RUSSELL TOVEY - No.453

Werewolf gets "Human" touch

Published: August 6, 2010

John Crook c/o Zap2it

Oh, man. Just when you think being a werewolf couldn’t stink any more, it – well – stinks a lot more.

That’s the grim situation confronting George (Russell Tovey) in the second season of “Being Human” airing Saturdays on BBC America.

The first season of the show – about a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost (Aidan Turner, Tovey, Lenora Crichlow) who share an English flat – ended with George, the reluctant and normally gentle werewolf, transforming into a raging beast to confront and kill Herrick, the vampire leader who was plotting to “transition” the human race involuntarily into a world of bloodsuckers. In that regard, then, George’s actions were understandable, even heroic. But they had a devastating effect on the character, Tovey says.

“He knows he has allowed his animal side into his human consciousness, and it just affects everything. He knows now that this is a part of him, and it’s something that he can’t run away from.”

While Annie the ghost is generally reasonably content in her newly visible (but still dead) state, Mitchell the vampire also faces the challenge of trying to stop the vampire society from spiralling out of control after the death of its leader. And the three friends face yet another threat in the form of religious extremists who, while appearing benign, have devoted themselves to carrying out brutal experiments on supernatural creatures and destroying them.

That last ironic wrinkle to the story delights Toby Whithouse, the series creator and head writer of “Being Human.”

“The characters spent all of series one striving to reconnect with, and yearning for, their lost humanity,” he says. “It struck me that there would be a really quite pleasing irony if the threat in season two was human, was representative of the very thing that they have been yearning for. That actually came to me during season one, in the episode about the little kid (whom Mitchell befriended), and the way the community turned on the characters because they thought something inappropriate was going on. I just thought it would be great to have a story about them being pursued by humans instead of something supernatural.”