Noah Reid on Going From Sweet ‘Schitt’s Creek’ Songbird to Sinister Disciple on ‘Outer Range’

variety.com:

Hunter Ingram SPOILER ALERT: Do not read until you have watched the full season of “Outer Range,” now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.In the end, it was Vanessa Williams circa 1991 whose lyrics best encapsulated Amazon Prime Video’s wild sci-fi western “Outer Range:” “Isn’t this world a crazy place?”After a season of surreal musical moments, Noah Reid hit a high note with Williams’ classic “Save the Best for Last” in this week’s finale, when Billy Tillerson euphorically serenaded aspiring cult leader Autumn (Imogen Poots) in the lobby of a bank and vowed to protect her from her rival, gruff rancher Royal (Josh Brolin).“They kicked around a lot of songs for that moment in the bank,” Reid told Variety. “But that Vanessa Williams song is so perfect for a song that would be probably playing in the bank and also explains exactly to [Billy] where he is and who he is in the moment with her, belonging to her. ‘Isn’t this world a crazy place?’ It kind of sums it all up perfectly.” For a series that traffics in the unexplained, Billy may have been the biggest enigma of all — an unsettling and unapologetically musical oddity that never kept his baffling behavior hidden.

The role marks quite a departure from Reid’s award-winning work as the lovable and buttoned-up Patrick on CBC/Pop’s Emmys sensation “Schitt’s Creek.”As Billy, Reid couldn’t help walking through the world inexplicably singing his emotions to the rafters, starting with his underwear-clad mirror performance of Whitney Houston in Episode 2 and culminating in his bank-bound profession to Autumn.In front of a few bewildered bank tellers, Billy pledged his life to Autumn in the fateful climactic scene, and he would pay for it in a blaze of bullets by the end of the.