We’re now in Season Three of Stargate Atlantis in our trek down memory lane in the Thirteen Weeks for Thirteen Years (13-4-13) series. This was the last year that both Atlantis and Stargate SG-1 were produced concurrently, for Sci Fi decided that Season Ten of the mother show was to be its last after gaining a place in the 2007 Guiness Book of World Records as the “Longest Consecutive Running Sci-Fi TV Show.” Atlantis would be left to carry the torch without SG-1‘s leading audiences in on Friday nights once they began Season Four, the renewal for which was announced in August 2006.
Stargate legend Richard Dean Anderson made three appearances this season. He had a pivotal role in the mid-season two-parter “The Return,” teaming up with Robert Picardo as Richard Woolsey for most of his scenes. The two needed Sheppard’s team to rescue them from the Asurans, the Pegasus version of the Replicators.
It’s not easy to understand all of the reasons why the production office felt the need to “shake the show up a little bit,” but a controversial decision was made during this season. As much as the office wished for it to stay a secret, fans caught wind of the changes coming, and finally with the airing of “Sunday,” their biggest fear had come to fruition; a regular cast member was given the pink slip as Dr. Carson Beckett died horrifically in an explosion caused by a tumor he had only moments before successfully removed from a patient. Fans from around the world organized the Save Carson Beckett Campaign, which was deemed successful as Paul McGillion was invited back to do appearances in both Seasons Four and Five as the beloved late doctor’s clone. The campaign was even featured on the Season Four DVDs!
There were other cast changes coming, too, but we’ll let the actors tell you as we present their words from those days in the excerpts from interviews below and in next season’s installment.
Atlantis Season Three
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Joe Flanigan
From “Good Sheppard” in Stargate SG-1/Atlantis: The Official Magazine #9 (Mar./Apr. 2006):
“One of the interesting things is that there are parameters for a hero—to be a pillar of morality and strength and to come through at all times. That is what the audience wants, and it’s funny, when you watch the show sometimes [as an actor] that’s what you want too. But as a performer, the richest material is in problems and weaknesses. And so I find myself not able to explore problems and weaknesses that maybe other characters can explore. You can’t lead and be indecisive or have problems. And those problems are what’s interesting from a creative standpoint. So you actually have to exist within pretty tight parameters, that a heroic character has to exist in lest he become less heroic. At some point, his heroic properties will be diminished if he continues to explore weaknesses and bad decisions.
“Brad [Wright] and I have had this discussion, and I’ve never really thought along those lines before. … So we are always trying to find some sort of challenge or obstacle that my character can overcome, to go from a point ‘a’ to point ‘b’ in a story as opposed to being static and always knowing what he’s going to do. It’s a challenge. It’s a trick line. When I think of the shows that I really enjoyed as a kid, I don’t remember those heroes going through any dark exploratory periods, either. I liked The Rockford Files and things like that. To me, those were great shows. These guys had to keep things relatively simple, and it certainly didn’t hurt the show. It may have been a little static for the performer at times, feeling a little unchallenged by certain things. However, that’s the dynamic.
“I think Rick [Dean Anderson] had the same problem. He didn’t like playing the hero because he wanted to play an anti-hero, so to speak. And I can see how it’s going to be challenging in that regard. You can take David Hewlett’s character and do almost anything, because there’s no bar set for him. So you can see his greatest weaknesses and his greatest strengths, and it won’t make him inconsistent.”
From “Third Strike” in Starburst #346 (Feb. 2007):
“[Working on ‘Common Ground’] was a great time from beginning to end. Will Waring is one of my favourite directors on the show, it was a strong script and Sheppard got to go toe-to-toe with a Wraith. It’s what I said before about us having more individual stories this year and more character development, the latter of which really comes out in this episode. ‘Common Ground’ was mainly Sheppard and a Wraith and we had some neat scenes that are both funny and dramatic. Even if the episode hadn’t turned out as good as it did, I still would have said it was a positive experience and I’m thankful to the writers for putting it together. Luckily, the final cut was great, and hopefully they’ll decide to do more of these mano-e-mano type stories. The only thing I didn’t like, though, were the prosthetics. They take forever and I can’t stand them. I’m just praying I look a heck of a lot better than Sheppard did when I get older!
“Of all the stories we’ve done this season, [‘Irresponsible’] is the one I have the most conficted thoughts on. I really enjoyed ‘Irresistible.’ It’s nice to do a lighter episode every now and then, although as I just talked about, I tend to lean towards a somewhat darker tone for the series while still maintaining its sense of fun. That story was more outright humour and a blast to do. With ‘Irresponsible,’ I have to watch it again. The thing is I keep getting different cuts of the episode. Every time I’m about to watch one version of it, a new one comes along. There were certain challenges to shooting this story because we had Robert Davi, who’s a dramatic actor, as well as Richard Kind, who’s a comedy actor, and there was supposed to be friction between their two characters. I have to look at the final cut, though, before deciding where I stand. Once again, I’m honest about things like this. I don’t really say I like an episode if I don’t. I’ve been wrong about a lot of stories that I’ve questioned and didn’t think were going to work, but they ended up turning out just fine. So for now I’ll have to reserve judgement on this one.”
From “Chicago 2009: Joe Flanigan, Man of Action” at Wormhole Riders (posted Feb. 5, 2010):
“Robert Davi is a superb actor, and so he knows exactly what to do, which is cause tension in a scene, and he’s good at it! He took something small and sucked the life out if it. He did it for, what, seven episodes or something like that. And they killed him off and they didn’t even need to. He could have gone on and on. He was a formidable opponent, and it was hard to find a formidable opponent, and when you do you need to keep them coming. Colm Meaney was another guy that was very good. Those guys were good. They’d just lay it into you and it just comes through, and it’s hard to find guys like that.”
From “Third Strike” in Starburst #346 (Feb. 2007):
“I just love working with Connor [Trinneer]. He’s a talented actor and a great guy. As for this story itself, I made a point of going up to Brad Wright’s office earlier today, as well as phoning writer Carl Binder yesterday and told them what a good episode I think ‘Vengeance’ is going to turn out to be. Sometimes we [actors] will call the producers with notes about things we feel might be wrong about a script, so they were probably surprised to hear that in this case I thought all the elements came together. I’m a pretty tough critic when it comes to my work and the series, and I like this episode a lot because it enters into the psychological arena. It becomes very much an X-Files-ish sort of thriller, and, honestly, if, like our characters, you’re exploring space and running into weird and spooky creatures, then things are going to turn deeply psychological, do you know what I mean? This is a direction that I’ve been trying to get Atlantis to go in for a while, but for one reason or another it just hasn’t been possible. Then this script came along. I’m a big fan of Carl Binder. He’s a very strong writer and the dialogue in ‘Vengeance’ is wonderful. It was a fun episode to work on, but the actual location wasn’t so hot. We shot in the hollowed out tunnels underneath an abandoned mental institution, which were dark, dank and had this ‘stuff’ on the walls. After a week, most people’s eyes were red and I got sick, so as cool as the story looks, hopefully now audiences will know that there were ‘sacrifices’ involved in making it look that way!”
From “Good Sheppard” in Stargate SG-1/Atlantis: The Official Magazine #9 (Mar./Apr. 2006):
“I like the big action episodes, and I’m always pushing for more. I actually like being out and about. I prefer to be outside more than I do being inside. All I can do is say to myself is, ‘Is this a show I would want to watch?’ I’m not a big TV watcher, but I will watch certain things, and that’s the only measure I have. So I try to push for that. One of the things that I watch for in a show like this is a lot of action. I’m probably less interested in the interpersonal relationships, although I’m happy that it goes on in our show. I think that’s always tied in with the action, although I think revealing character moments happen during the action. Simply exploring relationships is not what I’m interested in. I’m just a simple guy, what can I say? I’m just a two-dimensional man. I like action and great looking girls!”
From “Third Strike” in Starburst #346 (Feb. 2007):
“Last season it was about my character becoming a team player rather than a solo player. I think this year for me as an actor, the scripts are that little bit stronger, and that manifests itself in meatier scenes. So more about Sheppard is revealed because there are, in fact, more character beats. For a while there the writers were trying to craft scenes involving all the characters and gave them each one or two lines, but the truth is you don’t really accomplish much that way. Not only do those types of scenes take longer to shoot, but it also leaves the actors feeling slightly shortchanged because they can’t reveal anything of real significance about the characters. This year has been somewhat different in that we’ve had more individual vehicle stories and I think everyone—the fans, the actors, the writers etc.—are much more satisfied. I’m curious to hear what viewers have to say about this entire season and I can tell them now that they have some pretty awesome story arcs to look forward to in year four.”
