Exclusive Interview : Tony Curran (DEFIANCE)
On Syfy’s new series DEFIANCE, it’s been decades since an alien ship, carrying seven different sentient species collectively known as the Votan, crash-landed on Earth. The accident caused unexpected terraforming, to say nothing of conflict with the locals, i.e., humans. However, thanks to a joint human/Votan rebellion, there has been peace for the past nine years.
In the town of Defiance, formerly St. Louis, MO, the mayor is human, but many aliens are in prominent positions. One of the most powerful of Defiance’s residents is Datak Tarr, played by Tony Curran. Datak is smooth and manipulative. With his wife Stahna, played by Jaime Murray, at his side, Datak has quite a few schemes, some of them lethal, up his well-tailored sleeves.
In person at a party in a room decorated and lit to resemble DEFIANCE’s bar/brothel the NeedWant, Curran turns out to be gregarious, funny, very human and very Scottish, about as different from the American-accented Castithan Datak Tarr as he could be.
Curran, who hails originally from Glasgow, Scotland, is no stranger to genre work. Among his many credits are the films BLADE II, THE 13TH WARRIOR, THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION and THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN. DOCTOR WHO fans know him as that show’s Vincent Van Gogh and he was also a regular in the TV series ULTIMATE FORCE and the miniseries THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH.
Curran introduces his real-life wife Mai, and then makes a joke about his TV wife Stahma that has both his spouse and interviewer hiccuping with laughter. It’s that sort of conversation.
For starters, how was it determined that Datak Tarr, who doesn’t even originally hail from Earth, much less the U.S., should speak with an American accent?
“It’s odd, isn’t it?” Curran says. “At first [during pre-production], there would be left no stone unturned, as it were. It was like, ‘What are we going to look like? What are we going to sound like? How do we behave?’ So all of a sudden, [it was decided] the audio element of how we sounded as those characters, the best way to go about it is, they’re chameleons. These people are trying to integrate into this society. They have to hopefully sound like the people do in this society. Physically, they ain’t going to integrate, because they don’t look like human beings, but I think a lot of it is, they watch old movies. A lot of the characters, they talk to other human beings, and in many ways, [this was] the way they integrated and [why] they sounded that way. I spoke to Jaime [Murray, who is English] and some of the producers and directors and just thought that might take away from the performance, if it was a little too [colorful]. And also, on top of our American accents, as aliens, we have our own Castithan.” He then promptly says a line in Castithan, which he explains is something Datak Tarr utters in the pilot. “I’m saying to you, ‘Touch me again and I’ll break both of your arms.’ I think the languages on the show are going to be a real plus for the whole scope of the show, to give it a real universal feel.”
It helped that the inventor of the language was on hand to provide guidance, Curran adds. “David J. Petersen basically designed all the alien languages. He worked on GAME OF THRONES as well, the Dothraki language. He basically engineered all the alien languages. He speaks quite a few [real-world Earth] languages himself. I’ve got quite a good tongue, as it were, but this is definitely something quite foreign. It was tricky to learn, but David would send you MP3s and he would say it in English first, then phonetically, and then the way it should be said in Castathan or Irathient or Liberata, so it was very helpful. Basically, I think it helps any character, when you can have your own mother tongue, and then you can start speaking boring old English.” When not playing a Castithan, Curran says, “I speak a little bit of Vietnamese – as my wife has told me,” he notes with a laugh regarding his fluency in his spouse’s native tongue, “and I speak a little bit of French, a little bit of Czech – I can say ‘Hello’ in any language, ‘Buy you a drink?’ But I don’t speak anything fluently.”
Curran then says a phrase in Vietnamese. “It means, ‘I love you always.’ That’s the way I feel about my wife. That’s the way Datak feels about Stahma. But if anybody gets in his way, they’d better get out of my way.”
Speaking of how Datak feels about Stahma, she seems to come up with ideas that she suggests to her husband in a way that enables him to feel that he’s thought them up himself. Is Datak aware this is what Stahma is doing, or does he really think he’s coming up with the plans?
