We Talked To The Secret Apprentice... And Lived!

Sam Witwer may actually be the biggest bad-ass in science fiction, and you just don't know it yet. He played the pilot "Crashdown" in Battlestar Galactica, and then became the voice and face of Darth Vader's "Secret Apprentice" in the Star Wars: The Force Unleashed video game. And now he's starting a new role on Smallville as Davis Bloome, a paramedic with a very dark secret. We caught up with him at Comic-Con and asked him about playing dark characters. Plus, whether he's the last Cylon.

So it seems like you always play dark roles, like Crashdown, the Secret Apprentice... and now Doomsday. Are you like the Lord of Darkness?

I'm trying to figure that out. Well, you know, yeah. What's funny about that is the Doomsday character, or Darth Vader's apprentice, or a lot of these characters... they're not straight dark characters. They have other dimensions to them. And I think maybe that's why they offer [those roles] to me, I'm not really sure. In The Mist, I was a nice guy. That didn't work out too well for me.

But for example, Doomsday. You will not meet Doomsday, you will meet a guy named Davis Bloome. Who is a paramedic. Really nice guy, really conscientious individual. And the problem is that he's blacking out. He's having these blackouts. He wants to know what's going on with that, and when he learns the truth, it's horrifying to him, and hopefully it'll be horrifying to the audience, because we are trying to take our time with who he is as an individual before any of this stuff goes down. And he's a really good guy. I actually like him very much.

Or Darth Vader's apprentice.

He's a good guy?

I wouldn't say that, because he goes through and... causes some trouble.

He kills everyone he meets.

Not everyone. There's a few survivors. But Darth Vader's apprentice didn't start out that way. He started out as a very innocent young boy who Vader kidnaps, essentially, and then raises as a son. But it should be noted that if Darth Vader had a little good in him, well, who knows what he might have passed on to his adopted son? That's all I can say. These characters, I guess what I'm saying is: are they psychologically complex? Yeah, they actually are. And it's really fun to play.

So you're the final Cylon, right?

(Laughs.) I don't know, am I? I'll have to ask Ron Moore.

Send an email to Charlie Jane Anders, the author of this post, at charliejane@io9.com.

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