Tonight Syfy airs an all-new episode of its series Dark Matter. The series, based on the graphic novel by Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie, who also serve as executive producers on the series, follows the crew of a derelict spacecraft, the Raza, who have awakened from stasis with no memory of who they are or how they got on board. The six crew members have started to unravel their pasts, which include learning they were all criminals, but much is still a mystery to them as they continue to move ahead to a future of their choosing.

Recently star Anthony Lemke, who plays Three, talked to Jamie Ruby of SciFi Vision in an exclusive interview about who his character really is and what fans can expect from the rest of the season.

Shooting the show itself was easier than most projects, because a lot of the cast and crew had already worked together before. "I would say that it was an easy shoot in a lot of ways. The folks who we were shooting with, a lot of them had shot together for five years on Lost Girl, and so we benefitted from that sort of family aspect.

"...But any time you get one hundred and fifty people working together on a new project, there's going to be, you know, 'how do we work together' problems.

"And I would say in the first couple episodes, although on the whole they were quite smooth, you know, we were just working out the kinks. How do you work together? Who needs what? And how do people communicate? Again, it was probably a lot easier than on most shows, because that happens on every show, but here there was this shorthand that was developed between a lot of folks.

"But then of course you have new people coming in to an established team, and that sometimes created I would say just organizational challenges, and that's it...It's in every show I've ever worked on, like anybody who's ever worked in a large group realizes, you have to learn how to work together first."

Something that could prove a challenge at times was not knowing all of what was in store for their characters. "[Another] challenge that we had probably had to do with the nature in which actors are used to preparing, which is, we know a lot about our backstories, and we have a lot of information at our disposal, that we just didn't in this case. We had Joe on set and we could ask him if we were really sort of lost, and said, 'listen I just need to know.' And I know there were certain instances where certain actors went to Joe and said, 'Joe I've got to know for this scene. I have an inkling in this direction or this direction about who my character is or what might happen in the future. And I think it's really important for me to know when I'm playing this scene,' and you know, Joe is a smart guy, so he would give the actor the appropriate direction without revealing the truth. And I'd say that this was a unique challenge to this show."

The actors have been done shooting season one for a few months now, and Lemke enjoys having the time to get to watch the show while it airs. "It's been great being able to sort of almost just step back like a fan and watch this show that way, since, you know, sometimes you're on shows where it's on the air while you're shooting. It's a bit of a different experience."

The actor enjoyed getting to meet fans at Comic-Con recently and was happily surprised by the turn out. "For us, it was interview after interview after panel after signing, and I was kind of shocked. I think we were all kind of shocked when we showed up at our panel. I don't know exactly how many people were there, but the room sat twelve hundred and it looked to me that it was a good two-thirds full, if not maybe a bit more, and that was for a show that had only aired four episodes at that point in time. I would say that that was my largest surprise, and I think I wasn't alone in that. I think we were all kind of half expecting to be speaking to our assembled publicists, some folks from Syfy, and a few Zoie Palmer fans, but other than that, we were shocked by that particular turn out.

"And I think what I thought was really neat about that, was beyond the turnout, the fans had real serious questions; they'd been watching the show. There were programmed questions that Vanessa [Piazza], one of the producers, asked us, and then after that it was sort of maybe half audience questions, and they were smart questions by people who really had a handle on the characters and the world of the show. So that was a really pleasant surprise for me."

Lemke has really enjoyed the fan reaction so far. "I've loved it, and I'm looking forward to seeing it grow. I know that the show brings in various different followings, pretty loyal sci-fi followings, be they the Stargate folks or Zoie Palmer's fans, or Jodelle [Ferland] I know has a pretty solid following of folks from her body of work. So it's sort of bringing those folks in, but then it's also bringing a lot of other folks - call them new fans, if you will - who are picking up with the story and falling in love with the characters. And I think that part has been really rewarding to see, because fundamentally, that's who we're making this stuff for."

