The interview first appeared at ScreenSpy on April 25, 2015. For the video portion, please click here. 

What happens when you wake up in a small, unfamiliar town full of eerily perky people who pretend that everything is fine when clearly nothing is?

You end up much like Wayward Pines‘ Agent Ethan Burke  — in a hair pulling, paranoia-inducing fight to survive.

The FOX summer mystery stars Matt Dillon (Crash, The Outsiders) as Burke, an endearingly disheveled (and easily irritated) family man and member of the secret service. Tasked with finding two agents who have flown off the radar, his search takes him to the strange town of Wayward Pines, Idaho where nothing and no one is what it seems.

Burke is relentless in his pursuit to uncover the truth behind their mysterious disappearance, but the more questions he asks the more questions it raises.  His efforts force him to deal with a variety of town ‘characters,’ all with their own hand in whatever secret the isolated community is willing to kill to keep.

In a place where not even the crickets are real, Burke is moved to uncover what happened to his fellow agents and is happening to his own self — if at the very least to escape a town that seems to have no real exit.

You can catch the entirety of the 10 episode thriller, executive produced by M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable), on your small screen starting Thursday, May 14 when it premieres on FOX.

To get viewers even more ready for the exciting series — dubbed a mix between the Twilight Zone and Twin Peaks by its own star and creator — ScreenSpy has exclusive interviews with the series’ leading men, straight from ReedPop’s C2E2 convention in Chicago.

Hear M. Night Shyamalan and Matt Dillon discuss how they prepared for the unraveling mystery, fan response, what it’s like working in television versus film, and the relationship between the TV series and the Blake Crouch trilogy from which Wayward Pines was adapted.