Members of the “Orphan Black” Clone Club would be surprised to find Felix Dawkins roughing it in the wilderness many miles to the north of Toronto.

But that’s where Jordan Gavaris is calling from — or trying to, anyway. The actor, who plays Felix in the hit BBC America drama, was so far into the wilds of the Belfountain Conservation Area that he had to hike an hour and a half to get back to relative civilization to get any cell phone coverage.

No matter: Both Felix and Gavaris are nothing if not determined.

“Orphan Black,” created by Graeme Manson and John Fawcett, is the sci-fi thriller about a young woman who discovers she has a clone — several clones, in fact, of different nationalities and interests. Tatiana Maslany, who plays all the clones, won an Emmy as best actress in a drama in September, only a few months after BBC America announced that the fifth season, premiering Saturday, June 10, would be the last.

Felix Dawkins is the campy, gender-fluid foster brother of Sarah Manning, the central clone in the story. He’s an artist who works out of an industrial loft, and makes money on the side as a hustler. Felix is fond of eyeliner, painting in the nude and rebel poet Arthur Rimbaud. He is also Sarah’s closest confidant as she and some of her sisters put their lives on the line trying to find out who created them and why. The show was an immediate success when it premiered in 2013, and sparked the formation of countless fan Clone Clubs, in real life and of course on social media.

Although filming on the show wrapped in March, Gavaris, 27, admits he’s still processing his separation from the cast, which also includes Maria Doyle Kennedy, Évelyne Brochu and Kevin Hanchard.

“It was very strange to leave behind five years of your life,” he says, explaining that the actors know each other best as their characters, which complicates his feelings about the end of the show. “Acting becomes very intimate, and you go through these emotions. So it’s very discombobulating afterwards to find the frequency of your relationships just as people.”

Felix and Gavaris have both evolved over the past five years. The actor was 22 when the show premiered. He was glad to get the part, but the series had a very small budget, and no one was prepared for what a huge hit it would become when it premiered.

Felix has always been arch, over the top, but he’s grown less flighty during his journey. He’s toughened up, shown himself to be a leader, put his own life in danger to protect Sarah and her young daughter Kira (Skyler Wexler).

Gavaris. who grew up in Caledon, Ontario, not too far from Belfountain, agrees that the show has changed him as well and attributes that to “the magic of the first big experience” that convinced him how much he loves acting.

“Your life changes in the way that someone has given you the opportunity to make a living doing what you really love to do,” he says. “Orphan Black” represented “the first time you get a taste of the possibility that this could be a real thing, that you could spend the next 50 years doing this thing that you really love.”

Unlike Maslany, who’d spent 18 years working and studying acting before she broke out in “Orphan,” Gavaris came to the show with little experience (primarily, the short-lived kids’ show “Unnatural History”) and no technique.

“I found training after I started doing ‘Orphan Black,’” he says. “I learned that the acting I really like is when the actors did a lot of bringing themselves, and where they’re at at the moment, to the character. So Felix became less a character that I put on, and more a character that I reached inside to find.”

Gavaris also found his own voice, to speak out publicly about political and social issues, and to become more involved in the gay community. He came out to his family at 19 and has always been out within the entertainment industry, but says he never had a platform to talk about his personal life until “Orphan Black” came along.

“People started asking me questions especially because of the character that I played. And I had a choice. I could have at that time come forward and gotten on a soapbox and been very vocal and very out. But ... I wasn’t brave enough. I was 22. I didn’t think I could represent myself or the community in a way that maybe I would feel proud of five years later.

“I wasn’t at place where I would have admitted that I had more things to learn and I am now. I’m more aware of how little I know.”

Gavaris doesn’t think you have to be gay to play gay characters— “I absolutely believed Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger loved each other in ‘Brokeback Mountain’”— but concedes that his sexuality gives him an understanding of what it means to be different, and that helped him shape Felix.

“Felix is gender-fluid. I’m not gender-fluid at all. I was playing with gender. I wasn’t playing with sexuality.”

Gavaris has received offers for post-“Orphan” projects, including a broadcast network show that he turned down because he felt the big-budget project was nonetheless undercooked. His disappointment in the quality of the project is one of the reasons he and his partner of four years, fellow actor Devon Graye (“Dexter”), whose “Allison Adams” screenplay is on the Black List compilation of promising unfilmed scripts, decided to do their own project.

“We’re hoping it could be something really landmark where you have a gay couple who are protagonists against a story that has nothing to do with them being gay,” he says. “We want to show what a real gay couple looks like.”

In person and on Twitter (@JordanGavaris), Gavaris is not shy about expressing his opinions — often his outrage — on a wide range of issues, including the purge, internment and torture of gay men in Chechnya; Canadian politics, ongoing debates over immigration and health care in the U.S.; and Donald Trump.

“I did make some inflammatory remarks about Donald Trump,” he says, which resulted in “people calling me an idiot and saying that I don’t understand geopolitics.

“I would never call myself an expert on geopolitics,” he counters. “I’m not studied in it. But what I do know is what’s right and wrong in terms of treatment of people.”

And yet a note of weariness creeps into his voice as he says, “I don’t know where I’m at with it right now. … I don’t know if we can change minds fighting the way that we’re fighting. Short of trying to teach people that admitting you were wrong about something, that there’s something more you can learn, short of humility, I don’t know where you start.”

For the next few weeks, the question for Gavaris and other cast members of “Orphan Black” is how you finish such an intense project as the BBC America drama.

Although he won’t reveal how the series will end, he thinks both that the show’s fans will be satisfied and that the door is still open for a stand-alone film or some other continuation of the story down the road.

“I think that’s part of the ‘Orphan Black’ universe,” he says. “It sort of travels along the edge of the supernatural. … It always does leave the door open for a universe expansion, just by the nature of the subject.”

David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle. Follow him on Facebook. Email: dwiegand@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV

Orphan Black: Fifth season premiere. 10 p.m. ET/PT Saturday, June 10, on BBC America.