The actor takes both the positive and negative comments that they received in the beginning in stride. "You really want to be able to have really big numbers, of course, so you get can get a season two and all that stuff, but what's neat about now versus say ten years ago, is really big numbers also means that you're going to be able to interact with folks online who have opinions, be they positive or negative. (Laughs) Specifically there were a lot of negative opinions in the beginning, which I thought were a lot of fun, and I often retweeted those ones as much as I retweeted anything else, just because I think it's kind of funny. I love it. It's a really rewarding part of my life right now and I think it also helps sort of generate the world that we're shooting in, you know, where there's this sort of two-way conversation that's happening between the folks who are watching and the folks who are creating."

Even if some fans didn't like Three's attitude at the beginning, Lemke knew what was to come, and fans were surprised when they recently saw a softer side of Three. The actor enjoys getting to play both sides of the character. "I'm thankful that I get to play both, because I think it's the joy of the character like Three, that you can literally have folks saying, 'I hate the guy,' whatever, 'he's a jerk; he's self-centered,' or 'he's a poor knock-off of Jayne (Firefly),' whatever the hell it is they're saying about the character, that you're not supposed to like this guy. And people have expressed that dislike in many different ways. But I always knew where it was going, that there was this story that would change people's perceptions of the character.

"So for me, that's rewarding as an actor - to be honest probably more rewarding than to be playing a character for who's backstory everyone goes, 'oh yeah, that makes perfect sense,' and it feeds back into the myth of the character that people have created in their own minds.

"So I feel fortunate that there is a growth in the character. It's not like all of a sudden in episode eight he becomes like a nice, soft-hearted warm dude; he doesn't. Joe is a better writer than that.

"But I think you definitely see him become more a part of the team in his own way as the episodes move on. There will always be distrust I think between Three and certain characters, but in a way I almost see it - like Three in my mind has always been the character that would have been captain of the ship if it hadn't been that one thing that happened in his past in that made him sort of wounded goods and made him bitter and angry and all the rest of that stuff, and I feel like there's a journey that Three is going on. And it's a slow journey, but I think that you see him sort of step up throughout the rest of the season in small kind of ways and have different relationships, with like Five (Ferland), and even take on at times, you know, almost a paternal sort of relationship with Five. But again, it's all subtle and small and stuff that you just didn't see in the first sort of seven or six episodes, and that's been fun to play."

The actor, of course, couldn't reveal specifically what has made Three who he is, but he said that the audience would find out more by the end of the season about all of the characters, just not everything. "You'll definitely find out more about the characters, but one of the really interesting things about the way Joe and Paul have laid out the multiple seasons they have in their minds, is that you don't actually get all of the answers by the end of the first season. You don't really know why we're all on the ship. You get answers for certain characters, but even then - like you've seen episode eight, and you've seen the sort of flashbacks in Six (Roger Cross)'s mind, so you have an idea of who he is, but you still don't really know exactly how he got on the ship. Like what's our origin story? We get all these tiny little hints here and there, but we don't really know how the band of brothers got together, which is kind of what the starting point is of almost every single series, but you don't know this [in Dark Matter]. You haven't the faintest clue. And I don't know as an actor - Joe knows as a creator, but he won't tell us. [Though] I do know more about Three's past than the audience currently knows and than the audience will likely know at the end of the first season, and that influenced the manner in which I played my character from episode whatever - the middle of the season onwards."

Lemke talked to the fact that we really don't know how the characters got to the Raza or what really happened to them before they arrived or what brought them there, but regardless, they did perform criminal acts once on board. "What Joe created in the very beginning, sort of this bunch of criminals running around space, it's accurate. I've read a lot of stuff like on Twitter and blogs where people were like, "Now they're all of a sudden good." We aren't; that's not what this currently is, [at least] to my knowledge...But I can say, if you've seen episode eight, you know the characters are not all who they seem, and that even continues on right through episodes 12-13, where we think we know who the characters are and we're constantly being thrown curve balls.

"You know, the question is, are their rap sheets real; were they really criminals? You know, in the very beginning in the first episode where it says whatever 234 cases of murder and highjacking all the rest of the stuff, my understanding is that's real; that's legit. Now what led these guys to be on the actual Raza committing these particular crimes and living in this manner, I don't know. In some cases we do find out sort of parts of it, one of the characters very specifically, and then others a lot less so. But to my knowledge, yes, this is a crew of folks who may have started off in different places, from maybe good points in their lives or bad points, who've ended up in this place, and they're a group of mercenaries."

