Next week the popular time travel series 12 Monkeys returns to Syfy. At the end of last season, Cassandra Railly (Amanda Schull) was sent by James Cole (Aaron Stanford) into the time machine, where she splintered into 2043. Things, however, were not as Cole left it, as Deacon of the West VII, played by Todd Stashwick, had joined with The Messengers, and they had fought their way into and taken over the temporal facility.

This season, Deacon's role at the facility takes a turn.

Stashwick recently sat down with Jamie Ruby of SciFi Vision for an exclusive interview to talk about his work on season two of 12 Monkeys.

SCIFI VISION: I've watched the first eight episodes, and I have to say, I absolutely love this season.

TODD STASHWICK: We're proud of it. The funny thing is I'm a stupid science fiction comic book nerd and to be a part of a show that I would watch, even if I wasn't on it, is something of a 'pinch me' situation.

This show can get confusing with all the timelines and things. Is it hard to keep it straight?

We need Venn diagrams just to keep things straight. But we have an amazing shepherd with Terry Matalas. He holds everything in his pretty little head, and for the most part, my job is just to kind of tend to my backyard, you know, like I just have to kind of know what's going on with with Deacon.

So once I've gotten past that point, I go, 'Okay, great.' Now I just, as a dutiful actor, I like to be aware of what's happening in the whole story. So yeah, it does take a bit of like 'that happened when?,' and then 'Okay, so if that happened, but oh that no longer happened, because that changed. Right, got it; got it.' And we always have Terry there to text at three o'clock in the morning when we go, 'I just don't, wait, what is this? Okay.' And then he explains it and you're like, 'Oh, that's kind of badass. Perfect.'

Do you know a lot of what's going on ahead of time with the plot, or do you kind of just get it as it comes?

We usually would get a script that we're shooting probably three or four weeks before we'd shoot, because there'll be table reads. We'll get a first draft, and then we won't see it for a little while, and then we'll do a table read, and then the table read is usually about ten days before we would start shooting that episode, so that they have time to hear it and rewrite it. So yeah, we're usually about three episodes ahead whenever we're shooting.

That seems like it would make it even more confusing.

The writers are such they're so giddy about the work, because they're really on to something here, and it's that kind of alchemy of story and character relationships, and the nexus of where that all comes together. Terry will write me when he's like, 'Oh my God, wait until you see episode ten,' before we've even gotten a chance to read it. And I'm like, 'Ah no, you're teasing me.'

Deacon was always this bad nasty guy who did what he did to survive. Do you think he enjoyed doing these bad things and just needed an excuse to do them?

I think there's been an evolution of his role in the show, as well as his role in the apocalypse, and I think when you start to learn little tidbits about where he came from and what shapes the way he is - and there's a lot we haven't revealed - that ideally if we get a season three, we would get to dive into that stuff a little more.

I think Deacon has a little bit of his father in him, so there's a little whip of a sadist there. I think truthfully he's like, 'Look, if we have to do these things, I might as well enjoy it, because this is my life. This is the hand that I'm dealt; this is the road that I have to walk on, blah, blah, blah. If my life was nothing but misery, and all the things that I had to do we're misery, then what's the point to living? So if I've got to do this, I might as well enjoy it,' is, I think, a lot of his philosophy. I don't think he's ever killed for sadistic pleasure. He's not a serial killer, you know? I think when he's torturing somebody, yeah, he's getting off on the power, but he's doing it to get information so he can take care of two hundred people.

Ramse (Kirk Acevedo) walks around with kind of the martyr's cloak of 'I do all these things because I have to,' and all the pain of it, and it's like, 'Well I have to do these things too, but I'm not going to be a sourpuss doing it.' Like you've got to find some funny in the situation. It's an absurd situation that we're living in, and then you throw the time travel into it, which makes it even crazier.

You throw time travel into the post apocalypse, and Deacon's just like, 'Okay, this is just insanity.' For him, up until he met Cole, it was just, you know, kill or be killed. Life was this struggle, and then suddenly, 'Oh there's a temporal facility? Oh there's a place we can have a roof over our heads? Okay, I'm going to bring all my guys there, and we're going to have electricity, and we're going to be safe, but it's going to be the lush life. Wait a second, there's a time machine here? What is happening?' (laughs) So I think he finds this stuff absolutely absurd, and I think he's got a wicked sense of humor.

