The Ark Stars Explain the Syfy Series' Emotional Core (2024)

The latest Syfy original series, The Ark, has a spaceship carrying passengers intended to rebuild humanity across the cosmos, only for it to strike a mysterious object, resulting in the deaths of the command crew. With their superior officers dead, it falls on Lieutenants Sharon Garnet (Christie Burke), James Brice (Richard Fleeshman), and Spencer Lane (Reece Ritchie) to lead the beleaguered passengers to their destination. However, amidst the failing ship systems and a murder mystery, the three impromptu commanders must learn to work together if they hope to survive the arduous journey.

In an exclusive interview with CBR, The Ark series stars Christie Burke, Richard Fleeshman, and Reece Ritchie shared how they met and formed a tight rapport for the production, praised each other for keeping their performances engaging and nuanced, and teased what audiences can expect from The Ark as the Syfy series begins.

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CBR: The Ark was filmed in Serbia for five months. Do you remember first arriving on set, meeting each other, and developing your on-screen rapport?

Reece Ritchie: Yeah, I first met Richard at Heathrow.

Richard Fleeshman: Yeah, you came up and asked for an autograph. At first, I thought he was just a fan. [laughs]

Christie Burke: I found out I booked this part on a Saturday, and on Sunday, I was flying to Serbia. It was all very insane, mirroring Garnet's journey. She's a low-level ranking character, and I'm a low-level ranking actor. I'm kidding! [laughs] She's thrust onto this ship, and nobody knows her, and I feel like that's how it was in my initial meeting with these guys. I don't remember much of it. I was severely jetlagged.

Fleeshman: I remember it exactly! Reece and I traveled out together, and I knew he wasn't a fan. I knew exactly who he was.

Ritchie: He knew I was a fan already. [laughs]

Fleeshman: We had a couple of days to get to know each other, and Christie flew in from Canada. Christie and I met for the first time in makeup. She was like, "It's so great to meet you guys!" and I was like, "Is that Christie Burke?"

Ritchie: It literally served these characters so well because, from the very [start], we're these three lowly lieutenants who are thrust into this crazy situation. They don't have time to do anything. They just got their passports in their pockets, and that's it. That was us, and it helped the ante stay as high as it was in the first few episodes as we settle into this sibling relationship we have on the ship.

Burke: Which we then have in life! [laughs]

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On top of these three trying to steer the ship, this is Agatha Christie in space, with a murder mystery on top of everything else. How was it weaving in that subtext as audiences try to figure out who is being truthful?

Ritchie: I'm going to lean on an old cliché, but it's so true -- acting is reacting. The job was made so much easier working with Christie and Richard because you can only do so much as an actor. All of the nuance comes from reacting to good acting, and there wasn't one weak link on this cast. They nailed the casting on this with so many other characters.

Burke: I feel like Jonathan Glassner, Dean Devlin, and the whole writing team did such a good job on the writing. It was all written. I just had to show up, listen and react. Hopefully, the subtext that I was feeling in the moment was there.

Fleeshman: I think with this show, we're not struggling to figure out how to keep the audience interested. The show goes at a million miles an hour. Our role within that is we know what's happening. It's a crazy million-mile-an-hour thing, [and] we're the audience's window into that. For us, the pressure was taken off in keeping the audience engrossed. We're just trying to be the real people in this unbelievable situation.

Ritchie: With all those millions of lines! [laughs]

Burke: Speech after speech!

Ritchie: I've done seasons of things with less lines than one of these episodes. [laughs]

Burke: Same! I have to admit I've never really given speeches in my life. I'm not somebody who goes around giving speeches. I'm quite shy about public speaking. Somewhere in the second half of shooting this show, we have cast dinners, and they're like, "Give us a speech, Christie!" I just became this speech person. [laughs]

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Monologues aside, The Ark has lots of technical dialogue delivered very quickly. How was it getting that down and making it sound natural?

Ritchie: There were no guarantees that it was going to work.

Fleeshman: Dean was like, "These are clever people who speak quickly because everything is an emergency and everything needs to be done yesterday."

Burke: They're smart and know what they're talking about.

Fleeshman: There were lots of lines, and we were doing long corridor shots where people would be moving and crossing all in one shot. When you see all that stuff as an actor, you know there's no safety net. We all just went to town, and we just ran our lines. It got to a point where we'd see each other in a corridor and start our scene, and if they didn't know it, we'd go, "You don't know it! You better do better tomorrow!" [laughs]

Burke: After we finished this show, I came back home to Vancouver, put my headphones in to listen to a song, and I just started crying. It was the first time I had heard music and not my lines. I was like, "This is the sound of music, not just sheer lines that are always going." [laughs]

Fleeshman: I used to feel guilty because I learn lines on LineLearner, where you listen to your lines and say your lines back. I used to feel guilty if I listened to music because there'd be part of me going, "You should be listening to your lines right now." I lived with that for five months. When we were on that final episode, I could listen to guilt-free music again. [sighs in relief]

Burke: I cried because I didn't have the pressure of learning those lines.

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After sitting on The Ark for the better part of a year, what are you most excited about getting to share the show with the world?

Ritchie: It's in the hands of the audience. The exciting part for me was being with these guys on set and having that experience. Whatever happens now is out of our hands. I feel like we didn't leave anything up to chance. We worked super hard on this show. We really did. Everybody involved worked hard to make it as good as it could be. Hopefully, that counts for something when people get to see it.

Burke: For me, I hope what people take away from it is that there is such individualism on this show. Everyone did such an incredible job in creating these unique, complex characters. They are unexpected heroes. I hope people watching it can find themselves. I hope they can find their favorite character. Every character has a moment to shine. I hope that people that watch it see themselves in it. I think we do have a person for every person.

Fleeshman: We're in this lovely little space right now, as we speak to you, where we've made it, but it's still ours. The lovely thing about art is that the second that it passes that threshold and goes into the world, it no longer belongs to us. It's in the hands of all the people who watch it, and sometimes it can take on a life of itself. We're in the sweet spot where we're done. We're proud of it and proud of each other. We're about to release it into the world, and who knows what the next adventure we'll see is, but this is a nice moment.

Created by Dean Devlin and Jonathan Glassner, The Ark airs Wednesdays at 10 pm ET/PT on Syfy.