"It's a real mixed bag. Interestingly enough, two days ago on a camera, a camera assistant, Jimmy Garrison, had put a piece of tape with '100' on it. And I was looking at it and I said, 'Jimmy, what is that?' and he said, 'That's how many days we have left shooting,' and I went, 'Oh my God. A hundred? Oh my God.' And it struck me as really sad suddenly, that that hundred days of shooting — it'll go over a number of months — is, wow, like, the finality of it. And it's very sad. And this season has been so much fun, I think in part because we know it's the last season so we're just giving it and having a great time, but yeah, it's gonna be strange. This is my family. I spend more time here than I do anywhere else. I love the people I work with, I love the crew, it's gonna be really hard."

"There's still talk of doing a movie afterwards, and that would be great." That would be a very different animal, though. "I think it depends on who we get to direct it and the DOP. I imagine we'll have a lot of the same crew — I hope — but it really depends on whether MGM film division wants to use one of our directors or whether they bring in someone new."

"There's a lot of things I want, yeah. In a perfect world, I'd like to know what happened to Joe when we left him up on the Harvester with the Aschen in 2001; I'd like to know what happens with the Tok'ra and whether they are able to make their race stronger; there's a bunch of dangling threads that we've left throughout the course of this six-year run I'd like to see tied up."

"I'm gonna miss getting up at five o'clock in the morning and having somewhere to go that I love. Seriously. It's sick but it's true. I'm gonna miss this crew. I'm gonna miss the camaraderie. I'm gonna miss feeling like a part of this family. Such a tight-knit group, I'm gonna miss that. I'm not gonna miss army boots. I'm not gonna miss technobabble." She laughs, then admits, "Maybe a little bit."

There is, of course, one question that has to be asked: does Tapping miss Michael Shanks?

"Yeah," she replies, unsurprisingly. "It's just different. It's like I knew he was going, I knew he wanted to leave; you resign yourself to that and you move on. We still talk now and again, but you have to just move on if you still enjoy it. He wasn't happy here, and he left and so in a way it's almost even better, because he wasn't happy. Sure it's tough, but he moved on and we have to too."

"He's [Corin Nemec] a very cheerful guy, but to be honest with you, interestingly, by the eighth episode of Season One, Christopher [Judge], Michael and me knew everything about each other, because we had the luxury of spending six weeks living in a hotel doing the pilot together and eating all our meals together. We were literally forced to form friendships, in a way. It wasn't difficult by any stretch of the imagination, but we had a much easier road to really establish relationships. It's like being the new kid in school; we're still trying to make [Corin] feel comfortable, but it's not the same. And we're so established in our routine, we're patterned with each other. I don't envy him, I really don't."

(c) 2002, Cult Times & Visimag.  Extract appears with permission from Visimag.  All rights recognised.  No copyright infringement intended.

Return to Amanda Tapping interviews home
Return to Stargate SG-1 cast interviews home