Premiering Monday on Syfy, Defiance is a notable series for a couple of reasons. One is that it marks the first “hard” sci-fi show the network has launched in quite some time, in the vein of Stargate and Battlestar Galactica. Second, the show’s big video game tie-in stands out, as the series and game launch simultaneously, showing different parts of the same world.

Jaime Murray

I spoke to cast members Jaime Murray and Julie Benz about what to expect and their experience making the series, which takes place in the city of Defiance -- what we called St. Louis -- after several alien races have settled on Earth, in the wake of a great war.Jaime Murray has been a familiar face on series like Dexter, Spartacus and Warehouse 13 in recent years, but has a whole different look on Defiance, playing Stahma Tarr, part of an alien race called the Castithan.When I asked her about the makeup she wears, Murray replied, “Obviously in the script it kind of described her, and I don’t think too much about it because sometimes I’ll go up for short fat blondes or tall African American [roles] and I think, 'Well obviously they’ve decided to go a different way,' because they’re gonna get a skinny British girl with dark hair. So I just thought, 'Well, it’s an idea,' but often scriptwriters have these ideas, and by the time it’s on the screen, so many other people have tweaked it. So it came as quite a surprise to me when I realized that that’s actually how they needed me to look. I went and got wigs in LA, got the right wig, and I’m quite pale anyway, so I thought that will probably be it. Then when I got to Toronto, I realized that they fully intended on painting me white from head to toe. I don’t know whether it reads on camera, but you literally cannot touch me without white coming off me. I’m Snow White, and I leave little bits of white Jaime everywhere.”Stahma’s husband, Datak, is played by Tony Curran, and Murray laughed, noting, “Tony, in a scene, will want to stroke my face, and I’ll be like, ‘Not the face! Don’t touch the face.’ It was fun.”Murray described Stahma and Datak’s relationship as very close, but complicated by their very different, alien approach to romance, explaining, “I think Stahma is very good at reading when Datak is insecure or needs some help, and I think that she often has really good answers to his problems. But she can’t just say them, she has to go sideways about it. She has to make him think that it’s his idea. There’s a lot of gameplay and shifting power within the relationship. She’s wonderful to play as an actor, but I wouldn’t want that in any of my intimate relationships.”The Tarrs are a wealthy couple, and Murray remarked, “I would say that Datak has risen to that position maybe not by the most straightforward and the most righteous ways. He’s really kind of fought his way up from the gutter. But they’re aspirational, so they want standing and position in the town, maybe for different reasons for each other. Castithans are very class-driven, with a very strict hierarchy in their class system. We call it the “caste system” in our show, and he’s from the very lowest caste, so he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about that. He never would have, back on their planet, been able to move up through those ranks, but of course now he’s on Earth. He can reinvent himself slightly, and he wants to be in a well-respected position. On the other hand, Stahma was almost aristocracy on her own planet, so she’s not driven by the same insecurity, but she might have a sense of spite, which means that that’s where she needs to be or expects to be, because she is queen of the Castithans.”Former Dexter costars Murray and Benz are good friends in real life, and Murray said getting to work alongside Benz again was, “So much fun. Sometimes being on location, you can be a bit lonely. You know, you’re cut off from your friends and family, not only by really, really long distances but also time zones. You’ll think, ‘Oh, I’ll call my mom. Oh! It’s the middle of the night in the UK.’ You try and connect with people and realize they’re probably not awake yet. So it’s really nice to have a friend there on the ground who knows what’s going on and has got your back, so that was a gift.”

Continue to Page 2 to see what Julie Benz told us about Defiance.