Sci-fi TV series ‘Defiance’ launches with video game: ‘one world, two ways in’

What will Earth look like in the year 2046? Pretty beat up if a sprawling outdoor backlot for a new sci-fi TV series, tucked out of sight in an industrial section of Toronto’s east end, is any indication.

“Defiance” launches simultaneously in Canada and the U.S. April 15 as both a TV series and a video game. Both Showcase and the U.S. cable channel Syfy will premiere it over two hours Monday at 10 p.m.

Earlier this year before TV critics in Los Angeles, Syfy president Dave Howe called it “one world, but with two ways in.” Five years in the making, the series was planned all along as a way to unite “high-quality scripted television and online gaming in an unprecedented way.”

The series finds Earth scorched and altered after decades of alien invasions, the first coming in 2013. Defiance is a town near what was once St. Louis, although it is really being shot in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough.

The post-apocalyptic exteriors are spread out over two or three blocks. Railway boxcars, discarded RVs and corrugated metal are mashed together with recycled doors and awnings to form homes and businesses. Dented automobiles that look like they were headed to scrap heaps have been caged in plastic piping and re-fitted with bicycle tires.

The ramshackle neighbourhood looks a bit like Toronto’s gritty Kensington Market if it was attacked and then set decorated by the Trailer Park Boys.

Giving a tour of the set is Australian-born actor Grant Bowler (“Dick & Liz”). He plays Joshua Nolan, a former lieutenant in the Earth Military Coalition who unexpectedly becomes sheriff of Defiance.

“It is pretty grim,” he says of the surroundings, “but I find it very realistic. I mean, the present’s pretty grim.”

He likes the whole Wild West aspect of the series.

“We are very much a frontier town,” he says. “Everybody wants to usurp the town and come in and take over but it’s still struggling to maintain that Free State status. It creates a situation where, yeah, he’s pretty much the law, you know?”

Besides acting in the drama, all the actors also have to provide voice-overs for the video game and also do motion capture work.

“It’s really hilarious watching yourself rendered inside a video game,” says Bowler, who calls himself a bit of a gamer.

“I’m so used to seeing myself on television or in films, it’s kind of mundane. This is something I hadn’t done before, so that’s been new.”

Stephanie Leonidas (“The Bible”) has to go through even more of a transformation as Irisa, an alien who bonds with Bowler’s Nolan and becomes his second-in-command. Irisa is an Irathient, a near human race and one of seven species of alien battling to control the Earth.

The petite London native looks very human out of costume on the set, but each day it takes her nearly two hours in the hair and makeup chair to be transformed as Irisa.

“I’m kind of speckled. I have an orange wig. I have big, huge green contacts and I have all these prosthetics, so my eyebrows and my nose are covered,” she says.

The contacts limit her peripheral vision.

“A lot of the stunt people say they won’t work with me till my contacts are in because they say something changes, something switches, like this aggression comes out of me and I’m ready.”

Leonidas says she was “gob smacked” at the reception “Defiance” got last summer in San Diego at ComicCon by fans who hadn’t even seen the series yet.

“It’s amazing how passionate people are; I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Julie Benz (“Dexter”) plays Amanda Rosewater, the newly elected mayor of Defiance. Benz feels women can hold more powerful positions in sci-fi dramas, “be more of a bad-ass. Look at ‘Battlestar’ and ‘Buffy,’” she says. Her character had to survive a war, raise her younger sister and “know her way around weapons and guns in this new world that has been created.”

Scottish actor Tony Curran (“Doctor Who”) plays Datak Tarr, an alien underworld crime boss. With his shock of long, white hair, black leather top coat and eerie alien contact lenses, he looks more like a drugged-out rock star from the ’60s than an alien Tony Soprano from 2046.

It’s not all “aliens” from the U.K., Australia and the U.S. invading this shot-in-Toronto sci-fi drama. Canadians Mia Kirshner (as Kenya, Amanda’s sister and also the town Madam) and Graham Greene (influential human leader Rafe McCawley) also star in the NBC Universal series.

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Bill Brioux is a freelance TV columnist based in Brampton, Ont.