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Calgary actor Kelsey Flower landed a lead on Netflix's Black Summer and ran with it

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Given the ironclad rules of secrecy surrounding plot points of television series these days, there is precious little we can write about the fate of Lance in Season 2 of the zombie thriller Black Summer without angering the gods of prestige TV.

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But since Kelsey Flower, the Calgary-born actor who plays him, is still doing interviews to promote the Netflix series, it’s probably not too much of a spoiler to say his character will somehow figure into the frenzied action of Season 2. We will even risk going a bit further and say he will be running. After all, Lance is always running.

“Lance is the weaker one who chose to run most of the time,” says Flower with a laugh, in an interview with Postmedia from Vancouver. “You wouldn’t want him beside you in a foxhole for the most part.”

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But the one bonafide cliffhanger at the end of Season 1 involved Lance. Things did not look good for him as the season wrapped. He was separated from the rest of the survivors, who finally made it to the stadium where Rose (Jaime King) was reunited with her daughter Anna (Zoe Martlett.) When we last saw Lance, he was … running. In fact, he was being chased by a horde of the undead.

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“Everyone is curious about Lance,” Flower says. “He is the only unknown factor. Is he alive or not?”

“I spilled the beans to maybe one or two,” he adds. “Don’t tell anyone.”

Season 2 starts streaming on June 17. So it won’t be long before everyone learns of Lance’s fate. While the character may not be known for his bravery, he did earn a cult following among the devotees of Black Summer, which began life as a spin-off prequel series to Z Nation but quickly gained its own fan base. Given that the show reveals very little about the backstories of its characters, this is certainly a testament to Flower’s performance in Season 1.

“For the most part, people are really kind,” says Flower about fan chatter on social media. “I think the people that understood Lance really related to him. It’s all the people who are brave enough to admit they would be Lance if things went down.”

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Before landing his big break with Netflix, Flower was probably best known in Calgary as a theatre actor. Trained through Mount Royal University’s now-defunct theatre program, some of Flower’s stage roles in the city now seem somewhat auspicious. In 2013, he starred in William Shakespeare’s Land of the Dead, a unique co-production of Ground Zero Theatre, Hit & Myth Productions and The Shakespeare Company that mixed the Bard with zombies. A year before that, he starred in Evil Dead: The Musical. Flower eventually decamped to Vancouver and then Toronto, making the switch to TV and film with roles in the miniseries My Imaginary Ex-Girlfriend and the Unauthorized Full House Story.

Landing a lead in a Netflix series back in 2018 was a significant career boost, although the particulars of his homecoming kept him humble, he says.

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“It was kind of surreal, just a dream come true,” he says. “The way things worked out with Season 1, I was staying in my parent’s basement the whole time. It was this very funny juxtaposition of being on a big Netflix set as one the main characters and coming back and being asked to clean my room and do some chores.”

At the time of this interview, Flower was in Vancouver shooting another project that he also has to keep quiet about. In 2020, he had a recurring role in the Toronto-shot comedic thriller series Run opposite Merritt Weaver and Domhnall Gleeson. He played Daniel, a mysterious man who loves mac-and-cheese, taxidermy and …. running.

“Of course it was called Run and my character was running …. again,” he says. “I’m just the runner. I’m running in everything.”

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As for Season 2 of Black Summer, Flower has to stay mum about plot points. Of course, it’s a show about a zombie apocalypse. So a character’s well-being tends to be a going concern throughout production, particularly a character such as Lance.

“Lance is not equipped for this world,” Flower says. “There were a few times when Lance does give up. He was always pitched to me as the guy who should have died first but somehow keeps living. Eventually, they told me that I was safe for the first season. But we were always checking in with one another: ‘Did you get a new draft!? Did you get a new draft!?'”

Season 2 of Black Summer starts streaming June 17 on Netflix.

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