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ACTOR: Hugh Dillon on THE KILLING and CONTINUUM

Does Hugh Dillon look scary in these photos?

He doesn’t because this is a meetup with fan Julie Holden, but the actor-musician (The Headstones) has a formidable  presence on screen. You don’t want to mess with hard-ass death-row prison guard Francis Becker on The Killing or the mysterious Mr. Escher of Piron Corp. on Continuum, his two recurring roles in Vancouver this year.

Dillon goes toe-to-toe head-to-head with Peter Sarsgaard’s death-row inmate Ray Seward on The Killing but one of the most disturbing scenes for me was not guard versus inmate but Becker giving his son a tour of the gallows where Seward will be hanged. I had Becker pegged early on as a suspect in the street kid killings but he seems to be out of the frame for that, although the murder of Seward’s wife is still open ended.

And Dillon’s mysterious Mr. Escher is more omnipresent on Continuum each passing week as the Vancouver-cop-from-the-future series heads to its second season finale. Last Sunday’s Second Guess ended with an image of  Escher watching a wall of surveillance screens including one of Lucas, newly-committed to a psychiatric ward. Is there anywhere this freelancer from the future can’t go? The previous week, he arranged a meeting with young Alec Sandler (Erik Knudsen) through his “employee” Emily (Magda Apanowicz) to ask him: “What do you want? How do you want to live? More importantly, how do you want to be remembered?” He assumes what Alec wants transcends wealth, but warns him not to take too long to decide because it will be more difficult to get it. What does Escher want? He seems to know more than other time travellers about what’s going on and what’s at stake.

Update: The season 2 finale revealed that Mr. Escher is Alec’s father.

Related: Hugh Dillon films The Last Crop on a Chinatown roof

New episodes of Continuum and The Killing air this Sunday night on Showcase and AMC, respectively.

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