“Where can oi get sam facking caffee!” The Canadian assistant director mimics my question in Van Dyke-ian mockerney, tugging imaginary braces. I am from Doncaster. I’d asked for the coffee because it’s February in Toronto, and it is cold. Very cold. Today it’s around minus 10. Some of my extremities are numb. Others: awol.
I’m visiting the studio where the second series of The Strain – Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s adaptation of their own trilogy of vampire novels – is being filmed. Having heard tales of Del Toro’s friendliness, I’m looking forward to meeting him. “He’s great, very blue collar,” says Jack Kesy, who plays Bolivar, a goth rock star-turned-bloodsucker henchman. Kesy looks fairly buff and blue-collar himself, so I’m inclined to believe him. He talks about a time Guillermo gave him a bear hug. It sounds warm.
The Strain sits at the sillier, more Cronenberg-esque end of the vampire TV show spectrum. Imagine a cross between Contagion’s cod science, Buffy’s daft mythology and World War Z’s marauding monsters. There are no set square-cheekboned bloodsuckers here; no underwear models making haemoglobin theft look like foreplay. The Strain’s vampires are snarling, feral and foul. A plague breaks out across New York, which turns the infected into clacking, UV-averse wretches. Phallic protrusions blast like lassos from their mouths, passing the vampire “strain” via wriggling parasitic worms. It’s minging. And pretty much what you’d expect from Del Toro. These vampires are apparently the monsters the director had nightmares about as a child. If this is the case, he needs that hug more than I do.
My visit to Toronto was supposed to coincide with the filming of an outdoor set-piece, a running battle between man and assorted vampiric chump. Though The Strain is set in New York, the combination of a generous tax credits system and its “could be anywhere” architecture means Toronto is often used as a location for shows based elsewhere. But the city demonstrably has its foibles: the bitter snap has forced a last-minute jury-rigging of the shooting schedule. So we’re staying indoors. “You’re welcome!” says affable executive producer J Miles Dale. “All you’re missing out on is freezing your ass off.”
Relishing the prospect of toasty indoor activities, Miles is happy to lead me to the creature workshop, the walls of which are festooned floor-to-ceiling with corpses, monsters, limbs, heads and unidentifiable corporeal miscellany. One intricately sculpted face leers out, half blown or melted away, demanding an exploratory finger into an oozing fissure. Disappointingly, it’s dry, such is the swindle of television. Miles talks about the creative scenarios that necessitate this SFX chamber of horrors: explosions, swords, guns, clubs. “There are only so many ways to decapitate a person,” he explains, a touch sadly.
Back in the studio, talk has also turned to prosthetics. Corey Stoll, best known as House Of Cards’ ill-fated alcoholic Congressman Peter Russo, plays the show’s protagonist, disease expert Dr Ephraim “Eph” Goodweather, who leads a crack team of experts as they try to find ways to eradicate the vampires. He is only having a wig applied; Kesy, meanwhile, discusses the grim practicalities of spending 18 to 20 hours a day in full claustrophobic vampire makeup. In the first series, his character’s penis fell off into a toilet, a doozy of a drawback in the human-to-vampire transformation process. “What’s it been like since your penis fell into the toilet?” is not a question you get to ask often. “Fun,” he says. “Though you’ve got to tuck it in. It’s a little … Well, it’s not that little.”
On the sound stage, dozens of amply bearded crew members frantically prep cameras and lug vast bundles of cables of indeterminate purpose, politely declining to tell me I’m in the way, which I invariably am. An attack on the team’s hideout by a band of ghastly blind vampire children known as “feelers” is about to take place. Stol takes his mark. A klaxon parps. All goes deathly quiet. The vampires, giggling 12-year-olds seconds before, are now bent double, scuttling quadrupedally, heads and limbs seemingly dislocated. Stoll clasps a sword, unaware of one bodypopping up a staircase behind him. Then … “CUT!” The kids are kids again. Noise. Activity. Beards. Stoll prepares for another take.
Afterwards, the canteen buzzes with crew, actors, extras and producers. I turn to see a vampire tucking into a lemon cake. It takes a second to process the image. “It never stops being surreal,” assures English actor Ruta Gedmintas, who plays Dutch, a hacker who unwittingly helps the vampires before joining Stoll’s resistance. “I walk round a corner and there’s a guy eating a massive pie in full vampire makeup, and he goes: ‘Alright, Ruta,’ and I’m like, ‘ARGH!’”
I sweep the room one last time for Del Toro, only for Miles to explain that he’s mainly involved remotely and is, therefore, not actually here. I feel bereft for a moment, as if an appendage has fallen in the john.
Pining for the warmth of the hug I never got, I step outside. “It’s cold,” says Gedmintas. “So cold. It is beautiful, a really lovely city. I just wish I didn’t have to freeze my tits off to see it.”
Season two of The Strain starts Wednesday 26 August, 10pm on Watch