Will we get any backstory on Deacon this season?

We dig into it a little here and there. You'll get whiffs of why Cole is unique to him, and why he is what he is. Why he's deferential to Railly. You're going to see a lot more of who Deacon is.

In season one he was just straight up antagonist, but I wouldn't say he was quite a villain, because he does sort of help them at times, even in season one. I mean, he helped keep Cole and Ramse alive for a little while. But he certainly made things harder for everybody towards the end.

Deacon has changed a lot this season. Can you talk about his interactions with Cassie? Because some of his changes definitely seem to be because of her influence.

Oh, absolutely. I think the whole circumstance changed when they came into the facility, and I can't give away any real spoilers, but I guess Deacon remembers what life was like before the fall. I mean, Cole was a lot younger, and Deacon's probably about ten years older than Cole, so he was much deeper into his teen years when the plague hit. So he remembers Cassie; he remembers her being on TV. He remembers her being the voice of reason, because she was on every TV show warning everybody about the plague. He's in his forties, so if it hit around 2017, he was around thirteen.

Can you talk about his struggle to have to try to get along with and work with the group at the facility?

He's so used to being the boss, and he has to widen his world view, because, obviously, it's Jones (Barbara Sukowa)'s facility, and I think Deacon goes, 'We have an uneasy alliance here. You're going to run this stuff; I'll be security, and we'll all be safe.' And that's I think how he sees it. He's a rational guy, as crazy and sociopathic as he is, he's a rational guy. He goes, 'Okay, well if this is going to work, I need to make allies where I can,' and for the same reason he made allies with The Messengers at the end of season one. It's like, 'Okay, these guys have got the best plan for survival? Fine I'll make sure that I'm on the winning side. Oh, wait a minute, they're crazy. I'm nuts, but they're crazy.'

And so when they start talking about the cycles, and, you know, all of the coming of the change and all that nonsense, I think he realizes that he has more in common I think with Cassie and Jones than he did The Messengers.

So I think he's a smart guy. He's like, 'Okay, well if this is the way the wind's blowing, I'm going to blow with it. I'll just have to stick my face in it.'

Does he like it having to be more of a democracy? No, I don't think he likes it at all. I don't think he likes to have to listen to what Cole might have to say or what Ramse has to offer. I think he's got a lot more respect for Jones, because he's also seen Jones make the hard calls to get things done, so I think ultimately he doesn't go easy into this alliance. He sort of fights and kicks and screams towards it, but he definitely likes having Cassie around.

Do you think there could ever be a future for Deacon and Cassie? I see some chemistry there.

I don't want to ruin that. I think let's let that play out. Let's see what happens there.

Do you think that he can be redeemed in the other characters' eyes for the things that they know he's done?

He hasn't done anything worse than Jones has done. I mean, she killed all of Spearhead. (laughs) I mean, so he slaughtered the West VII; she slaughtered Spearhead. She did it to save the future; he did it to save his men. If I'm not mistaken, wasn't Ramse instrumental in the death of seven billion people?

Yeah, pretty much. Deacon doesn't let him forget it either.

I know. Everybody loved calling Deacon a monster, but there's a whole lot of pot meets kettle. Right? (laughs) And I think he kind of scratches his head, like, 'Why am I the bad guy here? You guys are doing stuff that's far worse than me, but because I'm doing it with a smile on my face, I'm the bad guy? All right. Fine. I'll be the bad guy.'

But yeah, he's more unsavory, but as far as him redeeming himself, I think you see an altruistic side in him that wasn't really shown in season one. Do I think people view him in a different light than they did in season one? Absolutely.

Can you talk about the action and stunt scenes you've gotten to do? Do you enjoy that?

You know, it's funny. I like to do as much of the fighting as possible. I enjoy that stuff. The ten year old boy in me loves running around in the middle of the night playing post-apocalyptic guns. That's a whole lot of fun.

