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Killjoys: Hannah John-Kamen and Luke Macfarlane look forward to Seasons 4 and 5

All hail Team Awesome Force.

Sure, there has been a lot of drama so far on this season on Killjoys, what with Hullen Johnny, Dutch and Aneela in the Green and a baby on the way for D’avin. But there’s also been a lot of fun too. A lot of swagger. I think a lot of that comes from a cast, writers, showrunner and crew who all get what they’re doing and are having a blast doing it.

With that in mind, here are our interviews with Hannah John-Kamen and Luke Macfarlane, conducted during a set visit earlier this year.

Hannah John-Kamen
I’ve already asked a couple of people about this. Obviously, as an actor, it’s good to know that you’ve got a couple of seasons still to go. Why is it important to you to be able to close this out?
Hannah John-Kamen: It’s a real soothing feeling, to be honest, just to know that we can close it out and we can do it properly. We know the time that we can do it in. There’s the story of the Killjoys and of Dutch, also introducing Aneela last season. Knowing that we’ve got two seasons to continue and know when it ends means that we can have a hell of an ending.

As one of the three main characters or actors on the show, you were doing heavy lifting anyway. Then you had another character for you to play. Was it a daunting feeling in the beginning? Is it still daunting?
HJK: No. Actually, to be honest with you I embraced her with open arms. It was just like, ‘OK. This is exciting.’ ‘Cause it’s just the creating of a character is the fun part. That’s the real fun part. I remember doing that with Dutch and figuring out who she is. Then introducing this new character which I suppose is a villainous character, but actually, she’s not and is actually finding when you play a villain, you actually play yourself like you’re the good guy. That was really fun to do, and I absolutely adored that. It was amazing to have such a juxtaposition of Dutch and to find her. That was fun creating.

How do you tap into Aneela?
HJK: It was amazing to see with the writers and actually figure out, what is her backstory? It’s all Khlyen. It’s all linked in with Khlyen. As Dutch, as an actor, Hannah working with Rob Stewart as Dutch and having that history with Khlyen it was amazing to use that history with Khlyen and create this one with Aneela which actually goes back way, way, way further and actually is more damaged.

Near the end of that season where we just found her backstory, and she’s just such a damaged individual. You had to feel bad for her. She’d been propped on this pedestal as being this villain and it was Khlyen all along.
HJK: It was Khlyen. Also, it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t ask to be that. Also what’s amazing is what Michelle [Lovretta] does which is amazing is, there’s no such thing as good and bad. Actually at some point, what was so fun was it flipped. You’re kind of going, ‘Dutch, you’re the bad guy and Aneela is the good guy.’ It was amazing to have that flip of the two characters and that, as an audience to go, ‘Oh god, I’m feeling confused. I’m feeling conflicted here.’

Obviously, you can’t give too much away but what’s the elevator pitch for Season 4?
HJK: Well, now we know that there’s a bigger force than the both of them. We’re gonna definitely, definitely try and destroy the greater evil.

Luke Macfarlane
What does it mean for you as an actor to have two seasons to wrap this up, aside from getting to know you got a gig for job stability?
Luke Macfarlane: Twenty episodes, yeah. Well, especially in this genre you are constantly making these really intricate things and you kind of hope it all goes somewhere. It feels like there’s satisfaction to the conclusion. What does it really mean to me? I mean, you always wonder about these characters. You wonder where they go off to in your mind so I think, I’m hoping there’s some sort of peace and rest for that because like I said, I’ve never been able to do that with a character on a television show. I imagine it’ll be sort of like a beautiful funeral. I don’t know if I’m going to die or not.

Even if you die in genre you can still come back. You never know what’s going to happen.
LM: This is true. As we found out in this show specifically.

D’avin is going to be a father. That must’ve messed with your mind a little bit when you read the script in Season 3 that that was going to happen.
LM: Totally, absolutely. It’s an amazing thing too where you just have to, the given circumstances are you are a dad now and we do this amazing sci-fi thing. He’s become somebody different as it’s gone on. I think he had the most to shuck off and he’s in a way having run away from a family, the guy who’s now building his own family. So it’s really interesting, really connecting with this part of the storyline for him. And hopefully, that will carry on to Season 5.

