Return to the Moonshine with Jennifer Finnigan and Allan Hawco

It’s finally time to return to the Moonshine!

Ahead of the Moonshine Season 2 premiere, we spoke with stars Jennifer Finnigan (Lidia) and Allan Hawco (Gale) about their electrifying on-screen chemistry, and how their characters shake up each other’s lives for better and worse. Jennifer touches on how Lidia is reconnecting with a part of herself that she didn’t realize she’d lost, and Allan comments on how meeting Lidia changes Gale’s worldview.

Watch Moonshine Sunday nights on CBC or on demand at CBC Gem. And if you missed it, you can find all of our Season 1 coverage here.

Lidia’s return to Foxton and the Moonshine felt very tentative in Season 1. She had one foot out the door most of the time, whereas Lidia seems to be all in for Season 2.

Jennifer: There are so many things going on with her. She now knows she’s here to stay. Season 1 was “Am I staying here? Am I going? I don’t know if this is right for me. This isn’t who I am anymore.” Season 2 has Lidia embracing her old self, and who she wants to be now. In a lot of ways, she’s been pretending for 15 or 16 years with her fancy life in New York. Her marriage falling apart made her understand that that’s not who she is anymore. In Season 2, she is ready to fight the good fight, and she gets scrappy. She goes back to her roots, from a Bennett to a Finley-Cullen.

Something I related to is when you hit your 40s and you’re like, “Am I living the life I want to live? Maybe now’s the time to just grab it by the balls.” It is kind of what Lidia does, for better or for worse. Maybe there’s an identity crisis of sorts. Maybe it’s a midlife crisis. She is redefining herself, as a woman, apart from being a wife and a mom, finding her sexuality again, and figuring out who this person is now and what she wants. Then she meets this hot-ass biker and just wants him for his bod. Then, it gets deeper. He’s exciting and dangerous, and all of these things that she’s never had. It’s incredibly seductive. Then you throw in the fact that his business could help save her family business, it’s a really good pairing. It’s a different journey from Season 1.

I love the way the writers and Sheri [Elwood] are able to so adeptly keep a person alive on screen, keep a character growing and morphing and changing. It’s such a gift playing this part.

Very quickly, it looks like the relationship between Gale and Lidia is more than just a fling. I’m getting a sense that Gale is willing to burn everything to the ground for Lidia, if necessary.

Allan: Lidia blows Gale’s mind. There’s pre-Lidia Gale and then there’s post-Lidia Gale, and they’re completely different people. She alters his life forever, emotionally. I feel like they both meet at the same point in their life where they are tired of being the thing that they have been told they have to be. From Gale’s perspective, I don’t know that he’s happy running this biker gang. It’s all he’s ever known and it’s his life but then Lidia comes along and just alters his sense of reality and what he thinks he is capable of. She’s this well-educated, refined nut job filled with positivity and wonder, and he’s never met anybody like her before. He’s addicted to her immediately.

Jennifer: It’s mutual.

Allan: He’s immediately willing to do almost anything to keep that going. For the first time, too, in that first episode, he has no idea how to talk to her. He’s just a bumbling idiot. He’s this badass biker dude who probably kills people and all of a sudden, he’s super sensitive and realizes the true part of him has never been really witnessed before until he meets her.

Lidia discovers early in the season that she remembers her youth through rose-coloured glasses. Can you share a bit about how that leads her to reexamine her teen years and reconnect with that part of herself?

Jennifer: It forces her to look back and ask, “Who was I back then? And how did that inform who I am now?” In Lidia’s journey this season, she does kind of revert back to her teenage years. She gave that up, married young, had kids young, and was forced to grow up really quickly. Now, she’s able to release that a little bit. She reverts to being this giggly teenager with this guy.

Allan: Especially in their first meeting, with the pigtails.

Jennifer: Exactly. And she has trouble forming sentences around him, too. There’s this giddy, gleeful little teenager when she meets him. Then she goes on a weird crime spree, not to spoil it, but you’ll see. She’s just seduced by all of it. It’s like going back to being a teenager and being stimulated by all these new things. That’s a running theme through the season, getting in touch with who you were back then, and understanding how it informs who you are now.

Do Lidia’s kids, Finn and Eleanor, complicate things with Gale at all?

They are the voice of reason, and Lidia knows that. She has such mad love and respect for these kids. They’re both so smart and mature, far more mature than Lidia is this season. In a weird way, I think they understand that Lidia has been cheated on. She has dedicated her whole life to them, and maybe this is her time to indulge herself more than she ever has and fall for somebody. They’re fairly supportive of that aspect. It’s only when things get dangerous and veer into criminal territory that the two wise children start to speak up.

I don’t know if this is something that will happen in Season 2, but I think it would be so exciting to see what happens if Gale meets Lidia’s ex-husband, Daniel.

Jennifer: I can say that IF that happened, that would be one of my favourite episodes.

Allan: I will just say this: Jonny Silverman, Jenn’s real-life husband, plays her ex-husband. He’s a brilliant actor and a brilliant guy. If that were to happen in the plot of this show, Allan would be very pleased to have the opportunity to work with him.

Jennifer: And they would have extremely good chemistry as well.

Anything else that you’d like to share about this season of Moonshine?

Allan: One thing I want to add about Sheri and the writing team is that, in my experience with this show, they typically don’t do the thing you think that will be done.

Jennifer: Or they do it, and then they blow it up.

Allan: Sheri’s vision as a showrunner and as a creator is unique, her vision is unique. Anything that could be standard is often approached in a very slightly different way.

Jennifer: She’s also not precious and earnest. She grounds it really well.

Allan: She’s the perfect boss, a perfect writer, creator, and collaborator. A real joy to work with, and I feel like everyone in this crew sees her in that light and feels valued. That’s really difficult to do while undergoing the stress of making and running a show.

Images Courtesy of CBC