David Hewlett
From “Weird Science” in Stargate SG-1/Atlantis: The Official Magazine #13 reprinted at David-Hewlett.co.uk (Dec. 2006/Jan. 2007):
“It’s kind of difficult for McKay to evolve, because once you know people like the character, you can’t change him that much. He goes through stuff, but the reality is, people don’t want too much of a dramatic change. The advantages that I have with McKay are that the situations he gets put in change him temporarily. Every single time something goes wrong it’s an absolute disaster for McKay. I get so much range within my episodes—which I think is a fine line to walk. I remember when we first started; the original concern was that you have this sarcastic bastard, who came in for a couple of episodes of SG-1. How does that become part of a show without turning it into Lost in Space’s Dr Smith? Not that that is necessarily a bad thing, but that’s not where they are going with this.
“If anything, what this guy is learning is how to have friends. I don’t think he’s ever had friends. It’s ‘one step forward, 10 steps back’ for McKay. He acknowledges one nice thing about somebody, is slightly sympathetic for a moment and then he’s right back to being a jerk again. The thing about McKay is, it’s all bark. He cares very deeply for these people; he just has no social graces at all, and doesn’t know how to acknowledge that. If there is an overall change with McKay, it’s getting used to people being his friend as opposed to just his competitive co-workers. He’s there to stir things up. And that’s the beauty of the show. I love the fact that it’s a bunch of scientists, brilliant people all put together with different agendas. So there’s not so much politics to play, because I think they tend to bond together as they need to, to battle their various enemies.
“I’ve got to say that one of the characters who I hadn’t had a chance to really play with up until this season was Ronon. We got to do a number of scenes stuck in a cocoon. Ronon and I are from different worlds. Our characters, and in fact in life as well are absolute opposites—what he does for cool, tall and good-looking I do for the nerds of the world. We’re like Romeo and Juliet. So being stuck in a cocoon with him was fun, because his reaction to being trapped is very different to McKay’s, who gives up before they’ve actually finished building the cocoon. So there’s a lot of fun there. We actually got to shoot that a couple of times because they had a change in design halfway through, and they decided to re-shoot stuff. We’ve been doing lots of exciting things. They’re really concentrating on the characters this year, on bonding all of the characters together. I don’t know how that works for McKay! I’m not supposed to get along with anybody. Its fun making that work—the anti-bond.
“‘Sateda’ is a season unto itself—people might get hurt watching it! They witness McKay getting hit in the ass by an arrow. I am struck by an arrow in the gluteus maximus in one of the first scenes and spend a large portion of the show on my front on morphine. It was interesting—one forgets that one has an arrow in one’s ass after a while, and then the jokes eventually just get tiring, because every single person on the crew has to mention something ass related or arrow related, I suppose. Those were definitely some of my funniest scenes to do. [Robert] Cooper, I believe has no other life. He sits just coming up with awkward, possibly embarrassing situations for McKay to be in, and then he smiles about it! He comes in like he’s done you some big favour. ‘I wrote you some great stuff!’ And it’s like, ‘Well, no you didn’t, you wrote me some embarrassing stuff that my parents will disown me for!’
“McKay was generally being injured and making a nuisance of himself. It’s a big Ronon back-story thing. I ran around a lot, mocking it. Jason would see the rushes because he was really excited about it. He’d be like ‘Oh dude, you gotta look at this,’ so you’d follow him in, and he’d show you these amazing shots of [him in] slow-mo, pulling the pins out of grenades and tossing them over his shoulder, walking towards the camera, things exploding. Then I would recreate them the next day using a donut. What would happen if McKay had this scene? McKay walking down a hallway, and he’d take a bite out of a jelly donut. He’d maybe dip it in a coffee, and then toss it back at his enemy…”
From “Kate Hewlett Cast as McKay’s Sister” in Stargate SG-1/Atlantis: The Official Magazine #11 reprinted at David-Hewlett.co.uk (Aug./Sept. 2006):
“When we did ‘Hot Zone,’ where [McKay] confesses he has a sister it had originally been written as a brother. And I said, ‘Look, just on the off chance, I’ve got a lot of sisters and one of them happens to be an actress. I’m not saying you have to cast her, but on the off chance, can I say ‘sister’?’ And they said ‘Oh that’s a good idea. That’s fine.’ I’ve just worked with Kate, because we just did this film together in January. And she’s fantastic. And that’s me saying it—I’m usually tougher than anybody on that kind of stuff. And one of the producers actually saw a couple of things she did recently as well, and said she’s good.”
From “McKay’s Catalogue” in Cult Times #130 reprinted at David-Hewlett.co.uk (Jun. 2006):
“It was a big challenge, of course, deciding on how McKay would behave towards his sister. That’s something Martin Wood [the episode’s director] and I discussed at great length. After all, my character is someone who is used to always being right. McKay also has a tendency to snap at people and is constantly assuming that they’re not as intelligent as he is. That’s the dynamic he has with Samantha Carter, who is in this episode as well. She’s introduced to McKay’s sister and suddenly you’ve got this situation where Sam is like ‘Oh my God, she’s solved this problem before her brother.’ Meanwhile McKay’s reaction to his sister’s work is one of ‘Well, it’s all right I suppose,’ but deep down he’s thinking ‘How did she do that?’
“In McKay’s mind, he’s done the legwork and really committed his entire life to his profession. As such he’s become part of Atlantis. His sister, however, just happens to speak the language of mathematics and has this innate flair for it. One day she’s playing at home with her children and out of the blue solves a scientific conundrum that she sees no practical use for but it is, in actuality, and interesting theorem that bridges parallel universes. For laughs, Jeanie posts it on the Internet and it attracts the attention of Stargate Command. So my character’s job is to persuade her to sign a nondisclosure agreement and give us a hand implementing her theorem. Sadly I can’t reveal the precise repercussions of all this, but suffice to say we discover that the parallel universe has a few more things running around in it than we expected.
“Funnily enough, this is a very scientific episode in that it deals with an awful lot of the Science Fiction elements of the show, but it’s also one of the most character-driven stories we’ve done yet. There’s this incredible family dynamic between McKay and the rest of the team and then his sister comes along and they’re like ‘She’s quite nice. Why can’t we have her around all the time?’ It’s a pretty neat story, and Kate is fantastic in it. She’s almost as good as me. Seriously, it’s a pleasure to work with Kate, especially as I was personally responsible for trying to stop her from acting. When she first said ‘I want to go to theatre school,’ I was like ‘Are you nuts? Get a real job and forget this acting stuff.’ I did everything I could to dissuade her from acting, but, quite wisely, she ignored me, and things could not be going better for her.”
From “Sheer Genius” in TV Zone #219 reprinted at David-Hewlett.co.uk (Sept. 2007):
“Filming that last scene [in ‘Sunday’] with Paul was quite subdued. We’d goof around all the time, no matter how serious the scenes were. Even in ‘Sunday’ where we lost Paul’s character, he goofed around to the end; that’s Paul. However, prior to us shooting that little tag scene at the conclusion of ‘Sunday,’ everyone was laughing and saying ‘Oh David and Paul on the blue-screen. Like that’s not going to be goofy,’ and it actually ended up being kind of morose and really quite depressing. That said, it seemed like a suitable send off for Paul and his character, and it was heartfelt.”
From interview with DVD Snapshot (2007):
“It’s so odd because I think as the years go by, the more you do a show, the more like life it becomes. You begin to react to it in the same sort of way. Like in life, you have these horrible, horrible things happen; there’s no rhyme or reason, and you sort of begin to take that on with the show as well. It was quite a shock. We lost a very popular guy—both on set and off set—we lost a very popular character. He’s got that great sort of Scotty-like quality. He’s just a fun character to play with and we had a lot of fun bouncing our various grating personalities off each other. It was an odd episode. In fact, it was over before I think we even really figured it out. That last scene was really quite… I was amazed at how sort of choked up I got. I was like, ‘What the hell? The guy’s not dead! Just his character died.’ They can always bring people back. It was a tough episode to do. I certainly had my doubts when I heard about the exploding tumors.”
From “Sheer Genius” in TV Zone #219 reprinted at David-Hewlett.co.uk (Sept. 2007):
“These guys are really good at doing the unexpected, you know? They’ve been working on Stargate for 10 years and they know how to make an impact. I think last season’s ender is a perfect example of how they can sort of shake you up and make you want to come back and find out what’s going on. It definitely spins the programme off in a different direction for year four.”
