Sanctuary Season 4 Begins Build-Up to a ‘Huge’ Finale

Sanctuary returns to Syfy in the US and SPACE in Canada in a few hours with its season four premiere ‘Tempus.’ It promises to be a drammatic opener with Dr. Helen Magnus (Amanda Tapping) trapped in the past and the rest of the sanctuary team trying to control abnormals in their own backyard and streaming out of Hollow Earth.

Flash forward thirteen episodes and Sanctuary fans will be anticipating what looks like being an equally epic season finale. CinemaSpy was at the shoot for that episode, ‘Sanctuary for None,’ at Vancouver’s Terminal City location (where parts of the Stargate Universe episode ‘Blockade’ were filmed) during the final days of shooting. We managed to snap a few shots of that rarest of rare sights: Sanctuary on location and at night. You can check out the little that we could give away below.

Recently, yours truly also had the chance to chat with stars Amanda Tapping and Robin Dunne about what it was like filming on streets close to Vancouver’s infamous East Hastings location as the sun went down.

“Night shoots are always crazy, super fun, and there’s a different sensibility on set,” Tapping said in a conference call. “Because, it’s three-o’clock in the morning and you’re still filming, it messes with your time clock, but there’s also a weird sense of adventure when you shoot nights. And we were shooting, again, away from home. We weren’t in the studio, we were on location in the downtown East side, which is an interesting place to shoot. We were shooting in this really beautiful space, like this old ironworks foundry, and there’s a sense of adventure to it, a sense of adventure when you shoot nights.”

“It was also strange for us, too, because not only we were shooting all night every night, which throws your equilibrium off completely, if any of us have any equilibrium, which that’s still very debatable, but also, we very, very, very rarely leave our studio,” added Dunne, who plays Dr. Will Zimmerman in the show. “We shoot everything here, and so [at] the end of the season, like Amanda said, we were on a location, so that kind of added another level to the sort of weirdness of finishing the season … [And] if you’re on the downtown East side at 3 o’clock in the morning and you’re firing, like having major gunfights, I think there’s a lot of paperwork.”

Although we swore not to reveal much of what we saw, we can say that this season looks like it will have at least as big a bang in its finale as the previous three had. We can reveal that we got to witness Sanctuary‘s creator, Damian Kindler, directing a scene in which Dunne got to get his gun out (now, now). Given the location and props around, there was clearly a lot to the story we don’t know.

“The last of the season two-parter is huge,” Tapping said. “We had like, 70 extras, and we had crazy huge set dec. I think for us we don’t feel it maybe as much as the locations guys do, and having to canvas the neighborhoods, and let people know we’re blowing stuff up and, I mean, logistically it’s a bit of a nightmare when you go on location, and especially when you shoot nights, and you’re in a neighborhood.”

“I got to drive a big truck,” Dunne revealed. “I like driving big trucks. I didn’t crash it or anything. Yes, I did, I did actually get to drive this… It was like doing a big Neal Moritz movie or something at certain times. It was like The Fast and the Furious or something, it was very cool, it was very cool. And yes, the fact that people let me behind the wheel of automobiles is amazing to me that they have that kind of trust. The paperwork to allow me to drive one of those trucks, my God, I had to sign documents, and give blood samples, and you know.”

Sanctuary‘s Season 4 premiere is tonight at 10/9c on Syfy in the U.S. and 10 ET/10.30 PT on SPACE in Canada. Check back here at CinemaSpy for an exclusive one-on-one interview we did on set with Robin Dunne coming soon.