Stargate star Amanda Tapping spoke with DenOfGeek.com’s Simon Brew for a nice long interview covering her time as Samantha Carter and her upcoming starring and executive producing roles in the new SCI FI series Sanctuary.
Tapping tells Brew that she loves her Stargate character Carter and that she was fun to play. She reinterates that being on the Stargate set is fun and that there is a type of family feel to it, especially since the original SG-1 cast and crew have been together for well over a decade. “As dorky as that sounds, at the end of the day if you can laugh every day while doing your job regardless of what’s going on, which we did, then yeah! It makes it so worth it to be there,” Tapping notes.
Even though Tapping loved being with the Stargate crew, she was faced with a difficult decision concerning continuing as a full-time cast member for Season Five of Stargate Atlantis or stepping down to recurring so that she could pursue her dream with the production of Sanctuary. “When my contract for Atlantis was about to be renewed, I knew that Sanctuary had a chance of being picked up for television,” she explains. “We hadn’t yet, so it was a massive leap of faith on my part. If I walk away from Sanctuary, it dies. All these people who put their money and time in, it goes away. If I stick with Sanctuary, then there’s a better chance of us getting a broadcast deal. It was a really difficult decision, long talks with [Atlantis executive producer] Joe Mallozzi, long talks with the Sanctuary producers. And eventually I just had to make the leap of faith. It wasn’t that I was sick of Stargate, it was that I had to give Sanctuary a chance.”
Tapping is currently slated to appear in two episodes of Atlantis in the upcoming season: the season premiere “Search and Rescue” and another episode in the second half. According to the British Columbia Film Commission’s website, Sanctuary is filming from May 5 to September 11 this year. Atlantis is currently filming (episode 7) and is due to be done by September 23. Of course, there is the post-production process to be done after filming is complete, and because Tapping is also an executive producer for Sanctuary, her time with the production is not over once the cameras stop rolling. Still, Tapping thinks that Carter can be a player even though she is no longer in command of the Atlantis base, “I’m hugely grateful that they’ve kept the door open, and they’ve been very gracious about it. Maybe Sam could come back toward the end of the season.”
Stargate fans can still catch Carter in new adventures in the upcoming direct-to-video movie Stargate: Continuum, due for its North American premiere on July 29, 2008. Tapping describes Brad Wright’s stand-alone SG-1 story: “It was massive. The scale of the shoot was massive. And it’s a really nice, standalone piece. So if you’re not a fan of SG-1 or you’ve never seen it, the show will still make sense to you. But for fans of the show we bring back Richard Dean Anderson, and we bring back Cliff Simon and all these great characters from the past. General Hammond—Don Davis—is back. It has a nice [familial] sense to it.”
The big question on many SG-1 fans’ minds is whether or not there will be another movie. “Yeah. It bodes well for potentially more, more DVDs which we’re hopeful of,” Tapping reassures fans after seeing the Top 10 sales figures for Stargate: The Ark of Truth. “Our fingers are all crossed! Ark Of Truth selling as well as it has bodes well.”
To read the complete interview, visit DenOfGeek.com: Amanda Tapping interview: Stargate SG-1, Atlantis and Sanctuary.