Torri Higginson
From “Exclusive Interview: iF Magazine and Torri Higginson Get Lost in Stargate Atlantis” at iF Magazine (Aug. 11, 2006):
“I think it’s interesting that the writers chose to put a woman in charge on Atlantis, because Stargate has always been very military oriented, so putting a woman who isn’t military in charge in very interesting. I think it puts out great challenges for the writers and the actors, because how do you write a person in authority who is not military; commanding military people. We’re always going back and forth of which choices empower her, and which choices lessen her power. Also being a woman, men are really not wanting to listen to what women say, just ask my ex-boyfriend! [Laughs]
“This is actually my favorite season so far. One, because the writers have a huge clean canvas after writing ten years of Stargate and three years of Atlantis, they’ve written everything they can write. This year they are being very brave with each episode being its own and blowing up borders and boundaries, I mean two episodes this season are sitcoms. When you get a script you never know what you are going to get.
“I am so tempted to tell you things that I shouldn’t. I’m a tell all or tell nothing girl. Something crazy happens second half of season three, that it will blow people’s minds. It is so crazy and so unexpected, and there will be uproar and the internet will be on fire. Weir goes on a date this season! My dog is in this season again, and it makes me very happy. I’m working on having her as a regular.
“We have a brand new enemy that is incredibly insidious, and whatever hint I give will take away from the drama of it. Our first introduction to them is through the gate we go to them thinking they will be our greatest allies. There is a version of them that has been spoken of in SG-1, and they come back for three or four episodes this season.
“The Wraith will show us another side this season, which justifies a lot of the stuff from season two thinking that the Wraith were a disease we could cure.
“We had Robert Picardo this season. He is such a kind, sweet, and funny man. Richard Kind was wonderful. We got to work with Richard Dean Anderson three times, and that’s a big treat for all of us girls!
“Jason Momoa had an amazing episode [‘Sateda’] this year, which I think our entire year’s budget went to this one episode. It was filmed like a feature film, I think they shot it for 20 days, and our usual shooting time is 6 days. So my episode this year [‘The Real World’] was just me alone in padded cell. [Laughs] But I liked that more, because I come from a theatre background and SCI FI is new for me, so the less money they have for special effects usually the happier I am. It’s about acting then, and goes back to the stories and characters.”
From “Ascension au Soleil” video interview, conducted and transcribed by Gateship-One.net (Jul. 2008):
“[At] first I thought [science fiction] was just entertainment and I didn’t get it. It’s too fluffy, I don’t get it. And then when I worked with it I went—and especially at the time in America where politics have been very strange the last few years—and I thought this is a beautiful way to talk about politics and talk about religion and explore philosophy without ending up in a fight. You know, you’re not saying your country is doing this, you’re saying that planet is doing this so let’s look at that separate from us and it allows you to explore and I think that’s really important and beautiful about science-fiction.
“I think we [Weir and I] are similar. I think it is compassion, I think we both have a lot of faith in human nature; I believe that most people are good, I always say it is just unfortunate the bad people are louder. But most people are good and I think she believes that too, and that was her battle with military all the time because the military attitude is beyond the defensive, it is most people you don’t trust. And she was for trust first until they tell you not to trust. So I think we are very similar. She has a lot to teach me as far as discipline and ambition [are concerned], she’s much more disciplined and ambitious than I am.”
From audio interview with The Sci Fi Guys (mp3 file at link) (Jan. 2008):
“Most of my [mail] comes from young women from all over the world, like, you know, all over the world! I get these fantastic letters from these young women just saying thank you for being a strong female character and I never ever would’ve expected that because I was always fighting—that was my job on the show was to have her fight for her strength to say ‘what is she doing’ and ‘why is she not doing anything’ and ‘she’s got to justify her existence, you know, her merit here.’ So I was always frustrated with her seeming lack of strength and to have that response, though, from so many young women, I feel terribly grateful. I’m very proud of that.
“I think all the spaces in between is everything I brought and I think that I did. Something I get moved by when I get letters of people [who] make that comment too, [who] say ‘you didn’t have much to do in this scene, but the pauses in between…’ Because I was trying to fill her, because I was frustrated with how she was written a lot of the time when I just went, ‘She’s not being active. She’s being quite passive,’ and I thought, ‘How can you be a leader and be passive?’ There has to be—so I had to find what I would do in that situation in order to find her strength. So I think I brought a bit of myself that way. But she’s much more patient than I am, she’s much more measured than I am, and she’s definitely much brighter than I am.
“The very last day of filming in season three as I finished filming the last scene on the last day, I was called up to the office and told that my character is going to become recurring if I chose to be. So I thought that was not a very dignified way to deal with it; I was a bit surprised. I was a little upset with how it was dealt with, but I wasn’t upset at the decision, because I understood it.”
From “Close Up: Torri Higginson” at MGM’s Official Stargate Website (Dec. 10, 2007):
“I wouldn’t go back to do a regular thing, but I’m more than happy to go back to do one or two episodes. As long as Weir had something to do—was there for a reason and was emotionally and intellectually engaged with the story, then it would be a lot of fun. Because it’s great, it’s a great job, it’s great to go to work up there [in Vancouver].”
Rachel Luttrell
From interview with Digital Spy (Jul. 12, 2006):
“In season three we get to see a lot more of the light-hearted side of who Teyla is. We’ve got a lot more humour injected into the season—in fact, two of the episodes are purely comedic. For me, I play a character who doesn’t really get to laugh all that much, so that was fun for me. We also get to see a little more of who she is when she isn’t on duty, a lot of her interests. There’s an angle that has been touched on right now, which is love interests. It’s always been toyed with for a couple of seasons… I think we’re going to get right into something, which is intriguing and fun for me to play, cos it’s a totally different aspect of who Teyla is.
“I believe that in the very beginning she was influenced solely by her people and the influences of the galaxy that she’s from. Since joining the Atlantis crew, she’s been influenced by those of her crew that are from Earth and that’s changed her perspective on how she deals with the greatest threat in her life, which is from the [Wraith], and how she deals with her people, so that’s been a very large shift for her. And another one of the big shifts for Teyla, which has influenced her character, who she is, is just slowly moving away from her people to a certain degree. The fact that she’s joined the Atlantis crew, we haven’t really been touching upon her people that often. She’s joined ranks with a group of people who she thinks can really really effect change for her people, the galaxy and the rest of humanity. That shifts her perspective quite a bit.
“My writers have assured me that there will be [Teyla-centric episodes]! In the first part of this season, we were onto the second part of the season finale, and Jason had a large episode to bite his teeth into, and it was kind of like, what is there going to be for Teyla? My writers have assured me that during the second part of the third season there’s going to be a lot more Teyla-centred episodes. I’m looking forward to it. I’m already starting to toy with that, getting some good and interesting episodes to sink my teeth into.”
From interview with The SciFi World (Sept. 16, 2006):
“To be truthful, we really haven’t had a chance to bite into anything … I haven’t had a chance to bite into anything that I feel really progresses Teyla in the eyes of the audience. I mean I have my ideas about who she is, but this season thus far we really haven’t had an opportunity to show that to the fans so … so yes, that’s how I feel. So we’ll see if we’ve got a few more to do, the season is not over yet but we shall see.
“There will certainly be another cliffhanger, you know, there will definitely be another cliffhanger … I don’t know, I don’t really know… there’s a script floating around, it’s not the next one we’re shooting it’s the one after, but that one I’m told it’s a very heavy Teyla episode and I know there’s something to do with the wraith queen and that’s one of our final episodes. I don’t know what they have in store for us. I can promise you it will be a cliffhanger, and I can promise you there will be a lot of peril involved … we don’t know who is going to survive! [laughter] But I have no idea about that for the moment, so we shall see!” [Note: The episode that was Teyla-centered and that dealt with a Wraith queen was ‘Submersion’.]
From “Slice of SciFi #103: Interview with Rachel Luttrell of ‘Stargate: Atlantis'” at Slice of SciFi (Apr. 4, 2007):
“It’s wonderful to bring [Teyla] to life. I mean, she’s feminine, but she’s also tough. She doesn’t lose any of her womanliness by being a kick-ass girl, and I love that about her…that’s something that the fans really enjoy as well. I’ve met a lot of young, cute girls who are inspired to take action and to learn martial arts and to just be empowered just by watching Teyla, so to me, that’s a thrill.
“The funny thing is, I tend to be more kind of light-natured and quicker to laugh obviously than Teyla is, but when push comes to shove—every once in a while my fellow cast members, and particularly the guys, push a little too much, I remind them that I wouldn’t have been cast in this role if I didn’t have it in me. So there definitely is a lot of Teyla in me.”
From interview with Digital Spy (Jul. 12, 2006):
“There’s so much of her I don’t think has been fully explored. I would love to have the element of Wraith that’s in her explored, because that’s something she found out about in season one. Nice to see how much that affects her, and what she can do with it and what powers it’s imbued her with. I’d also like to see some more connections between her and her people and where she stands right now with them, and how she’s being pulled between her alliance and her loyalty to her people, and that of her loyalty towards [the Atlantis crew]. That’s something I would like to see explored. I also want to see some interesting love interests—that would be cool. I’m always interested in the fight sequences, see some more of that as well.”
