‘Van Helsing’s Jonathan Scarfe on Filming In Dracula’s Castle and Saying Goodbye

Jonathan Scarfe talks about offering up tasty morsels for the fans, filming in what clearly looked like Count Dracula’s castle in Slovakia, and giving an emotional goodbye to the cast and crew.

Scarfe shares what it was like to watch Tricia Helfer tackle the role of Dracula from innocence to a vessel of evil. This fifth and final season is proving to be fresh, unique, and exciting. Dive right into the vampire verse of “Van Helsing” with our up-close interview with  Jonathan Scarfe.

The Toronto-born actor/Director/Producer is well-known not only for playing the badass role of Axel Miller SyFy Channel’s huge hit series “Van Helsing,” but he is recognized for so many other shows. He played Syndey Snow in “Hell on Wheels,” Charlie Sagansky in “Raising the Bar,” and Resnik in the film “The Equalizer 2,” and many know him from season seven of “The 100.” He actually packed up what he could, including plenty of courage, and sailed around the Pacific Ocean with his wife and two kids. The man can do anything!

Colleen Bement: We’re only a few episodes into this fifth season of “Van Helsing,” and so far it’s just incredible. Congratulations! First question, who came up with the brilliant idea of taking this show to the Dark Realm?

Jonathan Scarfe: You have to give Jonathan Walker credit for that, and a huge amount of credit for the whole final season here. As you’ll see it unfold, the fact that we got to go to Eastern Europe and shoot in Slovakia and unpack this whole Dracula origins story, which is totally unique. I thought they did an amazing job, not only with like kinds of offering up that tasty morsel for the fans but also knowing that they were having a fantastic final season. Also having the opportunity, which is pretty rare, to bring a story to a close–to try and take all of the threads and some of the different threads that have been thrown out over the course of four seasons, and find a way to weave them together in a satisfying way to bring the show to a close. I thought Jonathan did an amazing job with that.

CB: That is not at all easy.

JS: No it’s not. Everyone likes to pretend that they’ve masterminded all these things from the beginning, but it’s a constantly evolving thing. A lot of times you’re taking a left turn when you thought you were going to take a right, and you’ve got a bunch of fun and new ideas, and you’re not sure where they’re going to lead necessarily. To be able to tie it all together, in the end, is quite a feat.

CB: That leads me to my next question. What kind of wild ride can the viewers expect for the rest of this fifth and final season?

JS: What kind of wild ride? Well you know, we get involved with the whole Dracula storyline and what she’s up to. Spoiler alert: We managed to get Vanessa back, and things get exciting at that point.

CB: That is great news. I also love that you have a female Dracula!

JS: Well there are three episodes with that whole Dracula origin story and again, it’s something that they came up with that I thought was so fun. It gave Tricia Helfer the opportunity to get to be the female Dracula, but then to have the origins story include her as the polar opposite of that, as this pure innocent, and that’s why she’s going to be the vessel for the darkness coming into this world. I thought that was kind of a stroke of genius, and a fun thing for an actor to get to play with.

CB: What was it like to film in Slovakia? That must have been so organic to film there.

JS: Oh it was amazing! We shot in several different castles to sort of get all the bits and pieces that we needed to portray our Count Dracula castle, but the one in particular that is featured mostly from the exterior has been used several times in the past for other Dracula stories. There’s no mistaking it. It’s clearly Dracula’s joint! So yeah, getting to be in that environment in that part of the world was fun energy and amazing to shot there. Great people and beautiful settings. It was such a change of pace for us. Such a treat.

CB: How emotional was it to act and direct in these final episodes?

JS: It’s been great. I ended up directing 11 episodes over the course of the five years and served as Co EP for a couple of years. I sort of got caught up in the work of it all. I’m not a particularly sentimental guy, but to work on those kinds of things, it snuck up and bit me: At the end of the final day, trying to say something to the crew, I had to stop a couple of times. I absolutely got choked up. I was kind of amazed by the rush of emotion. It’s not often that you get to do anything like that in this business for that length of time, and the layers of experience piled up and you realize wow, this was a huge chapter that’s coming to a close.

CB: They become your friends and your family.

JS: Yeah, absolutely, and the nature of the world these days with COVID and all of that, and we were in the midst of it. I think we were the first long-form show to come back to filming after the initial shutdown here. We were in the height of it when we did come to our final moment, and so it was even that much more weird to say goodbye to everyone because you really didn’t know when you were going to see them again. Socializing was sort of banned. The only opportunity to see anybody was at work. It was pretty emotional.

CB: After these five years, have you learned anything from your character of Axel?

JS: I don’t know if I learned that much from Axel the character, I probably infused him with everything I had, but I certainly learned a lot from the experience of having done the show. Especially having the opportunity to direct and serve as Producer later on, and to have a broader perspective on the mechanics of the entire operation and all of the departments involved: A greater appreciation for all of them and a totally humbling perspective on what you’re role is, which is a small role really in the whole scheme of things as an actor. I think oftentimes actors have an inflated sense of importance in that dynamic. I learned a lot from that. I feel like I’ve become a better person, and a better artist, and a better actor because of it.

CB: Do you have any other projects on the horizon?

JS: Nothing on the horizon other than the project that I’m working on myself. My wife and I have a production company. She’s a really talented writer and we’ve got several feature projects that we’re trying to get off the ground. One in particular that we’re looking to co-direct, which would be the most exciting thing for the two of us. After 22 years of marriage and sailing around the Pacific Ocean for two and a half years with our kids, and our favorite thing is being together 24/7, we could build a film together and direct it together. That would just our dream come true, so that’s what we’ve been working on.

CB: I checked out your blog, “The Wet Edge Adventure.” I get seasick, so I couldn’t do it. Amazing.

JS: I’ve never really sailed before we got that boat. I knew nothing about it, so it was kind of a crazy whim. My only experience prior to getting a boat was, I was doing a show in LA and it seemed like a cool thing to have was rather than get an LA apartment and pay for a room in a place, I’ll live on a boat! That’s cool. My previous experience prior to that big journey was like you, I spent 20 seconds on board, I went upstairs to make a sandwich for somebody, and that was the end of me. I was like I can’t stand these things. This is impossible. But when it was your boat and you were captaining it, you had a totally different experience. I literally never got seasick seeing that it was my boat and I was in charge of it.

CB: Do you have the boat or is that chapter over?

JS: No, we had to swallow the hook, I mean we literally sold everything we had to keep going on that adventure until we were finally running on fumes. We sold the boat and started over and had to come back to reality. It’s something that we look forward to trying to get back to later in life, you know, once the kids are through college. Our fantasy is to get back on that boat and continue with that adventure.

CB: My last question is, do you have any causes that are close to your heart? I want to save the world from Climate Change.

JS: I think that’s the most significant one facing humanity as a whole right now. I think more specifically than Climate Change is the health of our oceans would be the one that I would flag. Obviously, there are countless issues that we face, domestically and politically, and socially, but I think overall if we don’t pay attention to the climate and our oceans and the health of it, we’re dooming ourselves. There’s a great quote from a running a sea shepherd in that documentary on Netflix, which is fantastic, called “Seaspiracy” he talked about the health of the ocean as critical to the health of the planet, humanity as we know it is in terrible shape. The answer to it is you just have to leave it alone, and it will fix itself, you just have to give it a break. Industrial fishing, commercial fishing across the planet; we’re just killing ourselves.

Are you watching “Van Helsing?”

 

Written by Colleen Bement

 

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