Tyler Posey

“I was screaming a lot yesterday so I might not have the most amazing interview voice,” says a rather husky sounding Tyler Posey, lead star of MTV’s surprise hit show, Teen Wolf. Having taken the 80s film classic and reinvented it as a weekly platform for today’s Twi-hard viewing public, the show surpassed expectations when it debuted earlier this year. In fact it was so popular that a second season was commissioned before the first had even wrapped. However, it is not howling at the moon that has over exerted the 20-year-old actors lungs but the thrill ride of rollercoasters at the Universal Studios amusement park. “I was bored and went with a couple of friends and had a lot of fun,” he explains, “the first thing we did when we got there was go into a pretty scary haunted house which takes 20 minutes to walk through. At the very end we got separated from one of our friends and got freaked out because we didn’t know where he was,” he continues, sounding panicked by the memory. But surely it must take a lot to startle a young man working on a supernatural show like Teen Wolf? “It’s all lies!” he laughs. “I am scared of everything. There were werewolves inside the maze and I thought I could have something in common with them but they still tried to eat me.”
Having survived the ordeal, Posey is finding ways of keeping busy during the show’s summer hiatus before the filming of season two begins in the latter half of November. Whilst a real life werewolf might struggle to cope with spontaneously emerging fur, Posey has recently opted to experiment with his own body hair by growing his first ever mustache. “I’ve been able to grow one ever since I was a young teenager but this time I tried to grow one for real,” he explains. However, the end result was not as dashing as he might have anticipated, with online commenters swiftly noting his resemblance to Mandy Patinkin’s Inigo Montoya in Rob Reiner’s 1987 classic, The Princess Bride. “It looked really bad,” he concedes with a laugh, “but I was very proud of it.”
Having begun acting at a young age, one of Posey’s earliest roles was Jennifer Lopez’s son in the 2001 romantic comedy, Maid in Manhattan. Like the famous Latina, Posey is also trying to find a balance between the world of acting and the world of music, with his as-yet-unsigned band, Lost In Kostko. “We played this show on Sunday night and it was like being Justin Bieber or something,” he recounts excitedly, “the curtain went up and there were screaming girls and flashes of cameras and posters saying my name – it was surreal. The part I loved the most was that they were singing our lyrics back to us and that was the first time that’s ever happened. I can’t even describe to you how that feels.” But all those Teen Wolf fans worried he might be about to cancel his acting plans, need fear not. Lost In Kostko is only a side project, for now. “It’s a punk rock band so I don’t really need to know how to sing. I can definitely act, but the singing: I’m still working on.”

[Originally published in Wonderland Magazine Issue 28, November 2011. Photography Danielle Levitt.]