Jason Momoa
From interview with Stargate-Project.de (Feb. 2006):
“Oh man, the Wraith are so ugly looking! When you see them with those eyes and the pointy teeth and that hair… you don’t have to act! They’re very imposing! Ronon is definitely ready to do battle against them though for what they’ve done to him and all the people he cared about on his planet.”
From “The Warrior Within” in Stargate SG-1/Atlantis: The Official Magazine #13 (Dec./Jan. 2007):
“‘Sateda’ was unreal. I usually do four or five days per episode and if it is every day, it is with the whole group and I have little lines here and there. ‘Sateda’ was a 12-day shoot when we normally shoot in seven. It was the biggest budget I think we’ve ever had and the most stunts and explosions. We’ve never had that many locations. I was exhausted. We basically shot a full-on movie in 12 days on a TV schedule.
“I had so much to do in ‘Runner’ and this year, ‘Sateda’ just blows it all away! They finally gave me something to act with. Being an actor, I want dialogue. My guy doesn’t say much but when he does… ‘Sateda’ was an amazing episode and worth everything. We shot it as the third episode, it aired as the fourth, and it was like, ‘Oh man! Now there’s not going to be anything! The rest of the season is going to suck’ but it has been pretty good!
“You can’t expect [Ronon] to get real emotional. That’s hard to write for. That is why in ‘Sateda,’ there’s a lot I don’t say but I am suffering through. [Robert] Cooper and a lot of the crew guys were coming up going, ‘Wow! That was amazing!’ I don’t necessarily have to say anything but that doesn’t mean I’m not acting. As long as there are good things to chew on and you don’t have to ramble off all this mumbo jumbo like McKay. I would never want to say all that sci fi garbage or Beckett with his doctor terms. I speak through my actions and the way I hold myself. I’m not the way Ronon is in real life so it is still fun to play but it is an ensemble cast and they write for everyone.
“Robert was fantastic to work with. I hadn’t talked too much with him before that. He’s a very quiet guy and I never go up to the office unless there is a serious problem. I came with my ideas and when I first met him, they were having a little meeting so I went in and gave him the hugest hug. I had to prove to him that I could act. He was there every scene, if I needed the set to be quiet, he would make sure they were. He gave me my time. Not to float his boat but he is definitely one of the top directors I’ve worked with on the show, let alone my career.”
From “Dex Appeal” in Stargate SG-1/Atlantis: The Official Magazine #9 (Mar./Apr. 2006):
“I love being Sheppard’s ‘sidekick’, because the way Joe plays his character, he’s like the unsung hero. And it’s nice, because Ronon was one of the top [military] guys on his planet, and when he came in, he had no trust for anyone else. Sheppard is the one he does trust, and throughout ‘Runner’ he trusts him more and more. I think it’s just a level of respect that we both have [for each other]. It’s really nice. Whether they call it a sidekick or his partner, it’s great and we’re a perfect match. I think it’s good for Joe because he’s got someone to go, ‘Ronon, kill!'”
From “The Warrior Within” in Stargate SG-1/Atlantis: The Official Magazine #13 (Dec./Jan. 2007):
“Ultimately, Ronon is still kind of a loner but has taken direction from Sheppard as long as he thinks it is right. That is the great part about him though. He’s military so he’ll still react and have that instinct within him but at the same time, he’ll listen to commands.
“Sheppard is Ronon’s commander but to me, he and Teyla are the only ones I can trust. I go to Teyla for everything because Sheppard isn’t big on the emotional things. If I had a problem, I would go to Teyla since we are both aliens. She’s like my sister. Shep is like my best friend through the whole thing. Weir is just my boss. I don’t know too much about her but at the same time, I respect her. Rodney is the brains and I’m the brawn and it will always be like that between us. I can kick his ass but he’ll outwit me. Beckett saved my life numerous times and in these episodes, you’ll see he’s probably saved me more than anybody. He is someone I trust and Beckett is like a good buddy now.
“[Shifting from the Wraith-heavy adventures to something more light hearted] is what is great about the show; we don’t take ourselves too seriously. The most serious character on the show is me. In that respect, Joe Flanigan plays the lead so great. He’s this unsung hero. I love the way everyone acts on the show and that it has that comedy element to it.
“I’d really like to do a story and have a credit for that. If I stay on the show longer, I’d love to do a director’s attachment where you sit down and go through the whole thing with him in post-production. I’d eventually love to be behind the camera, going through the dailies, editing, and enhancing what has been shot. I’d love to do that. Hopefully that may be possible next year.”
Paul McGillion
From interview at The SciFi World (Dec. 15, 2006):
“Season 3 has certainly been an eventful one for Carson Beckett. Stand-out episodes for me include : ‘Misbegotten’ – the retrovirus story is very interesting and I believe it’ll be developed further. ‘Irresistible’ – working with Richard Kind was a real pleasure and Beckett crying with Sheppard in a puddle jumper is always something to behold. ‘Phantoms’ – I thought it was such an interesting script that Carl Binder wrote. Seeing all the main characters encountering moral dilemmas made for a really exciting episode of Atlantis. And finally ‘Sunday’ – well, when you watch it you’ll know what I mean!
“I believe Beckett has very good moral intentions, but the pressure of war-fare has compromised some of his decision making abilities. At the end of the day, he’s a good man with a strong moral code that seeks peace.”
From interview in Stargate SG-1/Atlantis: The Official Magazine #20 (Feb./Mar. 2008):
“‘Misbegotten’ for Beckett was interesting. The whole Michael/retrovirus aspect of the storyline is really developed heavily in that episode. The great thing about Beckett is they wrote him with such humanity, and he stands up for his cause. As much a cowardly lion as he is, when push comes to shove, Beckett is very brave which I really like about the character.
“I really enjoyed watching Jason Momoa’s work in ‘Sateda.’ It was a really great episode for him and I was proud of the work he did. Robert [Cooper] did an excellent job of directing it. It was like an action movie and stepped outside the realm of a regular Stargate Atlantis episode. David having an arrow stuck in his ass for half the episode was pretty funny.
“…I loved ‘Phantoms.’ It was great because every character was stepping outside their normal beats and insecurities surfaced. It was a cleverly written episode by Carl Binder and i enjoyed the opportunity Beckett had in it. As an actor, it really let your muscles stretch.
“‘Irresistible’ with Richard Kind was definitely a highlight and so much fun, especially for Beckett because he’s the first one going down with the potion. Everyone enjoyed that one because it was really comedic. It was almost like doing ‘Duet’ from the season before.
“Beckett doesn’t do a whole lot of action so I love the dramatic and comedic stuff. That is a neat thing, the multi-layered character that they’ve developed with Beckett. A lot of the time, he is the comic foil but other times, he’s the dramatic eyes because he deals with life and death situations.
“I initially found out about Beckett’s demise right after I filmed the episode ‘Phantoms,’ which Martin Wood directed and Carl Binder wrote. Shortly after we finished that, I was back on set and John Smith, Brad Wright, and Robert Cooper asked to have a chat with me and brought me up to the office. To be quite honest, I thought they were going to say ‘Really good work on ‘Phantoms.” To say the least, I didn’t see it coming. They said ‘We want to shake the show up a little bit, we don’t know if Stargate SG-1 is going to go for another season, and in doing that, sometimes you have to kill a character off that will make a big impact. Unfortunately, it is your character we are going to kill off.’ They told me their reasons for it and what their thoughts were. I was a little shocked and at the same time, disappointed. On the other hand, it has been such a great opportunity. I’ve done almost 60 episodes of the show and went from a recurring character to a main cast member, so I have nothing but good things to say about those guys.
“When I received [the script for ‘Sunday’], as far as I know, it was the only script that had a confidentiality clause on the front page asking everyone to keep it top secret. After you have grown with the character for so long, it is a difficult read. Martin Gero did a good job writing it. It was noble and touched on a lot of different aspects of Beckett. It showed different sides of the character and a lot of reasons why he’s become a fan favorite. He was such a likeable, regular guy and that was the nice thing about the character. It kept true to his spirit. As for the exploding tumor thing, it’s a tough way to go!
“Initially, that scene [at the end with McKay] wasn’t in the script. They added it in later which I thought was a nice move. It was really difficult. David Hewlett and I are such good friends and have really grown close over the years we’ve been on the show together. McKay and Beckett had a terrific energy together and David and I certainly do. I think the fans would agree on that one. We didn’t rehearse a whole lot and I think it was difficult for David. He was amazing and supportive throughout the whole process. That is the goodbye scene and you could hear a pin drop on the set.
