Grant Bowler reveals all about season three of Defiance

Grant Bowler talks about season three of Defiance which can be seen on Friday nights at 8pm on Syfy.

So things have started off kind of different at the beginning of the season with some minds closed and it’s kind of a completely different place. Can you talk about kind of your character’s journey this season and maybe about how he’s going to try to help Amanda fix the town?

We’ve obviously established Defiance as not only an incredibly dangerous place to live which, you know, very heavily featured in that first double episode that you just talked about. But also the tenants always have been on the verge of disaster or boom or collapse, that really reminds me of kind of California in the gold rush and somewhat defined.

I’m really, really happy and grateful for what Kevin got me to do this year because he’s much more about a story of what’s going on for him in Season 3 than he is about chasing around other people's stories, which by and large, he was doing in one and two.

So basically, when Irisa set off and destroyed New York, a new element was created called gulanite. And gulanite is a rock that so hard that no earth-created machinery can penetrate it. So Defiance now sits on this cap, this impenentrable cap, which means the town can’t get gulanite which means that they can’t follow themselves. And the byproduct of that of course is Nolan and Irisa trapped under the gulanite, and I’ll say they’re kind of stuck.

This season is very much about getting the town back on its street; but as always, very much about town survival. I think the town in Season 3, thanks to Rahm Tak is in more peril and actually comes in a more direct attack and direct fight than it ever has before.

Defiance actually gets successfully infiltrated in Season 3 by the enemy force, and directly assaulted. So it’s a much more perilous place to live. It’s on its last leg. There’s no energy that lines for food. There are very little good things sold.

Can you talk about some of the action scenes you’re going to have this season, whether it’s fighting or just in general?

I’m in so much pain, I can’t tell you. I’ve done more fighting this season than you can poke a stick at. I think in the first three weeks at work, I had something like five or seven fist fights.

Can you  talk about some of the new faces on Defiance this year?

We’ve got three major new players. We have Rahm Tak, who we meet in the opening stanza. He’s a warlord, if you like, for the Votanis Collective.

And our big threat in Season 3 initially is that this military, you know, force of alien-based races, was moving north from South America. And so Rahm Tak is the advance god of that Votanis Collective. And he’s (bridled) and all he wants to do is raise Defiance, burn it to the ground, and kill every single human being in it.

Then we come to the other two major new arrivals, who are the Omec. Now, we established in Season 1 that there were seven races of Votan, we only saw six of them. And in Season 2, we saw the Gulanee, which we thought was the last race of aliens. And they were an energy-based life forms. So that’s why we haven’t seen them before.

At the beginning of Season 3, we discovered that there is an eighth race that predated all of the other races called the Omec. And the reason we never heard about them before was that the Votan, the aliens who came to work, they just wanted to immigrate and peaceful, had deliberately left this race behind. They sabotaged their ships. They destroyed their means of escape, and their rocks, and they left them behind to die. It’s basically the Votan shame and guilt that means that humans have never heard of this race before. In our first double episode, the Omec arrived, the father and daughter, T’evgin and Kindzi, played by Nichole Galicia and Conrad Coates.

What you might have learned in the last couple of years from playing Nolan? What he has taught you?

You know, it’s a question I’ll probably best answer in five years’ time, lasting what it is. But it’s taught me to be a better father to my daughter in a strange way. That would probably be the biggest thing.

Obviously going into a second season, you’d been pretty excited having gotten renewed. What’s the feeling like going into a third season?

It’s fantastic. I mean, it’s an interesting landscape television today, isn’t it? You know, it’s hard enough for shows to get a pilot, little on get a runoff of pilot. It used to be that if you shoot a pilot, you had a fair chance to the season. And it used to be that if you got one you’d be supported and developed three, two or three.

Do you feel like there’s a level of comfort now that you’ve been with the same people for so long?

Yes. You form a show line. You form a family. The third season is so wonderful because we have all have been around each other for a long time now. We know how to work with one another and we have real friendships based on lengthy experience of one another, which is really, really good when you got to work everyday. And we’re very lucky on this show because we have a group of just really good human beings  to work with.

How different are you from your character? I mean do you have any easy times looking back and forth?

He is more pragmatic than me. I am less self-assured, I think and I question myself a lot more than Nolan does. He’s much more unequivocal than I am.

I’m probably a little better at using honey to catch bears than Nolan is. Nolan would probably just fight them. I always like to think of Nolan as me with too much coffee and my impulse control removed.

Is there a scene that you can kind of tease about, that you’re most looking forward to people seeing this season?

There’s an entire episode where – let me figure out how to phrase this, where Nolan and Irisa get to re-experience their relationship, literally re-experience their relationship with one another.