what are you most excited about in the second season?Defiance is a story of what we want. If you are going to hope for something, what are you going to hope for? For a start, equality, no racism, the right to pursue your ambitions. All very American qualities, right? Well, when we come into Defiance, there is a town council, there is an ex-mayor, and there is a mayor in running. There's all of these power structures. There are police. That's fine. We'll learn who all these people are. We know what drives them, what their ambitions are, what their fears are, and who they'd like the world to see them as. And then we blow it up, and we make them all start again. That's the idea between Season 1 and Season 2. We had to get to know them. So that's fine, we know them now. Now let's explode the whole joint and start them as far from what we know they want as humanly possible. Now we can get going. That's what I'm excited about. I think that's the best way to end a Season 1 and go into a Season 2 that we could've done.

How are you enjoying this postapocalyptic adventure you're in?

Dude. I love this so much it's crazy. What drew me to the show were two things: One, the character, because I love him. I call them impact characters. I don't know if you've noticed, I like playing characters that cause either a lot of destruction or mayhem or havoc. Upset the apple cart. That's what I like doing. I like characters who come in and get their boots really dirty. And Nolan is a character who does that and lives, which is a real bonus. Because normally the only way to get rid of characters, in my experience, the ones I like to play, is that you kill them. So that was one half of what attracted me to the show.

The other half is this: I've never seen this world. Science fiction. Arguably, it is also an iconic Western town. Arguably, it's also an iconic postapocalyptic story. Father-daughter drifters, chased by steampunk dudes in high-tech alien post-gasoline automobiles — it's Mad Max. What Defiance does for me that I've never seen before, is that it actually melds them all. There is no part in the show where you go, OK, now we've finished the Western part of the show, now we're going to do the sci-fi part. Or hold on, this is now going to be the postapocalyptic part of the show. It all actually melds. And I've never seen that.

What's the biggest challenge about playing Nolan?

The biggest challenge about playing Nolan is really that he's an antihero. The problem with playing antiheroes these days is there are so many of them, to be quite honest. So with him, what I wanted to do was I wanted to drag him forward, where he won't date. In five years' time, you're not going to look back at Nolan and, go, errrr, dated! But at the same time, I also wanted to bring the past forward. So I chose a lot of Western things. I went with a lot of stuff out of Gary Cooper, what I liked about him as an actor the best. Jimmy Stewart. John Wayne. Those guys that played the original stand-up heroes. Throwing in a little bit of The Outlaw Josey Wales. You've still got to spit on a dog. I'm going to do that in an episode. You can all write, "He told me he was going to do that …"

Tell us about your character.Stahma is so "held," she is so repressed by her culture, her caste system, the sexist nature of the caste and the culture, that she constantly wears this mask. We all wear masks in life — when we're at work, when we're socializing. Hopefully, we have people that we're intimate with and a home life where you're able to let that mask drop and be yourself. Stahma [is] calm like the little geisha that she is, very sweet, trying to pacify, and she lets the mask slip and you see the potential for this dragon woman and it's a little bit scary. You see Datak, and he's such an animal in so many ways, he's a little taken aback by that. It's a little jolt. You see her catch herself, and she slithers up to him like a snake and tries to make it OK.

So what's the biggest challenge about the role?

The biggest challenge is that I'm a human being and I have very human impulses. As an actor, you want to not censor yourself, you want to allow impulses to come up, and you want to use them to make things organic and grounded. So often I'll get an impulse and I'll have to shove it away, because that's a human being's impulse. And I need to make it a little bit weirder, a little bit more skewed, so that [Stahma] really is alien and she really is "other."

I have to remember that her motivations are not the same as our motivations. People were asking me earlier, is she good or bad? I'm like, first of all she's my character, so I can't judge her. Because I know she's only doing the best she can with the motivation she has, but you know, it's like the fable of the frog and the scorpion. You can't judge a scorpion for being a scorpion. It just is a scorpion. She's going to bite you. It's going to sting you. It's how she is.

