It’s a great feeling when an actor suggests an idea or storyline to the producers and writers and they end up running with it. For Grimm‘s Reggie Lee (Sergeant Wu), he was lucky enough to see one of his Wesen ideas play out on the supernatural drama.
When OMFGTV visited the Portland set, we spoke with Lee and asked if he was excited when the mythical Filipino monster, the Aswang, was incorporated into the show.
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“Yeah, because I gave it to them!” said Lee, who is half Filipino and half Chinese. “I gave them three different choices from the Philippines.”
In addition to the Aswang, a shape shifter who feasts on human fetuses, Lee also pitched the Manananggal, a special breed of the Aswang, and the Duwende Itim, a tiny human-like creature that lives underground and punishes those who disrespect them.
The latter two did not make it onto the show, but Lee says he hopes they will eventually explore them since the Aswang installment “was a very popular episode.”
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Executive Producer Norberto Barba directed that episode, titled ‘Mommy Dearest.’
“Reggie and I worked really closely to bring that story to a place for his character so that it would be really believable– the way he would react to this childhood fear,” Barba told us. “I thought it worked out really well.”
There are, however, some times where the Wesen creatures born in the writers room do not work out well and never sees the light of day on the series.
“The writers come up with these ideas and sometimes we’ll look at it and say, ‘Well, it may not translate well as a creature visually,'” Barba explained. “So we play around with it and then through a process, we’ll have designs and they’ll say ‘That design looks great; this is the creature.'”
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“They’ll have the mythology,” he continued, “they’ll have a history of the creature they want to explore and then we’ll go futzing with it.”
When asked about what upcoming Wesen he’s excited for fans to see, he points out the one from tonight’s all-new episode, “A Reptile Dysfunction.”
“There’s a creature that’s like a lake creature like a Loch Ness monster type in a lake here in Portland,” Barba previewed. “That one’s interesting. That’s the one you should look forward to.”
Grimm airs Fridays at 9pm on NBC.