Stop smiling, Kris Holden-Ried. Literally, stop smiling.

That’s not far from the full scope of direction Holden-Ried was given for his role as Dyson in the second season of Lost Girl, which currently is airing Sundays on Showcase.

“No, it hasn’t been a fun season to be Dyson,” Holden-Ried admitted. “I’m looking forward to season three.

“I’ll be glad to be done with this. Not to be able to feel love sucks.”

Lost Girl is a Canadian fantasy series starring Anna Silk as Bo, a “free agent” Succubus trying to survive in the cutthroat light and dark work of Fae. Holden-Ried’s Dyson is a wolf-shifter and Bo’s previous love interest, but at the end of the first season Dyson made a sacrifice to save Bo’s life.

Dyson bargained away what mattered to him most, which was his ability to feel love for Bo.

“The thing about season two is, it was supposed to be 13 episodes, and then it got extended to 22,” said Holden-Ried, explaining his good news/bad news predicament.

“(The producers) couldn’t figure out a way to (wrap up Dyson’s no-love story arc in the middle of the season) without it being climactic. So something that was supposed to be sort of short-lived became an entire season-long arc of basically Dyson being a self-tortured, miserable jerk.

“They did definitely take a lot of bullets from my gun (as an actor). How do you play the absence of something? How do you play not being able to feel something?”

With Dyson being a main character in Lost Girl, viewers still had to be engaged and interested in his manoeuvres.

“We didn’t want Dyson to become an apathetic character, because an apathetic character is very uninteresting,” Holden-Ried said. “So we made it that he can feel everything else except for love, and he also can feel the absence of love. So Dyson reacts to that with anger, frustration, self-destructive behaviour.

“There were thoughts about making the role even darker, but then everyone got kind of scared about, ‘Well, what kind of show are we doing? Can we afford to have a character who’s that dark?’ So we kind of got caught in the middle with Dyson, with sort of an adolescent version of someone going through a real heartache. Because we still have to find those moments of levity, and how do we do that?

“I don’t know if it’s going to pay off in the end, to be honest. I’m thankful that as of now, people still are watching me and going, ‘Oh, poor Dyson.’ I get a little nastier (in the next couple of episodes), so I might burn some bridges with some audience members.”

Well, hybrid wolf creatures do have a nasty side, as Holden-Ried remembers all too well from his childhood.

“I have two step-brothers, and they sat me down when I was about eight years old and made me watch An American Werewolf in London,” Holden-Ried recalled. “And that tortured and scarred my psyche for a good 10 years.

“Even when I was 18 years old, walking around my farm at night, I would carry an axe with me, because I was afraid a bloody werewolf was going to jump out of the woods. I was a well-armed teen walking around the woods of Southern Ontario. So it took a little while to grow into this part.”

Well, grow into it he did, notwithstanding his character’s second-season despair.

What we need is for Dyson to go in the complete opposite direction in season three, kind of a Broadway Dyson, with big eyes and broad gestures.

“That’s right, yeah,” Holden-Ried agreed enthusiastically. “And he sings a lot.”

bill.harris@sunmedia.ca