NYCC 2015: Josh Holloway, Producer Ryan Condal Talk USA’s ‘Colony’

My first knowledge of USA’s Colony came during San Diego Comic-Con, when I saw branded SUVs and soldiers driving for Uber. I tried to get a ride but they wouldn’t stop. I spent the next twenty minutes walking lost in the Gaslamp District.

But I didn’t have a grudge come last week’s New York Comic-Con, when I sat down with the executive producers and star USA’s newest sci-fi drama set in a dystopian future. Starring Josh Holloway and Sarah Wayne Callies (from The Walking Dead). But don’t tell them that it’s sci-fi. They’re adamant about that.

“I think it’s not that much about science fiction,” said series creator Ryan Condal to me in the NYCC press room. “They’ve installed a proxy government of humans and it’s really about the rules of society that have been in us, about a family’s struggle to survive in this mysterious and brand new world. It’s not like we’re fighting aliens, that’s not what the show is about. It’s really about colonization. For us, almost every country in the world has either been a colony or a colonizer and that’s what our show is really exploring.”

Dim futures are en vogue now, from The Hunger Games to The Walking Dead. When asked how Colony could resonate in this era, the producers remained hopeful.

“Our audience is so well educated now with science fiction and genre story-telling,” Condal acknowledges, “but I think it is the themes of the show that we’re exploring: colonization, occupation, living under a policed state or a militarized government… Seeing similar stories told where the worlds are entirely different than in most other stories, I think is really going to hook in the fans. It makes the show unique.”

Star Josh Holloway thinks it’s more of a “character study.”

“It’s not the big flashy war that the normal genre begin with,” he says. “What’s happening is the after effects of [those] decisions we have to make, the moral compromises to survive. Ultimately it’s one of the oldest stories in human history. It’s about occupation, it’s about colonization. We’ve either been occupied or occupied somebody else throughout human history. So these themes, I think is what the audience is going to grasp on to because it’s an old human story.”

Josh Holloway stars as Will Bowman, an ex-FBI agent that was once a “man hunter” and now becomes the hunted throughout Colony‘s first season. “It’s not a superhero show,” he explains, “It’s not physical in that way but he gets physical and he’s in desperate situations… it’s more about putting puzzles together. That’s his super power, if you will.”

Ruggedly handsome, I doubted that Holloway had any difficulty adapting to the role. I was right. For the Georgia native, it was a cinch.  “I love physical action. I grew up with three brothers in the country so for me, that’s like putting on an old pair of jeans.” He also brought up doing martial arts, so I had to ask him what he trains in, naturally.

“Jiu-jitsu right now. Don’t ask me why I started jiu-jitsu at 46. Wow. They just call me Swiffer, they just clean the mat with me. But I’m learning. I’m getting meaner. I also do taekwondo, and I dirt bike and snowboard.”

I doubt we’ll see Point Blank stunts in Colony, but there will sure be a hell of a lot of brawling. “The action scenes and fight scenes are different. They’ve evolved so, jiu-jitzu I just got into. I spend all my time on the ground. I thought, ‘Let’s just get better at ground work!'”

Colony premieres January 2016 on USA.