The answer is sort of both, Curran says. “I think he’s aware of it, but he’s a very proud creature. At the same time, she doesn’t just come out and throw things down my throat. It’s very similar to Jaime. Jaime’s very smart in the way she gauges people, and sometimes people have to be molded somewhat. You can’t just go and shove an idea down their throat, because they won’t accept it. With Stahma, it’s very suggestive, almost to the point where Datak will say something and she’ll say, ‘Oh, yes, my darling, that’s a great idea.’ And I think it’s my idea, but it started with her. So she does play with me a little bit like that, but it’s for the greater good, you might say, although he does listen to her and he knows that she is from a higher caste. He knows that her education was far superior to his education. Although his education is you might say streetwise, and sometimes that can be as powerful as a somewhat more intellectual approach to existence. He was raised in the gutter, as it were, and to survive, you have to smarten up your ideas pretty quickly.”
Having played two vampires now, Curran has some basis for comparison in terms of how comfortable or uncomfortable it is to where nonhuman makeup. Fortunately, the Castithans, though made up to be very pale, don’t require prosthetics. “I wear contact lenses,” Curran relates. “Sometimes contact lenses can get a little uncomfortable if you wear them for too long. I try to take them out as much as possible. And some days it gets quite hot in DEFIANCE – you wear this costume. But overall, it’s fine. I’ve done shows like UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION and BLADE II [his vampire roles]. That’s where I coined the phrase ‘prosthetic depression,’ because there’s a lot more – five, six hours in the [makeup] chair before you do an eight-, ten-hour day. It can be very tough. But again, [on DEFIANCE], we’re in the chair for an hour, hour-and-a-half, so it’s a small price to pay for what you get at the end of it.”
When did Curran come up with the notion of prosthetic depression? “I would always say to my friend, Jason Flemyng [during the filming of] LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN – I was the Invisible Man, he was Dr. Jekyll, and we’d go, ‘Are you depressed? Do you have prosthetic depression? Call 1-800 now. We’re here to listen,’” he laughs. “You’re sitting there in your makeup and your skin’s crawling and you can’t relax. Your eyes are open, you’ve got [fake] teeth in your mouth and people have to cut up your food for you. But hey, I’m not complaining – it’s nice to be working.”
A massive multiplayer online game version of DEFIANCE, which takes place in San Francisco while the TV series story transpires in St. Louis, was launched to coincide with the show. Has Curran played it yet? “I have, yeah. I like it a lot, but I played it at Comic-Con [in 2012]. So I think for gamers, it’s going to be fun to play the game and to watch the show.”
However, Curran sees DEFIANCE as much more than the kind of science-fiction that makes for good gaming. “I think there’s a transcendence in the show. For instance, WALKING DEAD, it’s got a genre, it’s zombies, but it’s so much more about the human condition, how human beings survive, how they get on together, and I think that’s a lot of what DEFIANCE is about and the epic scope of it as well, it’s going to have that depth of character. It’s very similar to how there have been exoduses of people from one land to another, the Highland clearances [in Scotland], the potato famine [in Ireland], the Italians moving, or what’s happening today in Eastern Europe or in Africa, people trying to move somewhere to get a better life, and how people accept them or won’t accept them. So it’s in many ways holding up a mirror to society, except there’s aliens involved.”
As for upcoming projects, Curran says, “There’s a show called LABYRINTH – it’s a Tandem production, they also produced PILLARS OF THE EARTH, the Ken Follett novel. This is a novel written by a woman called Kate Mosse, it’s got John Hurt in it. It’s a modern-day story, but it goes back to the Crusades, and it was shot in South Africa a year-and-a-half ago. It was on Channel Four at home [in the U.K.] and it will be coming out in the States. So that’s coming out, that should be quite exciting as well.”
What would Curran most people to know right now about DEFIANCE? “I feel this show is hopefully going to fill a gap [of a kind of show] that hasn’t been around for awhile and it’s very, very eclectic, very exciting, culturally, spiritually and it’s a fantastical world of new creatures and a lot of hope as well in society. I threw a lot in there, didn’t I? But there are many, many elements of this show which I think people will enjoy, so I hope people watch it. I think they will enjoy it.”
Written and Interviewed by Abbie Bernstein
Abbie Bernstein is an entertainment journalist, fiction author and filmmaker.
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