‘Shadowhunters’ Finale Preview: Dominic Sherwood on the Hunt for Valentine (VIDEO)

Emily Aslanian April 5, 2016, 11:55 am

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Life is getting crazy down in the Underworld on Freeform’s Shadowhunters! After last Tuesday’s betrayal when trainer Hodge (Jon Cor) gave over the Mortal Cup to Valentine (Alan Van Sprang) to begin his Shadowhunter army, Jace (Dominic Sherwood) and Clary (Katherine McNamara) now have even more reason to find their deranged, evil father in this week’s season finale. Sherwood previewed what’s to come in the episode, as Jace’s emotions begin to get the best of him.

Jace has been through some serious emotional turmoil this season. What’s been the hardest thing for him?
It’s interesting, because the fans think it’s the realization that Clary and Jace are brother and sister, but with that he also realized that the 10 years in his past where he thought he was raised by Michael Wayland to be this Shadowhunter, this hero, this warrior, were all a lie. He was raised by this person that he hates the most. He was raised by someone who we read about in stories, like the boogeyman. He was raised by that person. When people say the realization that Clary being his sister is the worst thing, I think that’s part of it. But on top of that, he also lost his past. He lost who he is. He lost the way he was raised and was left with kind of nothing.

Is all of this affecting Jace as he’s going into this hunt for Valentine in the season finale?
Absolutely, yes. He’s going through this turmoil right now within himself where half of him believes that if he rights what was wronged at Renwick’s by letting Valentine go, if he finds and kills Valentine, then everything will be fine. The other half of him is thinking, ‘There’s something wrong with me. Maybe my answers lie with Valetine. If I went with him at Renwick’s, I wouldn’t be feeling such loneliness and so lost within my life.’ That kind of dichotomy is definitely going into this hunt for Valentine.

And they’re obviously going to run into Valentine at some point.
Yeah, yeah. They’re probably going to cross paths.

We’ve got a clip of you outside of the institute. It looks like Jace is going rogue, and he’s on the phone with Alec (Matthew Daddario) having a heated conversation. What’s going on there?
As we said earlier, I feel like this conversation on the phone very accurately depicts the dichotomy that Jace is going through right now and what he’s feeling. He does have this one side of him that thinks he’s a killer, and there’s this brutality within him that was instilled by being raised by this awful person with these radical ideas and a different view of the world, which is a very dangerous way of doing things. So he’s got that within him, and I think this conversation is that realization of ‘I don’t know. I’m going to make choices right now, and I have no basis on whether they’re good or bad. I have no idea whether I’m doing the right thing or not. I’m just acting and it’s just instinct at that point.’ And it’ll be interesting to see how the rest of that scene plays on as well, because that’s not it. That’s all I can say is that’s not it.

How is he dealing with Hodge’s betrayal, knowing that this person he grew up with was working with Valentine?
Yeah we’re not so happy with him right now. Jace is in a bad place. It’s interesting because in the books Hodge is depicted as an older, much more fatherly figure, and in the show we’ve kind of changed it. He’s very much an older brother to Alec, Jace and Izzy, and the person we go to. We’ve seen it time and time again within in Season 1. We get caught going to do something, and Hodge lets us go. Which, at the time, we just thought “He trusts us, he knows we’re good at our jobs and trusts us to do the right thing.” When in actuality, it’s him realizing and putting into action his secret, devious plan in the undercurrent. If you look back at the season, after having seen this betrayal, you see the choices that he made were much more weighted than we had thought at first glance.

Are we going to get some resolution between Jace and Clary and their current predicament?
All I can say right now is that the relationship between Clary and Jace is no longer Jace’s priority. Jace is no longer worried about her being his sister. There is now a bigger threat out there. It’s definitely playing on his mind and again toward the end of episode 13, he makes choices based on his friendships and the good and evil within him. He’s making a choice at the end of episode 13 that’s based on that dichotomy, his relationship with Clary, and his relationship with his friends, and that’s what I can say.

