Interviews
[Interview] ‘WolfCop’ Himself, Leo Fafard!
It’s been almost a year since we dropped our review of Lowell Dean’s riotous WolfCop and tomorrow the bad beast is finally shredding its way onto home video and VOD. The Canadian production is more than just a wicked name, it’s an excellent exploitation homage with retro-80s synths and hammy acting that also works really well as an actual cop movie, in which the lone wolf (ahem) policeman takes on small town corruption.
That lone wolf would be Lou Garou, played by Saskatchewan’s renaissance man Leo Fafard. He drinks, he growls, he welds Wolf Cruisers in his garage! I recently spoke with Leo and he dished out the ins and outs of playing WolfCop, the role’s difficulties, and more. Let ‘er rip…
(and come back tomorrow for our interview with WolfCop writer/director Lowell Dean).
The first question I have to ask you is, what’s it like being WolfCop?
It’s fucking awesome, what do you mean “what’s it like”? It’s the shit.
Good Answer. How did you get involved with the project?
A couple years ago I was shooting a music video for a local band in Saskatchewan called Rah Rah. I played a werewolf in their video for this song called “Henry.” Lowell (Dean) was the director and by the end of the shoot he liked what I did so he asked me would I like to be involved with a project he was writing called Wolfcop. It took about half a second to answer that one. “A movie called Wolfcop and you want me to play the wolf?” Done.
Such a no brainer. What was the most difficult part of the role?
A lot of people think it was getting in and out of all the makeup. But let me tell you, Emersen Ziffle, the makeup artist, is so much fun to hang around with. He’s so talented and good at his job. That part wasn’t as nearly hard as you think. For one thing, he would start putting all the stuff on me and I’d doze off, he’d wake me up an hour later. So the most difficult part of playing Wolfcop would have to be playing a cop.
Really?
I’ve never really gotten along with cops all that well. I’ve never really had anything to do with them unless I was running my ass off from them. Lou is a downright drunken, kind of cast off, so that’s what kind of got me into the role.
When Lou transforms, his whole attitude and movements change as well. How did you approach playing the cop versus playing the wolf?
Very little as far as the direction. Lowell really gave me the reins on that. As far as the transformation scenes, they were kind of difficult. You had to get yourself in the mindset of someone who is in excruciating, body-twisting pain. To portray that and the fact that he’s losing his humanity and becoming a beast, a savage as his skin falls off…it’s traumatizing enough. There was some challenge there. I grew up in northern Saskatchewan in the wilderness, so I spent a lot of time observing nature and animals. It was really just a manner of getting back to a more basic being. More instinctual, finding that aspect of yourself. If I didn’t have the foreshadowing of societal pressure and how you’re supposed to move through society, what’s the most efficient way? That’s what animals do. They behave in the most efficient, most instinctual sort of way. So it was that sort of idea.
The film’s obviously really out there. Was there ever a moment on set where it felt like you were going overboard?
(Laughs) Every moment. What this movie had to rely on was Lowell’s skill and his vision. He’s very talented and very professional so it’s easy to put your trust in his hands. He knows what he wants and he knows when to take a break. I mean, we shot a lot of stuff that was over the top and he went into it knowing what he wanted to get out of it and what he wanted to do with it. We didn’t have much rehearsal time, you know. This movie didn’t have much money. So we really hit the ground running every time we stepped on the set. Lowell did take the time to shoot scenes a couple of different ways to get what he wanted. It’s over-the-top and campy, but it’s still marketable. And we just let loose to see where we could take it. So yeah I thought we were going over-the-top a few times but I had faith in Lowell and knew he’d capture what he needed.
I talked to him and he mentioned that you helped weld the Wolf Cruiser together.
Yeah! I spent a lot of years as a welder so I had all the equipment. I have a small welding shop in my garage so I’m always making stuff. And I’ve been working on vehicles as a backyard mechanic my whole life. So we looked at some pictures, broke out our pencils and sketched some stuff out. I patched up the car a little bit and then we decided “we need more of this or less of this.” Then Lowell said “I want you to do this and this, rip the doors off, blah blah blah.” We really did develop it together and then I just took it to the shop and I cut the fucker up.
Give me one crazy story from the set.
Me and another local actor were sharing a fight scene during the climax when I’m on one of the final killing scenes. So we’re out in the bush and he shoots me with a shotgun and has the drop on me and whatnot. We did a lot of blocking and when it comes time to shoot it we know what we’re doing and what we want. In the initial shot when I attack Josh (Strait), it starts with him hitting me in the face with the butt of the shotgun and then I sort of push him against a tree. We started into this fight scene and really went at it. And Lowell at this time had a sprained ankle and was walking with a cane. He’s behind the monitor about 40 feet away and I guess he wobbled up had yelled “cut”, but neither of us heard him. So we keep going at it. Throwing punches and slashing and I’ve got him up against the tree, Josh’s squirming around and tossing himself on the ground and Lowell has called “cut” about four times. Finally he just goes “okay keep going! Keep going!” Me and Josh look at each other and we’ve been going for about three minutes. I look at Lowell and he’s just got this look of shock on his face. It was awesome.
It’s early in production, but is there anything you can tell us about Wolfcop 2?