And the fight scenes, if I can do the fights, and it's not going to be endangering my life? I'm not a professional stunt man, but I certainly like to do as much as they will let me do.

There's a big fight with Cole and I that we did. And we did it. There're some shots in there where they want it to look a little more brutal, and so we let the stunt guys take a lot of the hits for that, but we definitely get in there and do as much as we can that's physically safe.

Did you get any weapons training before you came to the series?

(Laughs) You know, the funny thing was, no. Literally my first day of season one, when I was brought to set, I was handed the machine gun. The first shot I think I did was when I ran into the temporal facility, and I just start spraying the machine with bullets, and I had never shot that kind of machine gun. I'd shot a tommy gun when I did The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was pretty stunning of an experience, but this thing had a kick to it (laughs) that I was not expecting, and also a lot of gun fire and how loud it was at first. I don't know what take they used, but I'm sure it was a take of me going, "Oh my God!" That thing was powerful. Now I know what to expect, and I can actually make it look like he knows what he is doing. (laughs) But for my first day on set, they were like, 'Here's your weapon, and here's your ear plugs, and go!" And this thing just became a bucking bronco in my hands.

Can you talk about working with makeup effects and being bloodied, etc.?

Whenever you have to deal with the reality of prosthetics, I guess there is an equation that the more badass that it looks, the more uncomfortable the actor is going to be. And look, I recognize that what I do is not coal mining - waah, you know, I mean, boo hoo. I have to sit around with really talented amazing people - but the reality is, if I was describing it to somebody, I would go, "Take packing tape, and take about twenty layers of it, and cover your eye with it, and then let's take maple syrup and cover your entire body with it, so now you can't open your eye, and you're cold and sticky, and it's three o'clock in the morning." And you're like that for five hours. So that was the physical reality. The collar of my jacket kept sticking to the back of my neck and I'd come home and peel it off. And I had no depth perception, because my eye was swollen shut.

And look, truth be told, you just lean into it. As an actor, you go, 'Well if I feel half as uncomfortable as I look, great.' You know, because it works for the moment, because the guy is in bad shape, so I might as well lean into how miserable I feel right now. (laughs) But again, it's a whole lot of fun at the same time.

Cole is no longer the only person who has time traveled on the series. Would you like Deacon to be able to time travel?

Heck yeah. That would be amazing I think it would be a lot of fun. You know, it's funny, because I spent so much of season two in the temporal facility, it was like living in a submarine for five months, and so it would be nice to break him out of there.

Plus, like how fun would it be to watch Deacon reacting to other time periods? I mean the guy's kind of an a-hole so it'd be fun to see how he would bump up against other time periods and what sort of running commentary he would have. I would absolutely love him to time travel.

This is a staple question you've probably been asked a bunch of times before since you're on a time travel show, but if you could travel in time where and when would you want to go?

I would love to go to Coney Island at the turn of the century, just to be able to walk around New York in like 1897. To walk around there, that seems to be pretty cool. And safety notwithstanding, before people would be kind of cool too, like primordial ooze. (laughs) Like seriously find out what it looked like when it was just kind of like a bubbling casserole.

Describe Deacon in three words.

Misunderstood playful pussycat.

You always play these great fun smart ass characters.

I tweeted about this the other day. I was waiting for food, and this woman comes up to me, and she says, "You look upset." I was like, "No, no," I said, "I think I just have resting villain face."

And what I think is fun about the parts that I get to play, is they're never just bad. There's always something else that I get to do with them. They're sympathetic sometimes; they're funny often. So it never is just straight up menace. There's always a little dangling something or other that's fun to play with.

Are there any other projects that you want to promote?

Currently I have a web comic that I write, that I collaborate on with an amazing artist named Dennis Calero, called Devil Inside, and it's free, and it's on the web, and it's about me as the devil having a crisis of conscious and going on the run.

And then I'm cowriting with creative director Amy Hennig a Star Wars video game for EA. So I've been living in the Star Wars universe when I haven't been living in the post-apocalyptic future.

You can catch Stashwick on all-new episodes of 12 Monkeys starting April 18th on Syfy, and to find out more about his upcoming projects be sure to check out his website.