Tyler Labine talks about the show and Shaun Cassidy
Invasion (2005-2006)—“Dave Groves”
TL: That’s the other one that got away. Invasion is the other real highlight of my TV career, I think. And Shaun Cassidy and I will make another TV show together. I can guarantee you that. The when and the what are yet to be determined, but we really want to. Dave Groves was the first and only time that I ever got to play a conspiracy theorist, and I really dove into it. I mean, I really got into it. There’s a real subculture of conspiracy theorists out there, and there’s just so much amazing proof of so many amazing things that people just don’t ever talk about, except for these guys. [Laughs.] And the way they talk about it, the forums they find to talk about it—it’s a really neat, unique individual who goes that far in their life to be dedicated to something that everyone else says is *beep* So I really loved playing that kind of character, and it was playing the jackass in a very different way. He wasn’t just this morally rudderless character that was lacking of any sort of plan and going with the flow by the seat of his pants. He really believed in something and would do days and days of research to prove these points to people who would eventually just laugh in his face. And I loved it.
Plus, the show was just so big-budget and awesome to do. We had, like, the whole back lot of Warner Brothers, and we had amazing actors on that show, like Bill Fichtner and Kari Matchett and Eddie Cibrian. And I still to this day don’t know why that show got canceled. We had great numbers, we had a good show, good critical acclaim… I don’t know. But it was a really fun show. The only drawback was that I was wet a lot.[Laughs.]
AVC: You’ve mentioned before that Shaun Cassidy, who created the series, had a massive bible that laid out where the show was going to go.
TL: He did! When we first sat down to shoot the pilot, he brought all the main cast into a top-secret room at Warner Brothers Ranch and had us all come in, he sat us down, and he had his Expo board, and he gave us all a copy of the bible—which we weren’t allowed to keep—and broke down exactly where the show would go over the course of the entire series. Not just season one. He explained what the aliens were; he had [hand-drawn] diagrams of what they were going to look like in certain stages of gestation and when they finally became the hybrid humans, and what they’d look like when they finally became the highly evolved aliens that they were going to be. He had it all mapped out. My jaw hit the floor. I could not believe how much work this guy had done on the show. And he writes, like, four pilots a year… and he’s doing that across the board! [Laughs.] But I know Invasion was his baby. He’d wanted to make it for a long time. It was incredible to be working with a creative mind like that, and I think people still have yet to realize just how amazing that guy is. Hopefully he’ll get a show that proves to everybody that he’s one of the most creative minds in TV.