“I was absolutely blown away by the campaign [Save Carson Beckett]. You never think as an actor you are going to have a pipe band for your character playing in the pouring rain in front of the studio and protests in New York, Los Angeles, and Germany. There was a huge letter campaign so it is flattering and I was honored. It just says a lot about the character that the guys, obviously with my help, created. The sci-fi fans certainly feel that way about a lot of characters but they love their Beckett. I’m thankful for that.
“The Stargate Atlantis experience for me has been the time of my life. Most of that has to do with the fans, so I can’t say thank you enough to all of them who have been supportive of not only the character, but my career. They have been great to me and every time I have an opportunity to travel down to conventions to talk to the fans, I always say ‘Without you guys, we wouldn’t have a show and I wouldn’t be Beckett. I’m flattered and humbled by the support so thank you.'”
Solutions
- Stargate Atlantis Main Page in the Solutions Stargate Wiki
- Season Three (Episode Guides and Transcripts)
- Solutions On-Site Forum
- Other Thirteen Weeks for Thirteen Years (13-4-13) Articles
[Many thanks to Alison who helped put together the Jason Momoa section of this article.]
Richard Dean Anderson returned to the sets to do two episodes, the most notable being the show’s 200th. Michael Shanks told 
“I think [‘Unending’] is incredibly moving and very good television, very good science fiction. I was intending to [be there to see filming wrap], but Robert was directing it and he went on a little longer the last day. Wrap was at three in the morning! I knew at that point we were going to be doing two movies. So I thought to myself, ‘You know what? I’ll go to the wrap for those!’ It’s funny, I knew we were going to be doing the movies, I knew it wasn’t really the end. It was the end of an era certainly, but not the end entirely. And so I didn’t get as misty as everyone else, because I guess I had a little more inside information. But there were a lot of hugs, a lot of congratulations. There were a lot of good feelings, and not all television series end that way. When you’re together for this long, there is quite often enmity, anger, bitterness and terrible things said on the last day. ‘Oh, I’ve always hated you.’ I’ve seen it happen! With this cast, this crew—there was a desire to continue to be together, and that allows us to do the movies. That says a lot.
“Well, unfortunately the SCI FI Channel called us the week before the 200th episode celebration party in August 2006, and told us we were canceled. We had sort of been prepared for it, but we weren’t necessarily expecting it. We were kind of hoping for an 11th season. One of the contingency plans that we had discussed with the studio was to do two, or three, or more TV movies and turn it into a movie franchise. With the unfortunate timing of the cancellation of the series, we thought the 200th party was going to be kind of a bummer if we didn’t have something positive to announce, so Charlie Cohen, who is the executive in charge of Stargate at the studio, stepped up and said he would announce that MGM was going to produce two straight-to-DVD movies. 
“I had already been thinking ahead to season 11, should that come about, and had come up with a story that I thought would introduce that element, the Ark of Truth, that potentially would help us defeat the Ori. The idea was that we wouldn’t find it right away—should we be doing season 11—it would be more like the 
“You know, there is no Mitchell centric episode this season. We have Carter episodes, Teal’c episodes, we have Vala episodes, but there’s no Mitchell episode, so you’re not going to point to that as an actor and go, ‘That was a great moment.’ The writers did that last year, and Mitchell settled in and grew up in a way. There wasn’t the need to address any major issues, and with a cast as large as ours, you don’t necessarily have time to address all the stuff as an actor or as a storyteller. Even with 20 hours, you don’t have a chance to address all the issues that you might want. So that lives out in the minds of the audience. ‘Where does Mitchell live?’ ‘Does he have an office?’ Simple questions like that. ‘Where are the bathrooms in the SGC?’ The salient issues of life! [Laughs]
“I’m thinking of the highlights, but often my highlights center around the people that I’m directly working with. When we get down in the action sequences, I cherish those because I really don’t know how many opportunities I’m going to have to do that. It may be that I’m unemployed for the rest of my life anyway, but if I do go to another job, it’s far less likely to contain a lot of the components that are so much fun on this show. I’ll miss my fellow cast mates and I’ll miss the people that I work with day-to-day on this.”
Stargate: The Ark of Truth: “Mitchell is taking a big o’ ass whoopin’! That’s what I remember of that! My last four days of shooting were literally about me getting my ass whooped. Rob Cooper’s wish fulfillment I think! ‘Give him more! Throw him against the wall one more time!’ It was tremendously fun. It was playtime, where I get to throw myself around and pretend I’m still a boy. At least I was the last time I checked!”
“I’ve enjoyed the character development of Daniel. I think that if you play the character the same way and he reacts the same to situations, it’s absolutely absurd. He has to learn with experiences, grow with them. I think he’s become a little less idealistic, a little more cynical, a little more eager to get involved in the action aspect of things. Certainly, enough of Jack O’Neill rubbed off on him, as well as vice-versa, that they’ve become cross-pollinations of each other in a lot of regards. I’ve enjoyed making those changes. I like to grow with the character and, with every new script, decide what the ramifications are going to be. I’ve struggled with the idea of how excited he gets about certain things and how unexcited he is about other things and [how] that changes with time.”
“He’s a fun character to play because he does occasionally get to use his smarts to overcome obstacles where aggressive force wouldn’t necessarily do it, and that’s a wonderful thing to play too—it’s a wonderful thing to teach, and be the intellectual, thinking man’s hero. It’s nice to have that and not be turned into a sneezing, fumbling over himself, oh-look-he-slipped-on-a-banana-peel, the bad-guys-beat-him-up-again, kind of joke. It’s nice to have a character with redeeming qualities and ability of spirit and all those other things. Those are the parts I really enjoy.
Stargate: The Ark of Truth: “The main thing I can say about Daniel’s role is that his role as the ascended being he used to be and arguing with the Ancients comes to a climax in the movie. It becomes a part of the evolution of the story—the argument that Daniel had with Morgan Le Fay in ‘The Pegasus Project’ comes to a peak as well. There’s a great scene that Rob Cooper wrote between Daniel and Morgan that really illustrates his frustration in a very different way than we’ve seen before. I thought it was a nice way to bring a climax to that storyline.”
Stargate: Continuum: “I remember specifically when we were filming going, ‘Wow! I don’t really do much expositing of previous storylines!’ I’m actually just reserve comic relief, so in that way, it was kind of fresh. … I couldn’t go to the Arctic and they had to find a way to justify me not being in certain shots. Brad threw this [Daniel losing a leg to frostbite] in and I remember reading it going, ‘Well, it gives me something to play!’ It gave me not only a different thing to play, but in terms of the story it gave me a different dimension of the character to latch onto, and gave it a far more interesting turn than it would have been had I gone along for the ride with Ben and Amanda’s characters. When I watched the movie it resonated as an interesting thing to see too, so I was happy with the end result.”
“As we talk, it’s the last day of shooting and I’ve just finished the final scene of shooting for an episode called ‘The Road Not Taken,’ which we started shooting a couple of months ago. It has David Hewlett in it, so it’s been a matter of co-ordinating his schedule with ours, but that sticks out for me as an important episode for Carter. I had a lot of fun with that and it was very challenging.
“This is the longest relationship as an actor that you could ever imagine having, I mean 10 years… We’re journeymen, we expect to do a gig and move on, three months here and three months there, and you never get 10 years. When you do, well, you’ve just got to grab it, and realize how special it is. It informs everything, it informs all your relationships. I think it’s a blessing in some ways that we’ve had this much time.
“We did try to create a sense of family, and I think people who come on the show, guest stars that come on, journalists, feel that hopefully. That chemistry, not even just between the cast, but that chemistry from the top down, translates on to the screen. There’s something about it and you see it on the screen. I don’t know what, I don’t know why. I don’t know why this particular idea works so well. … But for some reason we’re just this little show that could, this little sci-fi show that did it, and 10 years later it’s still got some sort of spark.”
Stargate: The Ark of Truth: “Well, in Stargate: The Ark of Truth, [Carter is up to] not a lot to be completely honest! It’s a continuation of the Ori storyline, which is really Vala’s story, and Daniel’s very involved, but Carter and Teal’c are around! We’re peripheral in some ways in terms of just helping to facilitate the story, but the story is not about us.”
“Well, I had some conversations with Coop [Robert Cooper], Brad [Wright], Joe [Mallozzi] and Paul [Mullie]. I thought seasons seven through nine were great, but Teal’c had become so much of an orator that it kind of took away from the essence of who he was, and that’s a warrior. And I think [in season 10] they really made an effort to get him back to his roots, more doing instead of talking about it.
