In Hulu’s Helstrom premiering October 16th, a brother and sister team who moonlight as a paranormal investigative team, while seeking answers to their past of being sired by a mysterious and powerful serial killer. The siblings have a complicated dynamic that affects everyone they touch. That extends to their own friends, partners, and associates. I got to sit down and speak with both Ariana Guerra who plays a Vatacan consultant, Gabriella Rosetti to Helstrom as he debunks many of the cases and is struggling with truth, reality and faith. Aswell as Alain Uy who plays Chris Yen co-owner of an auction house along with Ann Helstrom. Who is slowly but surely, becoming obsessed with his career and the items that are within his auction house.
Ariana, from what we're seeing in the episodes, it seems your character is the voice of both logic and faith. Was it difficult to convey both of those concepts with one character?
Ariana Guerra: Yeah, I think Gabriella - every time I was shooting, I don't think that thought ever came to mind. Like, how do you balance logic and faith? I think, outwardly, it is super challenging. But I think that's also very human; that's probably the most normal thing that any person experiences, where you're constantly having this internal conflict of what you believe, and how to actually practice it in the real world. That's kind of the experience that I think Gabrielle has.
There is obviously a lot of knowledge and logic that comes behind many of her decisions. But when you are someone who is faith-based, you also have to be a little more, I guess, willing to accept things that may not be as scientific or backed by reasoning. And I think that's kind of how she ends up experiencing many of the encounters she has with Daimon.
Alain, your character seems to be a very logic-based character, but he starts to learn a little bit more about the divinely demonic background of Ana. How are you able to walk that fine line of saying, "I don't believe but I'm seeing more and more," and the change that goes on with your character?
Alain Uy: I think you hit it on the head in the beginning. If there's a logical approach to Chris Yen, it's that there's an inquisitive nature of who he is; that curiosity brings him into that. It pulls him in. I think the base of Chris is control, and understanding what that means to him. And if there's something in this space he doesn't quite understand and can't calculate beyond what the potential outcomes might be, then he's gonna go in and be sucked into it.
I think when he first encounters this artifact in the first episode, it's that immediate interest of, "What is this? Why does this exist? Why is it even here?" He's taking the context of the world that he exists in. If he's fully control of the auction house that he owns, then he knows every little thing that's in that space. In fact, everything is meticulously placed, as you can see when he puts a sword down - it needs to be in its place. And then when he sees something that is completely out of place, and doesn't know what it is, there is that inherent curiosity.
So, yes, he is based on logic. But at the same time, that logic will allow him to investigate and interrogate certain things that don't seem right to him. His goal is to find the logic behind it. Whether or not that exists, I guess we'll find out.
When it comes to your characters, they’re created in a comic that has its own canon. Were you able to create your own headcanons that inform your portrayal?
Ariana Guerra: Yeah. I think that my character is based off a Marvel character, Gabriel the demon hunter, but there was a lot of freedom and a lot of creative flexibility that we were really lucky to have. That does come with having to do a lot of homework. For me, specifically, when I landed in Vancouver, I remember that almost every day I would go to church. I went to confession once. I did the rituals and the practices just to kind of get an understanding of the life that Gabriela lives day in and day out. I read the Bible; all of this research and all this work that we did.
And then on the day of, when you start to shoot, you have all this homework and all this stuff that you've done to make yourself feel as connected - and then you just throw it away. So, I think a lot of times, you really have to trust your scene partner and whoever it is that you're working on a scene with to begin to characterize who you are. Then the writers as well have a really interesting job, because we as actors are not told how things are going to unfold. So, we literally are trying to both piece together who we are and live it as organically, as authentically, and as real as possible - while not knowing where it's going to go. We're just as blinded as the audience while we shot.
So, that was a really interesting experience. It was a lot of creative freedom, but definitely a lot of stress.
Alain Uy: Yeah, it was a wild ride, to say the least, trying to navigate your way through that process. Because it is a different process, I think, than we're mostly used to. Understanding that you, in some ways, have to create that foundation. But the minute they told us what the process was going to be, of like, "Hey, we're not going to tell you ahead of time what the arc is. We're going to give it to you as the episodes are written, right before we shoot it."
To us, I think that at least gave you an idea of how to prepare for this, and prepare for it as best as you can. For Chris Yen, he's actually not part of the comic books. He's a character that Paul created specifically for this world. But my concern, when I found that out, was: can he exist in this world truthfully? And he does; he's part of the mythology of what's created. So, you do your research, you read the comic books, you investigate certain things, you ask a ton of questions, and you boil it down to the truth. And that's kind of the foundation that we created as a springboard for the season.
I know you guys are shooting in particular locations that are sometimes creepy, scary, anything like that. Were there any scary moments that you still remember?
Alain Uy: Ariana?
Ariana Guerra: I don't really think I was ever scared. There was one time when I first worked with Beth, that she just scared the shit out of me. Because she was so good! She was just really in it. Just a moment before we were having a lovely conversation about her son, and then goes into character and she has a different voice, different mannerisms. Her whole behavior changed. The scary voice! And I was just like, "Whoa, what the heck?"
But as far as locations, nothing creepy happened. We did have a ton of very difficult places where we shot sometimes, like we were on the mountaintop in Vancouver, and it was -10 degrees Celsius or something crazy. They had to have fires somehow. There was a lot of crazy stunt work; we had a ton of like special effects. The set deck was amazing every location that we were at, but I don't think it was as scary as I was expecting it to be.
Alain Uy: Yeah, Beth's work was amazing. You talk about getting out of the gates as quickly as possible? The first table read, I remember Bob [Robert Wisdom] was sitting next to me, and I'm just meeting everybody for the first time. But off to the distance, maybe three seats over, was Beth. You remember this, Ariana. We were sitting across from each other, I think, and when she came in, I'm like, "What is happening over there? Okay, this is where we're going."
Ariana Guerra: She dropped the heat, and everyone else was like, "Okay, we gotta do that."
Alain Uy: "Okay, we're going there." I think that really lends itself to the experience of being on set, because it is kind of jarring and scary. The locations, like Ariana said - I shot in one of those sets, where it was an abandoned hospital. That was scary. They said it was haunted, and I think it was, because there's a lot of certain things like little writings that you see on the wall. You're like, "Oh, wow. There's some crazy stuff that was happening here."