Tell us, how do you build that world of Defiance in your mind and step into character? I relate it to a superhero suiting up. It kind of feels like putting on armor. I get a kick out of getting the makeup done. I know it's been said before, but you don't really feel complete unless every little tiny detail is finally done. Then you feel yourself. Just the moments when you're walking by and you catch a reflection of yourself in the mirror. You forget.

Talk about the style of the show: postapocalyptic, steampunk.

It's really cool that every race of aliens on our show almost has their own unique style to them. The Irathients are almost very steampunk-like and the Castithans are more stoic, regal looking. And the Indogenes are mathematical. Everything they do, down to the language — the Indogene language is all written like a mathematical equation. It's cool to see how their style reflects in every aspect of their race and how they are all very different from each other, and unique.

What are you looking forward to in Season 2? Where it's all going to go. It's new for us as well. We were just talking a moment ago. It gets much darker, from what we can see. We've been released the first couple scripts, and it seems like the world opens up hugely. We find ourselves in LA, so it's not just the town of Defiance anymore. There's quite a lot to come.

So with Irisa being the chosen one, how is that going to affect her relationship with Nolan?

Hugely, I think. It brought them together, but equally took them apart, and I feel like it's been left in a way that she's trying to find herself. It's been left in a way that she's done a lot of growing up, but also she has no clue where she is and what she's doing. And I think it pulled her away from Nolan in many ways. She found herself more as an Irathient. It gets a lot darker with those two. Darkness is the word of the day.

Talk about how Defiance is different from the other series you've been involved with. Yes, I've been a part of so many genre shows, Buffy and Angel were more of the fantasy element. Dexter was its own thing, really. Defiance is great because for the first time in many years we have aliens back on TV, on Syfy. We haven't had that in a long time. To do science fiction, which is what we're doing, is great. It's great to have aliens in science fiction. We've had a lot of these supernatural shows and fantasy shows, but we haven't had an alien show since Battlestar.

What do you like best about Amanda?

I love her strength. I love playing a woman who is strong, but I don't have to be masculine to be strong. I can still be strong in my femininity. It was important to me that Amanda still remained a woman in power. Does that make sense? So many times we see women in power, but they've lost all sense of femininity. One of my favorite scenes was when I walk in and catch Nolan with Kenya, and I get all flustered. And I'm trying to have this conversation with him, because Amanda is obviously attracted to Nolan, the new guy in town, I think she thought they had a thing. And then he's with her sister now and she's, like, trying to do business. But then she's like, I don't know where to look, he's not wearing a shirt. And we did a lot of different takes that day. We had a lot of fun shooting the scene. Some choices were more extreme than others in regards to how flustered she got, because it was so much fun to play that. Because she is still a woman who has feelings and has attraction and all of that. So to be able to play that, but still have to do her job was a lot of fun.

Tell us about your character. Datak seems like some sort of gangster. Datak, he's got this persona … He's a victimizer, but in many ways I think he's a victim of society. But that's what attracted me to Datak. He's a survivor. I'm not saying that what he does is right. But in his world, in his head, it's the only way he can behave. It's the only way he can survive. In many ways, Stahma is trying to help him. Obviously at the end of the last season she didn't help him enough, because he let his nature get the best of him.

I think the interesting thing about Datak is there are many times that he can be attacking people, behaving in a rough manner, but he gets his [rear end] kicked as well … You can have this hard, tough exterior, but I think inside he wants a little compassion as well. I think it's something he didn't get where he is from. I think that is something they may touch on in the future. In the shots that we've seen this season where you get a backstory of Datak in Season 1, he's not "fellow" with Rafe McCawley yet. He wasn't always this gangster type, so I think it's something that society has shaped him into, maybe. But at the same time, he seems to be enjoying himself.

What are your biggest challenges playing Datak?

I guess the biggest challenge for me a lot of the time is just getting to the subtleties within him. He's a very harsh character a lot of the time. I think in the next season you're going to see Datak still being fierce, but in many ways simmering. Simmering in many ways. I don't want him to be too soft. He's learning. And I think, within that learning process, he doesn't want to be too volcanic, and he wants to simmer a little bit more, until the moment … So that's quite tricky, but it's a good challenge as well. I think that's what I like about him. You never know when he's going to explode and when he's going to simmer.