“I’ve liked him from the beginning, I always have. He’s an honorable, honest character and being an alien, there’s really no wrong way to do it! To have him be able to progress and become more human over time, and we were able to articulate what he was thinking over time in a very natural fashion— let’s face it, over 10 years, nothing had to be rushed!”
“It had been the plan, from probably season five, to start doing the movies and we kept getting renewed. I think this larger scale format had been in Coop and Brad Wright’s minds for a very long time, and to see what they did with it is absolutely incredible. Sometimes while we were doing scenes, and some of the shots were quite elaborate, you’d sit there, because a lot of the stuff was going to be CGI’d in afterward, and go ‘This is weird!’ But seeing it, I’ve got to give Coop all the credit in the world, that he knew in his mind what it was going to be, and it is exactly that. To see on screen what Coop’s vision was, it’s quite fantastic.”
From “Teal’c of the Town” at 
“I felt in terms of how the General came into Stargate, it was with an attitude of cleaning the house and making sure everything was being done the best it could be and nobody was dragging their heels. That’s what I was asking for. Landry was a hard ass in the beginning, but I also wanted him to have a sense of humor. That’s what I thought Richard Dean Anderson brought to the show that made it so unique and wonderful. I wanted Landry to be a bit of a practical joker and have a fun side to him too, which we got into more in the second year. 
“One of my favorite episodes was where I take everybody to the cabin in the woods [in ‘Uninvited’]. That was a lot of fun. I wish he could have gone out more, but that really wasn’t his place. He was sending the young bucks out to fight the good fight. There was enough dramatic stuff back at the base to keep me happy.
Stargate: The Ark of Truth: “I was really pleased that they—at that point we knew that the series had been canceled, so to be able to come back and do some more was exciting. Because I felt that the fans were sort of owed that. So to come back and search for that ancient artifact and defeat the Ori knowing that the Ori are going to launch their final assault on Earth, that was great. And I think like most of them it was very well written. … I love the look of it. I was pretty much relegated to the sets and the SGC. The guys went up to the Arctic and got into the underground passages there, that was pretty wild, but I didn’t get involved in that.”
“Well, I’m doing this interview on the penultimate day of season 10 filming, and tomorrow will be the last day of filming for the series in the current incarnation. It’s been fantastic. Vala’s an amazing character to play, she’s very different to the last character I played—that’s always a real incentive to accept a role, to extend yourself and do something different, to take risks. Rob Cooper’s been very supportive of that, so I play with Vala a bit, and what they keep, they keep and what they don’t, we still had fun doing on the day. I love my new buddies and I’m not prepared to say goodbye, I refuse to say the word tomorrow, I shall see them all again.
“Any opportunity I have to do the Daniel and Vala scenes [are personal highlights], because I really love working with Michael [Shanks]. We have a great laugh together. I haven’t seen him that much this season on set, we haven’t done as much stuff together. Just all the laughing we’ve had every day, you know, no matter how bad the hours are, we still find a way to giggle our way through it. Every guest [star] that’s come to play and do stuff with me, they always bring something fun and playful to the table. I got an opportunity to work with Fred Willard and Wallace Shawn, just terrific people this year. 
“I’ve been a part of it but I really am on the reserve bench as far as that accomplishment [of a record-breaking series] is concerned. I have been a part of it and I’m so delighted for everyone working on it. I worked on a show with Ben Browder and we ended up working together on this show, and I said to the guys it’s not goodbye because, so far, Ben’s and my track record is one of continuity and working together. It has been an incredible year. I think that Vala’s such a fun, brilliant character to play, and that makes it a lot easier to get through the day. It was tough on Farscape because I played the tragedienne and she carried the weight of the story on her shoulders in terms of the drama. Ironically on Farscape, my character informed my life and made it harder to stay positive. [Stargate SG-1] has had the opposite effect; Vala is so positive and such fun that it informs my life in a really positive way. For the most part, it’s definitely kept me in good spirits.”
Stargate: The Ark of Truth: “There are some nice little details that Tim Guinee and I were able to explore in the Vala-Tomin arc. I liked how that wrapped up. Or at least how it did on the day. Not sure what made the cut! In general the loose ends which we tie up seemed to be in keeping with the style/tone of the series: things wrap up as they need to in order to restore order. … I think the writing was probably on the wall where Adria and Vala were concerned. No room for a grey area. So there are two ways things could go for them at story’s end; Happy families or see ya later!”
Up until Momoa’s reveal, Rainbow Sun Francks appeared in the opening credits, but afterwards, he was noticeably absent. His character Lt. Aiden Ford left Atlantis after he underwent a life-altering ordeal at the hand of a Wraith. Discussing this change, the actor confided in an audio interview for the 
“Well, first and foremost you can’t possibly give enough credit to Stargate SG-1 [for Stargate Atlantis‘ success]. It paved a very comfortable place for a spin-off, so there’s no doubt we have an edge on a lot of shows in that regard. We’re probably going to get a greater audience flow than a new science fiction show would, so that helps quite a bit.
“I once had a bug attached to my neck for the entire episode. That was very uncomfortable. This season I had to turn into a bug, which was challenging. There were a lot of prosthetics and that was interesting. I wouldn’t want to be under prosthetics for too long, but the guys who do ours are such artists and it’s nice to watch them work. As an actor it’s fun to morph physically into something else.
“I tend to be more in the Harrison Ford vein [motions to taking out a gun and makes a shooting sound]. That’s pretty much where my skills come in. I have a sloppier, more improvisational approach to winning battles. They’re not well choreographed. It’s funny because James Bamford, our stunt coordinator, and I talked about that. In the beginning of the show, he was like, ‘Oh, you know this guy is going to be like, ‘Waaa Waaa” [Mock karate sounds]. I thought, ‘I don’t think this is actually the character. I think the character is a more regular guy in extraordinary circumstances who just feels like he is flying by the seat of his pants, and will be lucky if he pulls this thing off, as opposed to ‘Waaaaa….” It’s fun to have those characters on the show, but I just thought my character is not going to be that. Chances are, on his off-time, he won’t be sparring… He’ll be drinking beer or playing golf.”
“I pitched Brad Wright a number of different ideas, some of which had already been done, because they’ve done five million episodes of SG-1. The ones that I came to him with had been done in one form or another. I had another idea and he liked the basic concept and he had some other ideas with it, so we just collaborated. I came up with the storyline and he wrote the script. … I had an idea that there was a void that I walked into and got stuck in. I didn’t think of doing it as a different time dimension. Robert came up with that idea and it was a good one, so we ran with it [in ‘Epiphany’].
“Fortunately, the more you see of McKay the more you realize, yes, he’s incredibly arrogant, but he’s also incredibly daring, and there are other facets to the guy as well. Last year my character was put in situations where he got to be a hero, a villain, a Space explorer, etc., and that’s something we’ll be doing more of this [second] season. From a character arc standpoint it’s a dream come true for me. McKay has gone from being a bookworm to a full-fledged member of the Atlantis team. Throughout it all, though, we haven’t lost the fact that McKay doesn’t play nice with others. Not that he doesn’t want to. It’s just that sometimes he forgets to try because he’s far too busy in his own little world.
“It’s like the monkey’s paw…If you make a suggestion, all of a sudden it shows up in a script and it’s just not what you planned. Last episode [‘Runner’] they had me hanging upside down in a hazmat suit, hanging from one leg, in the middle of a forest at night, while it’s pouring with rain. Which was fine—until they started spinning me. And then it sort of fell apart for me. That’s when McKay leaves and David just fights nausea! I’ll just say something like ‘Could it possibly be more miserable that shooting ‘The Storm’?’ And then Robert Cooper will step up to the plate and go…’Sure! It can be! You can be wet, dead and upside down!’ So that’s the monkey paw aspect of it. Useful comments that I make are very few and far between!
“[‘Grace Under Pressure’] has some great banter between Carter and McKay which began for me and my character back on Stargate SG-1. It was, of course, a total pleasure to work again with Amanda. I couldn’t believe how full of energy she was considering all she had to do work-wise plus taking care of her new baby. To top it off Amanda was filming both SG-1 and Atlantis at that point. Even with all that on her plate she still came to the table with so many ideas.
“The reality of it, however, is that I’ve been given so much great material to sink my teeth into with this role. If I’d written this I couldn’t have written myself a better part. I keep saying this and it sounds so cheesy, but there are always a couple of scenes in every episode where I get to cackle to myself while rubbing my hands together and thinking ‘Ooh, I can’t wait to do this.’ There’s a fantastic scene in this season’s ‘The Long Goodbye’ where our two leaders Dr Weir and Colonel Sheppard have gone ballistic and are shooting at each other because they’re possessed by alien beings. Meanwhile, me, Mitch Pileggi [Colonel Steven Caldwell] and Paul McGillion are up in the Atlantis control room and, in this particular scene, are yelling at each other and going ‘OK, I’m in charge now! No way, I am! Shut up, you’re like so not in charge!’ To me that dynamic was just so hysterical and we had a ball shooting that scene. It was one of the best days I’ve had on Atlantis.
