the tree, not the Norn, but the other one [the Batibat from "Can't See the Fae-Rest"] where the people had been taking pieces of the tree and sculpting things like crutches. Hardie T. Lineham's in that episode and a woman named Pamela Matthews played that tree character, Maganda. She'd come back for all of her artifacts which were basically parts of her. There was a barstool that a person sat on that they thought was really really super comfortable, because everything that was from it had this real emotional connection to earth, and whatever was made out of the wood was the most comfortable or the most useful thing that was made. So I really liked that. I liked that kind of mythology, or whatever that would be called, that belief that somebody built something out of wood and it has some quality that's from the earth, that's from the hands that built it.

Is there a creature or something that you would have liked to have seen adapted into a Fae on the show?

It would have been kind of neat to see how they could have made this fire breathing horse come alive from this image. I remember somebody asking me at some point, because they'd seen like a glimpse of it when I was holding a piece of paper with a picture of that horse on it, and the person asked if that was Bo's dad, how he's the guy in Hell...And it was like, wow. I couldn't answer him, because it was possibly the right answer, I didn't really know at that point, but he gleaned a really great story out of it.

Did you keep any props from the set?

They gave me one of my quarter staffs from season four when I did the quarter staff stuff which was pretty cool, because it's a light weight like balsa wood one for practice, like if you hit somebody with it it doesn't kill them, it just might sting a tiny bit. But they gave me one of those.

And I got a picture, well two pictures, one is the picture of the woman in the grass skirt that's written from Delilah, "Thanks for a great night, Delilah." And that was in season three, I think it was, with Hale (K.C. Collins), when he was the Ash. And that was in that Cabana room that he took over that was in the back of the Dal. And I love that, and I had them for season four and five, it actually moved to the bar and sat at the corner of the bar, and then I was able to take that home.

These next two are from fans on Twitter. Why did you never sing on the show?

Well, there was never a possibility to sing on it. I mean there was an episode with some bad karaoke, and then there was that siren, and there was another woman who sang who was like a Russian bird kind of character, but it just never happened. I mean, as an actor, you can suggest things; you can throw things out.

One of the songs that I wrote and sang is in an episode of the show. It's in episode 4.02 when Zoie Palmer's character is in the diner with the red head wig. She's in disguise and kind of on the run, and while she's working in the diner, one of my songs, "She's a Goddess," is playing in the background on the jukebox. You have to listen very carefully, but it is there.

Rick HowlandHow has Lost Girl impacted your career?

It certainly has. I mean, I didn't have a Twitter account or Twitter followers before that, and I didn't have a Facebook page, like a fan page, set up really. I mean, I might have had it set up, but it didn't have the thousands of followers it does now. So certainly Lost Girl has had a massive effect in terms of exposing me as an actor from playing that character to a huge number of people, who've all turned out to be incredibly nice loving fans. So it's certainly done a lot of great things so far.

Has that gotten you used to social media now? Do you enjoy that?

I've gotten used to it. It's a great way to be able to connect to people and stuff. I mean, it's part of what you do now. That's what really fascinating about it for me, is how much it's important to manage and maintain those things.

How do you want the show to be remembered?

How they're seeing it now, like a lot of people loved it; they loved the journey. They go back and they watch it again. It will be around for quite some time. It will be on the air I would imagine, or there will be places to see it anyway, for quite some time. It's sort of, not really timeless, but, I mean, they can enjoy it again and again. Maybe there's some other things in it they'll catch later, or a few more layers. But I just hope that people remember it fondly, and, you know, enjoy it for what it was.

Do you have any more projects coming up? Also, a fan on Twitter wants to know specifically about Walkerswood.

That's still in the process - the director-producer is quite busy, but we're constantly trying to get that forward and get it made. We're hoping that that will happen sooner rather than later.

In terms of other stuff, there's a couple of things on the burners that I can't quite talk about yet, but we'll see. Just keep an eye on Twitter, I'll let everyone know when I know something.

Do you keep in contact with the other actors from Lost Girl?

We keep in contact. Every once in a while somebody will contact everybody, or there will be like a group email or something like that, and it will turn into a big virtual hug-fest. But yeah, I do see people from time to time.

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