The actor talked to the fact that sometimes, he can't even trust what he himself knows. "I can't even trusts things I think I know about the character, because, you know, you get to an episode and you're like, 'oh darn I thought that's like whatever.' We were going under the assumption of X and all of a sudden it's Y. We're almost in as much of the dark as you guys are."

That makes them excited to find out more. "To be honest it makes us really really really want to read the scripts. When we come out we're just desperate to read the scripts, and to get a second season, because I want to know how the story continues."

Lemke doesn't like to wait either. He had to leave the set one time before reading the script, so he had his wife read a copy of it to him over the phone. "I live about two hours outside of town, so when I'm shooting I stay in town, but then I go home on the weekends, because, you know, my wife and family are a couple hours outside of town. And you know, you can't read in the car, so I called phone my wife, you know, at 10:30 at night, and said, "Honey can you read the script to me?"

There is a lot of cool future technology within the script that's been written into the show, some of which may not be that far off. If the actor could enjoy using some of that tech in real life, he'd like the Transfer Transit. "Although a lot of this stuff feels really far in the future, it might not be as far as all that, like with the androids and all that stuff. But if there was a technology that I could use personally, it would 100% be this idea of the Transfer Transit. I mean it's kind of as close to a teleporter as we kind of have on the ship. I mean, it's that idea where you can go experience something across the other side of the galaxy without actually having to travel there, but yet you're there and you experience it and have the memories and all the rest of that stuff. I think that's kind of neat. That whole stuff is a little weird on the technological aspect of like downloading memories into my brain and stuff, but I think that would be cool."

The series is filmed primarily on the gorgeous ship, the Raza. Lemke's favorite part of the set of the ship is the bridge. "To be honest, I just love the bridge. [With] everything else you could be on some kind of other show on some kind of other set. It looks like a spaceship or whatever, but it could technically be the hallway of a research facility sometime in the future, you know, but the bridge is the bridge."

The actor loves the retro design of the ship. "I love the sort of retro elements in that it's got these big buttons from the 60s and that kind of thing, but it's also got like the advanced computer screens, and it feels like it almost was cobbled together from the tritest matter of different ships. Clearly that was on purpose. We could have had a very new shiny looking ship that was all touchscreen and holograms, but they didn't do that on purpose. And what's interesting, is some of the older button-y looking kind of things are actually not at all old. They're entirely contemporary and new modern technology that exists in say the music industry, but plugged into one of the consoles, it looks like these buttons are old. But actually, it's literally like cutting edge technology, but it has that retro almost Star Wars feel with these larger buttons and whatever else. And I love that, I just think it's a lot of fun. I mean, I think Joe and Paul and the producers and the set designers thought pretty carefully about the look they wanted, and there's a real nod to the older sci-fi shows, and I think it works. Except for, it's art, right? Everybody has their own interpretation. Some folks would be like, 'oh come on, you know, these old buttons, this that and the other.' Well, they did that on purpose. You know, it wasn't like they couldn't find a bunch of flat screens or holograms. That was a choice on their part to make the ship look kind of retro, but not retro in the whatever twenty third century, but retro to us like in the way we think about spaceships from the 1970s and 80s. I think that was a choice on their part, and I happen to like it, but it makes that space my favorite space on the show."

The actor also has a favorite location outside of the ship. "My favorite location on location is the one in episode nine, the one where Four goes back to his planet. We've shot in a lot of cool places, and I just like the scene that's shot in the woods. There's this sort of a showdown in a scene in the woods that my character's a part of.

"I've seen the way it looks on camera, and, you know, it just was the right time of spring where there weren't any leaves on the trees yet; there wasn't any snow on the ground, and it looked a little bit like November. You know, that sort of barren poles as far as the eye can see, and I just thought it really worked, because we spent so much time inside buildings, locked in buildings, locked in spaceships, you know, that kind of thing, that to be out in this so obviously natural setting that looks like a forest [works]. However, it's not a forest where you're losing the depth because the cover has come in, where you can't see for literally a mile through all the trees in this forest if you're shooting in the summer, but now you can. So I think it's great, this almost cathedral like setting in which to have this showdown, and I just loved that."

You can catch Anthony Lemke in episode nine of Dark Matter, airing tonight on Syfy.