“I sound like such a suck when I say I really don’t have a favourite episode. Off the top of my head, in no particular order: ‘Duet,’ ‘Grace Under Pressure,’ ‘Runner, ‘The Long Goodbye.’ There are some that are my favourite action shows, and others that are my favourite acting shows, and then there are some that just ended up being my favourite episodes to shoot.”
“I’d like to be out there doing the exciting stuff.
“I always thought it would be interesting to have the episode where you see all of the characters at 3 in the morning, right? Lying awake in bed and worrying about the decisions that they made that day or regretting choices that they didn’t make and I always thought that would be very interesting. Because I think Doctor Weir made some very tough choices and she was in a world that she didn’t know existed a year before she was put there. You know a year before it’s like somebody says to one of us, ‘You know, you’re going to work on another planet,’ and you’re like, ‘What?!? You’re crazy, that doesn’t exist!’ So she went from that to all of a sudden living that and I think she made some bad mistakes too. You know, in order to learn you make mistakes and I think she is a very compassionate person and I think that was hard for her to deal with the guilt of having made certain mistakes and hurt some people because of those mistakes.”
“I will say this about bringing Teyla to life, she presents so many challenges, but one of the biggest ones to me is that she is meant to be human, but is meant to be other worldy from a different galaxy. So there has to be something about her that sets her apart, though she is human. That was a particularly interesting challenge for me when I started to portray her to make sure there was always that balance, the fact that she was human, but she’s different. And then the second largest challenge, to me, was learning the martial arts and starting to incorporate that into who Teyla is. The physicality of that was also challenging. But both of those have added to my enjoyment of portraying her. They were two things that I had to surmount, but I’m still finessing them but when it comes to the physical element.
“I’ll share this funny (story), or I think it’s funny, the day we shot the kiss [in ‘Conversion’], it was a day when my parents happened to be up visiting me from Los Angeles. They had come up for a few days and they wanted to be on set. (So) they were there front and center, and even though I love them and they are so supportive, it was very very nerve-wracking, and it was a particularly challenging scene to shoot because it was a fight sequence that ended up in a kiss, and my parents were right there watching every moment, so that that was a unique situation…They thought it was great, they were champions of it, they thought it went wonderfully well. They thought Joe looked great. They’re big fans. They were happy, they were pleased.
“I [was the one who came up with the idea for me to sing], because I love to sing, and it was always something that I thought we would be able to use in terms of a link [to] her people, to Teyla’s people. It would be very interesting, kind of a historic look into who her people are, and their beliefs. I went and I talked to Brad Wright about it, and how I thought song and dance have been historically used for funerals and grief, and spiritual purposes, in various different cultures. I thought it would be an interesting way to incorporate it, and also to get to know a little bit more about the assertions. Which I’m always anxious to learn more about, Teyla’s history and their people. (Brad) was game, and incorporated it [into ‘Critical Mass’]. Something that I brought forth.
“They flew me to Los Angeles twice. I had a few conversations with [composer Joel Goldsmith] over the phone about the feel of the piece, what I had envisioned, what he had envisioned, and we came to a common ground. I had a lot of fun working with him. It was really exciting, because we built the song from the ground up, put various instrumentation to it, and discussed how we wanted the song to feel. It was really, really good. The funny thing is, I flew to Los Angeles and recorded the song with him, then immediately flew back to continue shooting in Vancouver. Then one of my producers, John Smith, came up to me on the set, and said, ‘Rachel, we’re going to have to fly you back to Los Angeles to re-record the song because it sounds too good.’ So they then sent me back to Los Angeles to rerecord it and to not to make it sound quite as polished. That’s what we ended up with. It was a very interesting experience working in a sound booth, and working beside the composer, the musicians and what have you. There is a lot that goes into recording a song, but I really did enjoy working with him.”
From interview at 
“I think in the first season I had more fight sequences, and in the second season they had to establish Jason’s character, Ronon, as being kind of a go-getter, scrapper, fighter—will throw himself into the fray at any given second. So yeah, that has definitely changed the dynamic a little bit. It’s also a good thing for Teyla from the perspective of character that she now has somebody onboard the team who shares her references, and being that he has grown up with a similar background, and that has been a good thing for her. Ultimately, it will be a good thing for the show. I think he definitely has changed the dynamic for the best.”
From interview with Gilles Nuytens at 
“I went to high school in Iowa before moving to Hawaii where I worked on the shows Baywatch Hawaii and North Shore. … I auditioned for the role of Ronon, but I had met the casting director, Paul Weber, about a year before on something completely unrelated. So he thought of me for the part of Ronon Dex when it came up and I was immediately attracted to the whole package. I had never done any action based roles before and Ronon is my complete opposite—I’ve never shot a gun in my life! So this has been a totally different mindset for me.
“I’m actually the opposite to Ronon Dex. We’re the same height and have the same hair, but other than that, we have nothing in common! So where Ronon’s intimidating and gruff, I’m kind of a softie and a goof ball! He’s more comfortable with a gun or a sword in his hand and I’m happiest doing my art or writing. We both like action though…I just prefer to be out in nature rock climbing or something, and Ronon prefers to be fighting someone!
“When I first showed up on set, I was grabbing Ronon’s gun and spinning it. If you feel a real gun, it weighs three or four pounds. I came up with this idea right on the set, to just spin it, do these shots, and they loved it. I just made it a part of my thing, that he was to be flash in some ways, and it’s just like watching old Samurai movies and getting into that, ‘I’m an action hero.’ It’s great, man. I’m never going to play a cowboy. I will probably play the Indian, or the bad guy in some way, but I’m not going to play John Wayne. I’m not going to play that, so it’s fun to play a gunslinger and be able to do all this kind of stuff And with it being a laser gun, I can do all kinds of stupid stuff that no one would do with a 9mm gun. I’m not going to play SWAT team but it’s going to have that flash. With swords, I’m not going to play a Samurai either but we have a great action adventure show where we do stuff very fast like, bam, bam, bam. Something that should take a couple days to shoot, or should be at least eight hours, we get in two to three hours sometimes. We cram it in.”
“Dr. Carson Beckett is a very interesting and complex character who wears his heart on his sleeve. He is passionate about his work and has a very moralistic backbone. The character has developed greatly since the pilot—thanks to his interactions with all of the other characters and great story lines from great writers. From comedy to drama—Carson has seen it all and will hopefully continue to get bigger and broader with every encounter and challenge.
“I love my cast mates, they have become really great friends. Again not to sound cliché but it is like a family in a lot of ways and I really learn to respect all their individual talents as well as their friendship. David Hewlett is one of my closest friends now and I wouldn’t have met him if it wasn’t for Stargate.
“I would argue season nine is season one of a new series. In fact, Robert and I pushed very hard for that to be the case. We thought it would have more of a chance of running more than one or two years if it were re-branded and altered. We would have changed it even more significantly than we did. But Sci Fi wanted it be Stargate SG-1 and they had their reasons for that. And actually, it was MGM that wanted it to be Stargate SG-1 more than anything else. At the end of the day it didn’t matter, because it was still going to be a continuation of the same mythology.
“Hey, we thought we ended SG-1 several times. For me, the last chapter was ‘Moebius.’ It was a new story after that. The show just happened to have the same name and some of the same great characters and I was happy to have a job. I don’t ignore criticism but at the same time, I can’t obsess about the fact that some people don’t like everything I do. If I did, I would be paralyzed to the point of inaction. I’m not always happy with everything either. Or the circumstances under which things unfold. Or the way they ultimately turn out. But I do the best I can at the time, try to understand what I can do better and make choices that will hopefully satisfy me when I look back in the future.
“I think we’ve been consistent [with the touchstone moments]. Right out of the gate in Vala and Daniel bonded in a way that made their characters interwoven. They have a depth to their relationship that happened right out of the gate. The moment she was burned [in ‘Avalon Part 2’] he went over to her and held her. It was incredibly powerful; it was very well directed and acted. Michael did a wonderful job, Claudia did a brilliant job. Vala’s façade was gone for just a few moments. That’s what I wanted to play with and expand upon in ‘Crusade,’ to see what Vala was like when she was around the team and what would happen when she fell into a situation where she really did start to feel comfortable again, even though there was something wrong with the situation.