I don’t know what I can get away with telling you, so I’ll just say this: bigger and badder. If you thought the first one was over-the-top, buckle your seat belts.
Very good to hear! Congratualtions again on the film and thanks so much for talking to me.
No, thank you!
Nothing is the same when two crewmates return to shore in Rose of Nevada, the latest by Enys Men filmmaker Mark Jenkin.
Time and reality blur for stars George Mackay (Wolf, 1917) and Callum Turner (Green Room, “Neuromancer”) in the hallucinatory time travel mystery releasing in New York and Los Angeles theaters on June 19, 2026.
But this isn’t your standard time travel movie.
Rose of Nevada bends time and genre in its exploration of Cornish identity and community, upending the lives of Nick (MacKay) and Liam (Turner). There’s a listless, dreamy quality to the time travel, and for inspired reason: Jenkin approaches it like a haunting.
While time travel was on his mind early in the writing process, Jenkin’s partner and collaborator asked a question that unlocked Rose of Nevada and inspired the filmmaker.
Jenkin explains, “I remember saying to Mary [Woodvine], my partner, who’s in the film, I said to her, ‘God, it really seems like I’ve fallen into this thing of either making films about ghosts or films about time travel,’ and then she said to me, ‘Yeah, but aren’t all ghost stories just time travel films, and aren’t all time travel films just ghost stories?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, great. So I’m not making two types of films. I’m actually always making one type of film.’ But that was ultimately liberating because I thought there’s a nice gap or a crossover in the perception of genres, there’s a lot of room to play and to be free within that.”
“Once I’d abandoned the idea that I was going to master quantum physics in any academic sense,” the filmmaker continues, “It was incredibly freeing because I thought, ‘Well, I can just set my own rules here,’ and it really doesn’t matter what the rules are as long as you stick to them. You can’t bend them for the sake of the plot or for the sake of a character arc or something. You have to establish those rules upfront and stick to them, which made me really think I’ve got to limit the time travel element. This film can’t be about time travel.“
Bearing the brunt of the time travel disruption is Mackay’s Nick, a man struggling to support his family before the ill-fated voyage upends his entire world. It’s the type of role that was an easy yes for the actor, simply because of the filmmaker behind it.
“I saw Bait at the cinema when it was first out a few years ago and was so struck by it,” Mackay tells BD. “I just hadn’t seen a film like it. I want to work with the best directors. I want to work with the best directors and people who have a singular vision. As an actor, the process of work is almost my biggest draw, as well as what a story’s saying, but I think you learn by doing, and if I can do my bit in as many different ways as possible. The physicality and the discipline of Mark’s filmmaking, how that is so entwined in the DNA of the film, and therefore in the way that I work within it, that was the biggest draw. I’m just a fan of Mark’s. I was just very pleased to be involved.”
That reflects in Rose of Nevada‘s unique casting; Mackay initially was eyed for Liam.
“When I first got the call to meet Mark at the audition stage,” Mackay said, “We didn’t wind up reading scenes, but they said, ‘There’s a project. There are two roles in it that you could be right for, and Mark is leaning towards you for Liam.’ So, I had a look at Liam, Callum’s role, and had my interpretation of the script ready to talk about it and what I thought that character was, who he was, and how I’m thinking about how I might inhabit that or what I saw in him. And when we met, we didn’t talk about the film at all. We spoke about everything else. But following that meeting, I got the message, said, ‘Mark would like you to be part of the film, but he thinks you’re definitely more of a Nick,’ which I think I just may be a complete sheep because I went, ‘Of course I’m Nick.’
Mackay continued, “But it’s funny, I do have in my own life, I just started a family, and so much of my last few years of being has been trying to figure that balance and what that means and how you navigate that. So with family being at its core and all the kind of conundrums that come with staying level with that, that rang true. So I felt like I understood objectively, I have my interpretations of what both men mean to each other and within the story, but then once I was playing Nick, I just became about a very present focus on who he was and what his situation was. What I liked about him is that he’s a very straightforward bloke. In the best possible way, he’s quite a simple man. It’s just he’s in an extraordinary situation.”
Jenkin wrote Rose of Nevada during the pandemic lockdown that had forced a halt in production on Enys Men. He’d return to rewrite once Enys Men had been completed, creating overlap between films. “They are even more in conversation than you’d think because the first draft of Rose of Nevada was before I’d made Enys Men, and then everything I learned through the making of Enys Men, I fed into Rose of Nevada. But also the reaction to Enys Men, all the critics and writers and audience members who are telling me what Enys Men was about. I’m always the last to realize what I’ve done, I think like most filmmakers. You don’t really know what you’ve made a film about until the audience tells you. I was able to feed that into Rose of Nevada and also scale it up a little bit. So, yeah, in some ways it predates Enys Men, and in some ways it follows on from it,” he said.
Jenkin’s latest caps what’s unofficially been dubbed his Cornish trilogy, a moniker that initially surprised the filmmaker, but he’s come to embrace it. A recent revisit of Bait made it even clearer. “I can now understand why people are linking the three films together. I’d forgotten how linked they are, which is amazing, really, considering the first draft of Bait was written in 1999. So, most of my adult life has been one way or another making this trilogy. I am quite looking forward to starting the next chapter.”
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