GateWorld: Absolutely. You kept coming back. 2013, you’re going to be a busy man. Tell us what you can about participating in Defiance. Everyone’s excited about this series.
Dion Johnstone: Oh yeah, I’m excited. Very excited. It premieres April 1st, 2013, and it’s a cross-platform between an online game that you can play and the TV series which you can watch, and events that happen in the show also are translated and take place in the game, so it’s happening simultaneously. Although there are two different cities within the world that [is] taking place. So all the gameplay that you do is in a different city as the show is set.
For me it was really exciting. I play a character called Nizar. He’s of an alien race called the Irathients. He’s a spirit rider, which is sort of like a “Hell’s Angels” of the Irathients. They’re very dramatic and tribal and aggressive bunch of people. Their leader is Sukar. It was fascinating because the production of Defiance, there’s maybe five, possibly seven different alien species that we meet throughout the show. It’s not just one. And they all have their own languages. Quite a lot of my text was in Irathient.
GW: So it’s going to be subtitled?
DJ: I don’t know! I don’t know in the end how much they’ll subtitle, how much they’ll want left as mystery. I guess that is left up to production. But we had to learn what it meant, what we were saying, and play the scenes fully in a different language. It was really exciting. You get the opportunity to lay down a track that no one’s done yet in a same way that a bible was being created when I was working on Stargate, and there’s a bible for the Klingon in Star Trek. There will be bibles that are being created for Defiance.
It’s a great exercise of just that tool of working on different languages. They do some beautiful, beautiful prosthetic work on the alien cultures, they’re just gorgeous, all the different varieties that you meet. The stakes of the show are very high. I think it’s going to be very exciting when it comes out, first of its kind.
GW: That’s awesome. Any opportunities possibly for returning later on if the show’s successful?
Dion Johnstone: Not right now in terms of how my storyline goes, but you never know.
GW: That’s great. And you are heading to Chicago!
DJ: I am! At the end of the month.
GW: There you go! One of my favorite cities. Julius Caesar. You’re going to be playing Mark Antony. Were you pretty familiar with Julius Caesar before auditioning for that? I read it in high school.
DJ: I’m a big comic book fan and I’m an artist as well, too. I drew my own comics when I was a kid. When I was in elementary years my parents were worried — they loved the fact that I loved comic books but they really wanted me to get into the classics and start getting me reading novels and literature.
As a way of helping bridge that gap they were at a flea market one day and they found these old comic books produced in the sixties, I believe, called Classics Illustrated. So there was Moby Dick and Three Musketeers. And one of them was Julius Caesar. I still have the copy of that.
GW: Is it line by line or is it condensed?
DJ: It’s a condensed version of it it but it is the text from the play. So that was my first introduction to Shakespeare, through a comic book. So when we hit that time in school where you’re learning Shakespeare and everyone has to take turns reading it, it was easier for me because I had those comic images in my head. I had a visual attachment to the words.
I played Octavius Caesar at Stratford maybe four or five years ago when we did Julius Caesar there. So I’ve been in the production as well, too. I’m looking forward to this production that we’re going to do, and playing Mark Antony. We’re setting it in a modern American political landscape. It should have some very exciting relevance to audiences.
GW: Wow, that’s really cool. That would be almost bizarre to be involved with a character, Octavius, and then, even in a different setting, to re-approach it again inside of another character, almost like jumping bodies. It’s like “OK, I was that guy, I know those lines,” Because I imagine the lines are all intact. You’re just changing appearance. That sounds really cool. You think your home base really is theater?
DJ: I’m actually looking to shift my home base into film and television. I took the last year off of theater to just focus on film and TV and basically started making the rounds and all of the various shows in Toronto over this past year. It’s been great to get me back into this scene.
I’ll have a bit of a break in-between Julius Caesar and then I’ll be playing Othello for Stratford in the summer. I’ll have a three-month opportunity to pluck away a little bit more at film and TV. But when I wrap Othello in the fall of 2013 my goal is to really to put back that concentrated effort into film and television.
I love both mediums. Theater is always going to be a part of it. I’ve invested quite a number of years solidly in theater, to really get myself to the place where I can play the roles that I’m playing now.
GW: It’s a foundational thing. It really is. It’s one of the oldest forms of entertainment. It still resonates even after thousands of years.
DJ: And I think it’s immediacy. It’s happening right there in front of you in that moment, in that way, only for you. And I love film and television. There’s a level of intimacy that you can achieve on screen that you can’t do on stage. It just wouldn’t reach the back row of a two thousand seat theater, and in a way I find working on each helps strengthen the other.
Film and TV is a really good bull**** monitor. [Laughter] The moment you lie the camera catches it. It forces you to keep reinvesting, to find the truth of what it is you’re expressing, and then to bring that to the stage, so that even though your voice needs to be bigger in terms of how you project that out to the audience, that truthful place still needs to be as intimate within yourself. I find they really help influence each other.
GW: I have a friend in LA who does props work during the day but a lot of times will take his son to go do auditions for commercials and things like this. The little boy’s like nine years old. They’ve landed one really big commercial in a couple of years that’s going to take care of his college. But at the same time there’s driving all over LA, trying to get work for him.
The amount of competition that’s out there to get those roles is just staggering. I don’t know if I could do it. I don’t now how you guys manage to do that. If you’re not really well known then I imagine it’s like to scale. The more work you do, the more well known you are, the greater your chances of getting a particular role or a particular job. It’s just hard!
DJ: Yeah! And I think even with the body of work that you can create, you always run the risk of film and television — because so much if it is what’s hot at the moment. I think, if as an actor you can build your career just solidly through your body of work, just by continuing to work, you make enough connections in the industry and people respect and like to work with you that you will continue to work.
The thing with fame and celebrity status is it’s very fleeting. It’s got very little to do with the acting. It’s a whole other thing that you can’t control. So you can be hot in the moment and then all of a sudden you can’t get work after that, nobody wants to see you.
GW: You may have done something that bombed!
DJ: Absolutely! Or you played a fantastic role in a long-running series and now that the series is done people can’t see you as anything other than that role. So there’s many pitfalls that are so hard to predict in this industry even when you are successful, let’s say.
I think that’s part of why I like to go back and “hit the boards” as they say, sort of reinvest in theater from time to time. I think that’s the place where it’s really the actor’s craft. It’s great when you can be in a show that’s got beautiful production values, but you don’t need that, in the end, to tell a story. So when I’m feeling like I’m losing touch with that it’s always great to fly back in and do a play and reinvest yourself.