Stargate Atlantis star David Hewlett was interviewed by io9 concerning the end of his show’s run as a weekly engagement on Friday nights on the Sci Fi Channel. The actors finished shooting a few months ago, but there still are two episodes to be aired before the show is actually “done”. Episodes “Vegas” and “Enemy at the Gate” will debut January 2 and January 9, 2009, respectively.
“It was miserable!” Hewlett said about filming these last episodes. “It was absolutely miserable. There’s nothing worse, we find out that we weren’t coming back I guess a couple, a few weeks before the end, and it just makes it painful.
“You’re in this weird situation where you know that it’s over, and you’re acting your little heart out like usual, cuz you’re used to having to keep going, but there’s a part of me that’s like, I want to go now. Like if it’s over you don’t want to be hanging around, you want to rip the band-aid off and move on type thing, so you’re desperate to go away and do something else, and at the same time you’re dreading it being over and stuff. I just can’t imagine what it must have been like for SG1 after having been on for ten years. Everyone was really sort of upset about it.”
Actually, it isn’t quite “farewell” for Hewlett and McKay. A telemovie is in the works, being penned by Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie. If all goes as planned, the movie will be filmed during the summer and premiere on the Sci Fi Channel in the fourth quarter of 2009 as a fill-in for the first mid-season hiatus of the new Stargate Universe series (which premieres in July 2009). Mallozzi has said that the movie will pick up where the Season Five finale “Enemy at the Gate” leaves off, although the final episode of the television series is not exactly a cliffhanger.
“There’s an extra special ending,” Hewlett said about the finale. “Yeah again it was so weird too, I can’t help thinking there’s nothing you can do in one episode that’s gonna sum up five years. I hope if anything out of this, I hope it sets up further adventures for Atlantis. I think what’s nice about the episode is there’s enough unanswered stuff there. There are still things that need to be dealt with that I hope there will be more Atlantis for people to see, in cheaper formats, TV movies or DVD movies or whatever they want to do. But I do hope that’s something we can look forward to.”
In the meantime, the actor is busy with his own project. “I have a sort of 30 Rock behind the scenes of a scifi show thing that I’m working on now, called Star Crossed, originally looking at developing it as a TV pilot but I think we’re going to develop it as a film now, just to open it up for people. Basically we had a half hour sitcom style thing.”
Star Crossed had its beginning as a show-within-a-movie in Hewlett’s A Dog’s Breakfast. Then, the Sci Fi Channel expressed interest in it as a half-hour sitcom. The project then was considered as a web-based project instead. Now, it looks like Hewlett will develop it as a movie. If Hewlett continues the trend he’s set with A Dog’s Breakfast, we’ll likely see some of his Stargate co-stars and production crew in the new project.
To read the rest of the interview in which Hewlett talks about McKay’s romantic lead status and Joe Flanigan’s hair, among other things, visit io9: The Great Rodney McKay Says Goodbye to Stargate Atlantis.
[Image from MGM.]