Grant Bowler says it’s ‘no surprise’ he ended up on a show named Defiance

IT took more than a decade for New Zealand actor Grant Bowler to become an overnight success in Hollywood on the TV show Defiance.

Grant Bowler’s big Hollywood break

GRANT Bowler concedes his friends are right when they observe it’s no surprise he ended up as lead actor on a show called Defiance.

As the sci-fi-meets-western series launches its third season, Bowler is proud that even when at the hardest moments — when he was broke, when he was cleaning elevators in LA, even when his marriage fell apart, he persisted.

“Stubbornness and perseverance got me a long way, but I had to learn them. I had to learn to ask for what I want,” says Bowler, 46.

It’s the same stoicism which sees Bowler, as lead law maker Joshua Nolan in Defiance, play most of his own stunts in below-freezing temperatures in Canada ‘because that’s the fun stuff’.

It’s the same down-to-earth approach which allows him to make a storyline in which he’s a human lawmaker with an adopted alien daughter named Irisa (Stephanie Leonidas) fly.

Actor Grant Bowler in scene from TV program "Blue Heelers". /TV/programs/Titles/Blue/Heelers

Bowler, who cut his teeth in Australian dramas including Blue Heelers, had three shots at Hollywood before landing leading man status.

Along the way he starred in Ugly Betty, True Blood and Lost, before landing Defiance.

“Am I a glutton for punishment? Yes and no,” he says of the long battle for his big break.

“If I had have gone over and nobody was interested I probably would have taken the hint.

“But the problem I kept having was there was interest but I’d get all of these really horrible 50-50 coin tosses that went the wrong way.

“Sometimes the jobs didn’t go to anyone else — the whole show would fall over. It was horrible.

“Like watching your house slowly fall down the hill in slow motion ... towards a fire.

Grant Bowler in a scene from the television show True Blood.

“The reality was I knew that there was a career there. I’m bloody glad I kept going.

“I learned what was really important and I learned about having faith in myself.”

Bowler laughs. “In the end everybody got fed — it was only a quick four-and-a-half years of absolute agony.””

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The present sees Bowler sitting pretty.

As season three of Defiance airs, he’s wrapping final scenes in Canada, preparing to return to his LA home, where his former wife Roxanne Wilson and kids now live just a few miles away.

It will be welcome respite from the freezing temperatures of Vancouver, where Bowler says shooting the first few episodes of season three of Defiance was ‘brutal’ — both in terms of emotional storylines and physicality.

EMBARGOED to Sunday June 14, 2015, Sunday TV Guides first use. Grant Bowler for season 3 of Defiance. Picture: Supplied

“I think we shot 22 days outside in between -18 and -35 degrees Celsius,” he says.

“It was horrible. But what we put on screen was fantastic.

“In that cold, I had I had at least five fist fights. I must have got knocked down 50 times and got back up and I’m wearing a jacket which is 20kg, and carrying a rifle and handgun weighing another 18kg, and falling over in the snow five times.

“And I get back up and I’m like ‘just kill me’ just end it now, or let me lie down in the soft snow and I’ll go to sleep.”

“But that’s the fun part. I do all this talking in between. Why wouldn’t I do the fight?”

DEFIANCE

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Originally published as Grant Bowler says it’s ‘no surprise’ he ended up on a show named Defiance