Tapping on SG-1 Movies, Atlantis, Sanctuary

The Scifi World has published a lengthy interview with Amanda Tapping wherein she discusses her role as Samantha Carter in the Stargate franchise and her role as Helen Magnus in Sanctuary (for which she is also an executive producer).

Stargate SG-1 Movies

Tapping talks a little bit about her experience filming in the Arctic for Continuum and how “much bigger” it felt filming the two movies. She also speaks about her hopes that there will be more movies, but nothing has been confirmed as of the time of the interview.

For those fans curious as to where the movies tie into the two Stargate timelines, Tapping said, “The producers have decided they are not concurrent timelines but definitely these two movies happen before Sam goes to Atlantis.”

[Atlantis executive producer Joseph Mallozzi stated in his June 14 blog entry that Carter “will be a Full Bird Colonel for both the movies and Atlantis’s fourth season.”]

Stargate Atlantis

The majority of the interview is taken up with Tapping discussing her move to Stargate Atlantis in its fourth season. She talks about how much out of her element Carter is as the new base commander. She explained, “She is out of her element, she is much more comfortable taking orders running her own lab, you know she is very comfortable out in the field as a soldier, so this is very different for her being behind a desk making decisions that effect thousands of people. You know having to be more of a diplomat in some ways and not have own lab so she can do experiments, which was sort of her happy place. When ever things got too stressful Sam would just go down to her lab and run experiments or try to write short essays on nuclear physics and things like that, so she does not have that time and she does not have that luxury. So I think it is a little bit more stressful for her because she is not in her element. But she’s finding her feet. It’s just like I said she feels like playing a very, very different character.”

Tapping also hints that the second half of the season will have more conflict between Carter and McKay than the first.

Sanctuary

Once Atlantis has completed filming Season Four, Tapping is hoping she will go immediately into filming ten additional hours of her new on-line series Sanctuary. These additional hours would translate into 40 new webisodes for the series that was created by Stargate production veteran Damian Kindler. Tapping hopes that more backstory will be revealed about Helen’s retention of her youth (she’s currently 157 years old), and how her daughter Ashley will turn out having had two “gifted” parents.

When asked if there were any other projects she’d like to participate in, Tapping replied, “Really, honestly, I just want to get Sanctuary up and going, that’s my main motivation right now.”

With working these projects, Tapping said, “It’s keeping me pretty busy, literally that’s kept me shooting for a year solid so, no. I don’t have anything else, right now I have two weeks off right now and I’m going to spend it with my family. It’s pretty much my only two weeks off this year.”

Visit The Scifi World for the complete interview.