This character has grown because in Season 1, Episode 1 when we first met him it was almost immediately a pissing contest with Johnny. There’s just an ease between these characters now. It’s so much fun to just sit back and watch their adventures and not worry about squabbling between them.
LM: Totally. There’s always little disagreements and stuff but we’ve moved beyond squabbling for sure. I also think what’s interesting about the show is we’re so used to these kinds of tropes in television like two guys fight over the girl. We’re kind of past those tropes. So as an actor it’s funny to have to reinvent what we are. It’s a little bit more complicated than just your typical two brothers who like the girl and want the girl. So it always keeps you on your toes a little bit.

Killjoys airs Fridays at 10 p.m. ET on Space.

Images courtesy of Bell Media.

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Killjoys: Showrunner Adam Barken discusses Season 4

When we last left Team Awesome Force, things were in a bit of a disarray. Dutch and Aneela (Hannah John-Kamen) had entered the green to do battle against The Lady, leaving Johnny (Aaron Ashmore) and D’Avin (Luke McFarlane) stunned.

Killjoys roars back on Friday at 10 p.m. ET on Space with one heck of a fun ride in “The Warrior Princess Bride.” Creator Michelle Lovretta bridges the current timeline with the past, mixing the trio of Dutch, Aneela and Khlyen (Rob Stewart) with the Dutch-Johnny origin story. It has everything Killjoys fans have come to love over the last three seasons: humour, snark, action and heart.

With two final seasons of Killjoys to look forward to, we sat down with new showrunner Adam Barken—who has been a writer and producer with the series since Season 1—to get the scoop on the adventure ahead.

Congratulations on becoming showrunner for Seasons 4 and 5 of Killjoys. What does that mean for you? Is that just more meetings?
Adam Barken: It’s more of everything. When we were done with Season 3, Michelle was feeling like, ‘All right, I kind of need to take a break and step back,’ and didn’t want to leave the show completely, so when she and I talked, we discussed how we would go forward. I still loved the show and had been her No. 2 for the last two seasons and had been on since the first, so she basically said, ‘I would still like to be involved if you were running it,’ and I said, ‘I’d only run it if you were still involved,’ so that worked out. So what it basically means is I’m here every day. I am vetting all the scripts, I’m breaking all the stories. Michelle’s involved to basically watch that process, to help me kind of shepherd them.

As both of the people who have been writing the show the longest, we kind of take a pass on everybody’s scripts and then yeah, a lot of meetings. A lot of meetings, which is just how you make television.

When I spoke to her in Season 2, she was already saying, ‘I would love to do this for a certain number of seasons and then step away because I’m always about the world building.’ She really loves that part that.
AB: Loves it. She’s great at it.

What about you? Do you like the world building as well?
AB: I love the world building as well. Not that she doesn’t, but I really like making TV. I like the meetings to a certain degree. I like the production stuff, and I love being in a writing room. I’m happy to go in and out of the room more so that I can kind of keep an eye on all the different departments and keep track of everything that’s going. Thankfully we’ve got the whole writing team back from last season.

How important is it to keep that writer’s room intact? I mean, so many writer’s room people that I talk to like yourself, there tends to be a couple of new faces every year. Other people rotate out. Why is it important to have everybody, this same group?
AB: It’s great because you just have an institutional memory, right? Everybody is …

You’ve got a shorthand already.
AB: Yeah, everybody knows everyone. We’ve kind of worked out all the personality kinks. We all know each other. We all know when to leave each other alone and when to bug each other. Then it also just means that everybody … any time a new person comes in a room, it can be a great experience because they bring fresh eyes but you also spend a lot of time going, ‘Yeah, we did that story already. Yeah, we’ve already done that beat.’ In this one, with this, you’ve always got a team going, ‘Oh, we already did that. All right, let’s do something new. Let’s do something different.’