What do you think the first thing Jace would say to Jocelyn, or what do you think he will say, assuming she wakes up?
“Why’d you leave me, woman?! What’s going on? Why’d you leave me? I needed a mom, what’s going on?” [laughs]. As we saw in the last episode, Magnus says, you know, “Jocelyn is your mother,” and Jace is like “No, she isn’t.” Anyone can be a mother, you can give birth and then you’re a mother and then you give that child away and you cease to be a mom. A mom is someone who raised you, and in Jace’s mind that’s Maryse, not Jocelyn, not anyone else who’s in his mind. In Jace’s mind, Maryse made him the man that he is, so in his mind, Jocelyn is not his mother, Maryse is.

What’s the deal with Camille and Magnus (Harry Shum Jr.)? Did we know they were an item beforehand?
So, we knew that there was a thing at some point because of the necklace. Man, I’m going to butcher this line, I know I am, I feel like it’s “Mi amor veratus?” Or something like that. There’s a phrase that Magnus uses when we find him for the first time, to try and find the memories for Clary, and we give him the necklace and he says, in latin, ‘True love never dies,’ and it was hard to explain that that necklace was a gift from Magnus to his then lover, Camille. So we did know that there was something there, but we’re now starting to see the kind of depths that that goes into and how that is going to play out in the longevity of our story.

And that’s going to be a problem for Alec and Magnus now, I can only imagine.
It’s going to be a problem for Alec and Magnus. I’m sure they’re not going to be happy about it, and also Clary and Simon (Alberto Rosende) aren’t the biggest fans of Camille, so that’s also going to be a little wrench in our work so that’s going, and she obviously has to be a part of our story at this point because she has the Book of the White, and we know she’s a tricky character, so there are times when maybe that’s going to be a little difficult for everyone.

And the vampires are just keeping her locked up? Is that something that they’re allowed to be doing?
I think so, I think what’s happening right now is, Raphael is now the leader of the vampires, he’s taken over this group and he’s imprisoned her because she’s too dangerous to be out. As we’ve seen with Simon, she broke the accords and she almost caused a war, so this is the safest way to have her and keep her contained.

Is Lydia okay after getting hit by Hodge?
We don’t know. Episode 12 left it very up in the air, so as far as we are right now in our story we don’t know. She got hit pretty good and she went through a table, I mean Shadowhunters are very resilient, so I think there’s definitely a chance that she could be okay, but you never know. Hodge was a Shadowhunter as well, and he brought her down pretty rough.

Are you just constantly training for this role?
Yeah, I was fortunate enough to be cast first so I was up where we filmed before anyone, and we started physical training because we had to look like these soldiers, and I’m kind of skinny as a rake naturally, so I had to put on quite a lot of weight to look like this solider, as did all of us, and we all worked very hard to get there, and then on top of that there’s the gymnastic quality of these characters. Jace can do a back flip off a wall, I can’t do that, I’ve never done that before, so I had to learn how to do that sort of stuff, and do a front flip.

Can you actually back-flip off of walls now?
I can! I put myself through it, I want to be able to do as much as I can with this character, and I want to feel as much like Jace on set as I can, so doing the things like that and training myself how to do that sort of stuff is really helpful. So on top of that gymnastics quality, we also have weapons and martial arts training, because Jace and Alec and Izzy, every Shadowhunter has been training since they were Max’s age in how to fight and how to become these soldiers, and the appropriate way of doing it and it was almost like kind of the cross-fitting like the Greek soldiers and Spartans, the way they moved with their swords, and we played a lot into that with our movement, and used those as references and had movement trainers come in so we all kind of moved the same and worked with our swords the same and this, that, and the other. So on top of that, we have to look like we’ve been doing it for, Jace is in his twenties, so I have to look like I’ve been doing that for 20-odd years.

Check out the exclusive clip below:

Shadowhunters, Season Finale, Tuesday, April 5, at 9/8c, Freeform.