Luke Macfarlane Talks Killjoys Season 5 [Exclusive] 

As Killjoys winds down its run, I’ve been extremely fortunate to chat this summer with our onscreen and offscreen faves. I’ve said here a few times that Luke Macfarlane was my introduction into the show, and in the intervening five years, he’s been very kind to chat with me for both Killjoys and his Hallmark projects. Since it had been a year since we’d talked specifically for Killjoys at the group press day last August, we were due for a catch up on all things D’avin Jaqobis. This week, we got on the phone to talk about Season 5.  

Everyone we’ve spoken to freely admits that this was the season where they all just went for it, and one of the ways that’s been most apparent is in unleashing D’av and tapping into Macfarlane’s comedic side. He loved getting to bring that forward. “It’s been all of us trying to figure out how best to make this character make sense. I think it’s really been a group effort on every level,” he shares.

“From the beginning, there were some very clear ideas of An Officer and a Gentleman-type character who was a bit haunted. We were feeling like it wasn’t working for people. I am naturally very funny and they leaned into that in a way that didn’t sacrifice the integrity of the show and we weren’t making fun of him.”

“They would give me funny stuff and I was always game for it. And within it, we were also trying to preserve whatever the relationship was going to be with Dutch. Even if he was self-deprecating and funny, he was still somebody we wanted to see with Dutch.”

More comedy came from the scenes of D’av being the worst wingman ever for his brother. Macfarlane enjoyed those moments and would’ve loved more of them. “That was really fun and I wish we’d gone further. That was an example of, ‘Oh, dude, we only have ten episodes.’ We realized, and discussed creatively with the writers, that there wasn’t a ton of time to figure out who Johnny was going to end up with,” he recalls. “[We thought], ‘Maybe they’re setting up a triangle here,’ but there wasn’t enough runway left.”

The counterpoint to the lighter said of D’av was that he was also still fairly vulnerable about where he stood with Dutch—looking for reassurance about their relationship after the memory matrix and with Johnny’s looming post-battle sabbatical. “I think we played with that a lot and we didn’t know if they would be together. D’av found his way, but I don’t know if we always knew what that was going to be, and as the performer inside of that, it was very difficult,” he admits.

“We had a world we were dealing with and that was always going to be the number one story. Early on, we set up this thing and let it go and then would touch back on it sometimes. I think the writers are incredibly talented and listening to what is going on. I felt like that was really hard to do in the brave new world of a female lead of an action-adventure show.”

“We don’t want her to need D’avin. We’re so used to seeing the damsel in distress. It’s a more complicated relationship. The amazing, beautiful, incredible intelligence of the show is, ‘How do we need each other, but not need each other so we can be our strong selves?’ We wrestled with that.”

“One of my favorite scenes was him not knowing where he stood and when he finally had the misunderstanding with Dutch where he thought she was in love with Johnny. It’s one of those great Killjoys things that feels like it’s about to be one thing and in a split second it becomes something else. I loved playing that so much.”

“Three Killjoys and a Lady” was this season’s bottle episode, pitting TAF against each other until they realize Lucy is the one who’s been bodyjacked (thankfully not permanently). The episode capitalized on the fantastic chemistry of the three leads and also teased out a little nudity, some of which was left on the cutting room floor. “There was definitely a bum shot but it didn’t make it. I was all ready,” Macfarlane laughs. “I will admit I was disappointed that it didn’t make it.”

One of the sneaky cool things about that episode was that we at home didn’t entirely trust who was real and who wasn’t, and Macfarlane says the shooting style of the episode helped create that tension. “I think it was built into the nature of it. If you’re being asked to look at something cockeyed, you can’t tell if it’s cockeyed,” he explains.

“There’s this great scene where Dutch and Johnny are pointing guns at each other and [director Paolo Barzman] allows the camera to be floaty. As an actor, I love that so much because you’re free to float around and the camera has to find you instead of having a static camera or a camera on a dolly that you have to find.”

“Maybe that informed the tension and other “off”-ness a little bit. I loved that. That was one of my favorites. It was also really nice because it was the three of us. Having worked with each other so long, we always knew that was the easiest and we had the best shorthand because we’d been together the longest. That was a really fun episode.”

The final season has had some fun pop culture homages, with Macfarlane getting to appear in three of them—one he realized and two he didn’t. He clued me in that last week’s scene of Dutch showing D’av how to use the Q’reshi gun was a role-reversal nod to Hicks and Ripley in Aliens, which I totally missed.

The two he was unaware of are the scene of Johnny breaking D’av out of holding with the Robbels in “A Bout, A Girl” with, “Do you have a kiss for daddy?” – a wink to Ferris Bueller, and D’av’s, “I love you,” declaration to Dutch last week that was straight up The Cutting Edge. While Michelle Lovretta and Adam Barken intentionally put that together as a tribute, Macfarlane didn’t know. “I had no idea. I love that scene,” he says. “All I remember about filming was that it was the loudest space and we had to do all that dialogue [after filming] in ADR.”

This season also gave us a couple of surprisingly warm scenes between D’av and Delle Seyah as they worked out the world’s weirdest co-parenting arrangement. “I enjoyed working with [Mayko Nguyen] so much and that energy and that world we were offering up,” says Macfarlane.

“I think that was always a very interesting part of, “How do these two totally different people come together to ultimately do the most important thing—raise a child well?’ Despite their differences, they were entirely in line on that. They want the best for their son.”

Killjoys airs one last Friday at 10 pm/9c on CTV Sci-Fi Channel (formerly Space Channel) and Syfy. All of our Killjoys coverage, including my mash letter to the show, is here. You can catch all four seasons and the first nine Season 5 episodes on demand on the CTV Sci-Fi Channel app and Syfy app and website. Click here for our preview of the finale.

Photos courtesy of CTV Sci-Fi and Syfy.