What do you look for in a writer?
AB: Personally, what I love in a writer, especially in a writing room like this is you want ideas people. The job of a showrunner is to say no and so it’s very similar to a director in that what you want are people coming to you with five options and you being able to go ‘Yes, no, no, no, no,’ and you say no more than you say yes, so you’re looking for writers who have lots of ideas, throw them out constantly and then at the same time move on when an idea has been ‘No, we’re not gonna do that,’ and not take it personally and understand this is part of the job.

As I learned when I started in a writing room and was that person is first you’re like, ‘Oh, but that was a good idea,’ but then I get to save that for my show, which is nice, and what you’re trying to do is basically you’re all pulling together but you are pulling together towards one person’s vision, or in the case of this season, I would say two people’s, because Michelle and I are both intimately connected in terms of what the vision of the season is going forward.

The press release that Space sent out when they announced that they were going be the two final seasons, I think you were quoted, certainly, Michelle was, about the importance of being able to tell the story and having two seasons that do that. Why is it important? I mean, I think I know the answer, but why is it important to know that you’ve got two 10 episode seasons to finish with?
AB: Well, I mean, look. If we had known that we were only getting one season, we would have made that work as well. The idea that it was important was just knowing we had an endpoint, because when you know you have an endpoint, then you can build your stories to go towards it. With two seasons, it was great because even before we had gotten the order, Michelle and I had been talking, and we said, ‘You know, there’s a way to do what we were talking about,’ because we had some general ideas and tent poles, as if we had two seasons, we kind of know exactly how this would break out, so when they ended up saying, ‘How about two?’ We were like, ‘Great, we’ve already kind of thought that would be the way to do it.’

I think five is a good and a round number for television regardless of how many episodes. It’s five seasons, so with four we can kind of do some interesting stuff. We can mess around with our convention, but end on a cliffhanger that points to specific things. You know, Season 3 obviously ended on some pretty big cliffhangers, but they were pretty open-ended because we didn’t know if we were coming back, so our feeling was, ‘OK, if we don’t come back, then basically we’ve given the audience a sense of, like, the adventure continues.’ With this, we’re able to end it in a way that feels like … put a bit more of a bow on it.

Do you already know what the end scenes are? The final lines are at the end?
AB: We’ve definitely got some strong ideas about what those moments are and what the feeling is that we want people to come away from, and we’re just kind of still … as we’re figuring out season five, we’re … you know, making TV is definitely building a bridge from both sides and hoping they meet in the middle.

How often do things change, where you think, ‘Well, this will be what the end is,’ and then you’re getting there. You’re like, ‘Well, no, that isn’t going be the end, because things have changed.’
AB: Constantly.

Tony Nappo is playing Big Joe, what can you say about Big Joe?
AB: Joe was a character we introduced back in Season 1 and so he was Dutch’s mentor who, by then, had gone to seed and obviously we killed them, so how are we having them back? So what we’re doing is we got to do something really fun at the beginning of this season because we wanted to shake things up a bit and actually tell basically an origin story and we wanted to do a story of what happens when Dutch and Johnny first came to the quad.

Because we loved Tony and I remember doing the read through of 106 and I remember him reading it and getting really good and then he gets to the end and goes, ‘Ah, fuck, I’m dead?’ I was like, ‘That’s why you should always read the script before you do the read through, Tony.’ But it also … we felt the same way. We were like, ‘Goddammit, we got this great actor, this great character,’ so we get a chance to see him in action and see what he was like as a Killjoy, which was a lot of fun, so yeah, I’m very excited about that one.

Killjoys is one of those shows where no line is ever a throwaway line, no scene can just be like, ‘Oh, I can just rest because this won’t matter.’ Everything matters on this show.
AB: We want you guys to watch it many times. We hope that, yeah, the stuff that we work on … because that’s, you know, from our perspective, if we’re gonna get people’s eyeballs for 44 minutes, we want to be able to give them not only something that is a fun, hopefully fun diversion, that if they feel by the end, ‘OK, I got what I wanted,’ but if they’re gonna go back, hopefully, they’ll see that, you know, we’re trying to make sure everything feels like it matters.

Stephanie Morgenstern will direct this season. How did that come about?
AB: Because as we were looking for directors, we knew that Stephanie had stepped up and been directing in X Company. I’d been working with Stephanie since she and Mark [Ellis] created Flashpoint, so it just seemed like a no-brainer. We knew we wanted to have somebody in that was good, smart, and Stephanie just fit the bill. And Temple Street had worked with her on X Company, of course, so it just seemed like a no-brainer.

Killjoys airs Fridays at 10 p.m. ET on Space.

Images courtesy of Bell Media.

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Photo gallery: Killjoys — “The Warrior Princess”

As of today, there are just 12 days left before Season 4 of Killjoys jumps back onto our television screens. Yes, I have been counting. And, after checking out these exclusive images released by Bell Media, I’ve even giddier.

Look for my feature story on Season 4 next week, plus interviews and extended coverage as the newest 10 episodes roll out. In the meantime, here’s a handful of images from the first instalment, “The Warrior Princess,” and the episode synopsis from Space.

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Trapped in the mysterious and mind-bending greenspace and on the run from the deadly Lady, Khlyen and Aneela struggle to stay one step ahead of the Lady while keeping a wounded Dutch alive with a story that he promises her will save her life: the tale of Dutch and Johnny’s first mission in the Quad. He tells the story of the time when, down to their last few Joy, Dutch and John accepted a simple cargo transportation gig to the armpit of the galaxy and how this led to them facing off with a deadly assassin.

Season 4 of Killjoys returns Friday, July 20, at 10 p.m. ET on Space.

Images courtesy of Bell Media.

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Space renews Killjoys for Season 3

From a media release:

– Hannah John-Kamen, Aaron Ashmore, and Luke MacFarlane return to star as the Quad’s favourite interplanetary bounty hunters –
– Production begins this winter in Toronto –
– Season 2 finale airs tomorrow night at 9 p.m. ET –

A day before the Season 2 finale and hours before a cast appearance at Canada’s largest genre convention Fan Expo, Space confirmed today that it has renewed its most-watched original series ever, KILLJOYS, committing to an additional 10, one-hour episodes. Season 3 begins production in Toronto this winter, and is expected to debut as part of Space’s popular summer lineup in 2017.

Created by showrunner Michelle Lovretta and produced by Temple Street in association with Space and Syfy, KILLJOYS follows a trio of reclamation agents – or “Killjoys” – as they get pulled further into political turmoil and the deepening mystery surrounding the Quad system, despite their vow to never take sides. Season 3 of the genre series sees the return of Hannah John-Kamen as Dutch, a stout-hearted bounty hunter with a fierce dedication to her Killjoy family, and on a quest to solve the mystery of her own identity; Aaron Ashmore as her loyal partner John, the witty tech wizard with a vulnerable heart; and Luke MacFarlane as D’avin, a born soldier who’s tactical skills and loyalty are as strong as his jawline.

Tonight at FAN EXPO in Toronto, Space presents a special advance screening of the KILLJOYS Season 2 finale at 6:30 p.m. ET in the John Bassett Theatre. Immediately following the screening, INNERSPACE hosts Ajay Fry, Teddy Wilson, and Morgan Hoffman moderate a jam-packed KILLJOYS panel with star Aaron Ashmore, cast mates Sarah Power, Rob Stewart, Thom Allison, Morgan Kelly, and Tamsen McDonough, along with showrunner Michelle Lovretta. Fans with a valid FAN EXPO pass or tickets for Thursday night have access to the panel. Admittance is first come first served. For more info on acquiring FAN EXPO tickets and passes, click here.

Season 2 of KILLJOYS on July 1 debuted with an impressive audience of 444,000, a 12% increase from Season 1. Throughout its Season 2 run, the series has reached nearly 1.1 million viewers each week and more than 3.1 million to viewers to date.

Season 1 of KILLJOYS is available now on CraveTVTM.

In the Season 2 finale of KILLJOYS “How to Kill Friends and Influence People,” (Friday, Sept. 2 at 9 p.m. ET on Space), the Killjoys and an old enemy join forces in a desperate bid to thwart Level Six’s plans for The Quad.

KILLJOYS was created by Michelle Lovretta (LOST GIRL, THE SECRET CIRCLE) who also serves as executive producer and showrunner. Executive producers are David Fortier, Ivan Schneeberg, and Karen Troubetzkoy. Universal Cable Productions distributes the series worldwide.

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Killjoys’ Hannah John-Kamen details Dutch’s Season 2

“More challenges, more questions to be answered, more characters. Some questions answered. Bigger, more action. Romance. Explosions!” That’s Hannah John-Kamen’s description of Season 2 of Killjoys. And if what happened in Episode 1 is any indication, she wasn’t kidding.

We’ve already gotten indications, through “Dutch and the Real Girl,” that Khylen’s actions are a reaction to a larger story, something John-Kamen outlined when we spoke last January from the set of the Space and Syfy drama.

We’re talking on the set of Season 2 while you’re in the midst of production. Do you feel like you’re hitting your stride at this point?
Hannah John-Kamen: To be honest, when we came back for Season 2 it felt like we’d never left. We really, really picked up where we left off. We were in our stride straight away.

The Old Town set this season is incredible. As an actor, it’s just another layer to help you get into this character, isn’t it?
One of the most exciting parts is when you see, in the script, that we’re going to be in a whole new world. And then to see the sets is so exciting.

Was it a bit of a learning curve for you, coming into a genre that is so beloved and has a built-in audience?
I remember when the only thing that was out while we were shooting Season 1 was a picture and a small synopsis of the show. But then we did the Fan Expo here in Canada and in the back of my mind I wondered if we were going to have any fans because there was so little information about the show. And then we went through the room and it was packed full of fans already. I remember the questions they asked the panel were so amazing and in sync and intellectual about the show. The questions about The Quad, about Leith, Westerley and the politics. It was nice to have a built-in audience, but it’s also nice to have a new audience. This show has action, drama, romance, comedy … everything that appeals to an audience.

Dutch had quite the journey last season. Khylen, the fight with D’Avin … she’s gone through a lot. Will Khylen be a big part of her storyline in Season 2?
Yes. It’s unfinished business. When we left Episode 10 in Season 1, there are so many more questions to be answered. It’s bigger than just Dutch and Khylen now. Now it’s expanding. The relationship with Khylen isn’t just about Dutch anymore, it’s everyone in The Quad now. It’s another journey.

Killjoys_S2_cast
Killjoys images courtesy of Space

Dutch has got to be pretty pissed off at this point. It’s one thing for Khylen to come after her, but now he’s targeting D’Avin and Johnny.
But not everything is black and white, especially with Khylen. It could be being done for the greater good; there is a reason why he’s doing the things he’s doing.

It’s so much fun to hate him. Rob Stewart plays him so well.
He’s a lovable rogue! It’s fun to hate him, but at the same time there is such a love for Yala, the little girl that he saved, and we still don’t know why he saved her. He’s protecting Dutch, always has and always will.

I know that we will be visiting more of Dutch’s Yala phase. I’d love to explore the first time that Dutch and Johnny met, with her in a bloody wedding dress.

Did you have any questions for Michelle Lovretta between Season 1 and 2?
Michelle is so amazing and open to a knock on the door and talking about the arc and in general what’s going to happen. I don’t know details about each episode because those can always change.

Talk about Dutch’s wardrobe. Pretty kick-ass.
Are you kidding?! I love the wardrobe. It’s so gorgeous. The wardrobe is so important. The material, the leather, it’s harsh but sexy. And then, when I go undercover, the wardrobe is elegant but with the Dutch twist on it. Honestly, it really does make the character.

What’s your elevator pitch that summarizes Season 2?
More challenges, more questions to be answered, more characters. Some questions answered. Bigger, more action. Romance. Explosions!

Killjoys airs Fridays at 9 p.m. ET on Space.

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