“When Mitchell—this was something that happened as much off screen as it did on screen—but when Mitchell is fighting the knight in ‘Avalon Part 2’ and he’s unwilling to quit and absolutely killing himself and giving his all to get past this challenge, the other characters felt like, hey, this guy is a good guy to have in your foxhole. He’s willing to go to the ends of the earth. That was a thing that happened on set as well, Ben just went all out, physically and energy-wise, to actually do that sword fight. He nearly killed himself throwing himself around the set that day.
“I always wanted to be a director; that’s what I grew up wanting to do. I went to the movies and I saw the director as the guy who was kind of making the movie, and that’s what I wanted to do.
“I had met Brad Wright at Comic Con back when we were promoting The Peacekeeper Wars. Prior to that, I’d met Joe Mallozzi as well as Paul Mullie at the Saturn Awards, and had also shared a plane ride from Los Angeles to Canada with Michael Shanks. Then Claudia Black happened to call and told me that she thoroughly enjoyed her experience working on Stargate, and that speaks quite highly of them. She’s a discerning lady and we know each other pretty well having worked together on Farscape.
“What I can speak about with certainty is the fun I’m having working with the SG-1 cast. Chris Judge is a terrific presence on set. Anyone who thinks he’s anything like his character of Teal’c is sorely mistaken. In fact, I’m always trying to draw a little more Judge out of Teal’c. Michael Shanks is a consummate professional who works diligently at his craft. Because he’s played his role for so long, he has a great perspective on the show and is very much the pace and rhythm of the series. As for Amanda [Tapping], I think she’s amazing to be back at work and be a mom at the same time. She has an incredible ability to focus on the task at hand as well as remember her lines and do everything that she actually does. To top it off, she’s a real sweetheart.”
“Mitchell has been busier in the second half of the season. In the first six episodes they were not yet a team so there was no team to lead. There was less adventuring, as it were. So, once you get the team back in place there’s more for all of SG-1 to do, in a way. As team leader, if SG-1 is busy, then Mitchell is busy.
“I like the guy, which is a good thing. No self-loathing for Mitchell! Especially as the series has gone on… I think he’s revealed a bit more of his foundation as the year has continued. The more it goes on, the more interesting a character is. Not necessarily the ‘dark side’ either, but here’s this beat, here’s that beat. It informs you as you move on to the next stage of playing him.
“I think ‘The Scourge’ turned out well. Ken Girotti came in as a director for that and I’ve got a lot of time for Ken. He directed [season one’s] ‘Cold Lazarus,’ which is an episode I really liked. ‘The Scourge’ was one of the scripts I wasn’t too sure about when I got it because it skirts into different territory for us, but I think it’s going to be a good episode. It’s got a great guest cast, which includes Robert Picardo.
“We bring back Vala, played by Claudia Black, an amazing actress, and our two characters spend a great deal of time kind of joined at the hip and doing their frick-and-frack routine, which you saw a bit of last season. They end up going to the Ori galaxy and crossing paths with these guys, and in doing so bring their wrath to bear upon Earth’s galaxy. Yes, Daniel inadvertently unleashes this threat as only he can do it. He’s like, ‘I’m just so curious about you. Oh, oh, wait, it’s a mistake! It’s a mistake!’
“I really like this villain. I think they’re far more interesting than the Goa’uld, just because they’re veiled in mystery. There’s a wonderful way to peel away layers and keep finding out different things. It keeps the audience interested.
“We’re also breaking in a new colonel, so to speak. Ben [Browder] and I have talked about this. As much as his character being the leader of SG-1, it’s kind of in title and theory only, because in actuality he doesn’t lead by dictatorship, he leads by suggestion. He’s leading a group of people who are far more experienced than he is, one of which is equal rank with him in the military, one’s an alien, and one’s a civilian. So there’s not really a lot of hierarchy for him to draw on because of his lack of experience in certain sectors. With O’Neill, Daniel was able to trust that [the action] side of things was looked after a lot more. So Daniel’s had to take a little bit more of a leadership role in certain sectors of the storytelling, not just as an advisor who sits back and watches but to make sure and saying, ‘No, we’re not going to do it that way, we’re going to do it this way, I understand your point of view but you don’t really know the lay of the land.’ It’s been a balancing act all season, I think, to find when those moments are. We’re also finding where those voices mesh together.
“They did a very good job of making sure that Ben’s character didn’t walk in and was given too much assumptive knowledge. I think the audience would have rejected the idea that this person was just embraced wholesale. He’s got to earn his stripes, and both Ben and the character of Mitchell have slowly evolved that. This guy can hold his own, he’s got his own strengths. There’s a layer of reality in the characterization—we play these characters so many times for so much of the year that, obviously, some of our own personal dynamic has to take hold of these characters. I think that they did a good job of making sure that his character is as Ben is—very enthusiastic and gung-ho about stuff, but very uncertain about a lot and it’s up to us to advise him. It’s been a very natural dynamic.”
“With the first six episodes of this season it was almost like a completely different TV show. Richard Dean Anderson was, of course, no longer there, we had Claudia Black replacing Amanda [Tapping] in our first five stories, and Ben Browder, Beau Bridges and Lexa [Doig] had come on board, too. After those initial episodes we headed back into more familiar territory, but at the same time it was somewhat confusing ground because we had established a new rhythm when we started the year. So in the remaining 14 episodes of Season Nine we were still trying to find our sea legs and mine the depths of our new characters.
“It was especially tricky working with Amanda and Ben in this episode [‘Arthur’s Mantle’] because Daniel isn’t supposed to acknowledge their characters’ presence. There were scenes, however, where Carter and Mitchell are having a conversation with each other and Daniel is in the same room and talking with someone as well. We had a few good guffaws where Ben would improvise a line that I wouldn’t expect, so I’d just sort of look at him and say [jokingly], ‘Shut up already.’
“Obviously, Sam had been away … and during that time a whole new dynamic had built up among Daniel, Vala, Teal’c and Mitchell and with the actors who play them. For the first couple of days I felt like the captain of the school chess club trying to hang out with the football players, do you know what I mean? I can make jokes about the captain of the chess club, seeing that my twin brother was one.
“I just feel like the strength of this character and the joy of playing this character is the fact that she’s a strong, capable, smart and powerful woman. I love the fact that there are so many sides to her—I loved the Pete side, because I loved working with David Deluise, and the whole ‘Jack and Sam’ thing was fun to play at times and a bit of a pain at other times. We were exploring all of the different sides of her, which is great. Now we know that she’s capable of love and she’s capable of hurt and all these things to do with her heart and soul. We know all that, so now lets [sic] get back to what made her the character that she is!
“You know, I have an interesting thing about [Mitchell’s] being the leader of SG-1, because Ben and I have this constant thing—hey, we’re both of equal rank, but I’ve been on SG-1 much longer. How come you get to lead? I actually went up to Rob Cooper after this one episode that I had just read and said, you know, Carter kind of takes control of this mission and does all the intel on it—how come Mitchell comes in and ends up calling in the troops and leading them? That seems terribly unfair, you know, when they’re both the same rank. And Rob said, no, no, you’re right, — you’ll be leading that mission.
“This past Spring I really did question whether or not I’d made the right decision as an actor, a mom, and a person to come back to work. Character-wise, I definitely felt Sam Carter needed to return. For me, though, as I sit here now with only seven days left until we finish filming Season Nine, I know that, yes, I made the right choice. This season of SG-1 has gone really well, and I’ve had my daughter here with me every day and we have a wonderful nanny on set. I’m lucky in that Olivia is such an easy-going baby and is much-loved as well as treated wonderfully by this cast and crew.
“Conversely, there’s this brand new dynamic she’s dealing with when it comes to the Colonel Mitchell character and what he’s all about. At times, he’ll say something and Carter will think ‘What?’ and then other times she’ll be like, ‘OK, I get it.’ It’s interesting because he leads very differently than Jack O’Neill did, and then, of course, there’s the question of why is Mitchell and not Sam in charge of SG-1. That’s something I hope the writers will explore further next season. After all, it could be an ensemble team where there is no patriarchal line of command, or maybe Mitchell and Carter could share the leadership responsibilities. However, because Sam is military and a good military girl, she will do exactly what she’s ordered to do. It wouldn’t be so bad, though, to see her rebel every now and then against an order she truly does not agree with.
“Because of the nature of ‘Ripple Effect,’ it wasn’t our Dr. Fraiser and Martouf. There is a clear recognition, but somewhere the lines of communication are not the same. It’s not the same perspective, and we don’t speak in the same vernacular because we’re dealing with different experiences. So it was weird. It was like, ‘But Janet, come on, it’s me!’ The one thing that I wished for in ‘Ripple Effect’ between Carter and Janet. I think it was a matter of telling as good a story as we could in the short period of time as we had. We had a big story to tell in 44 minutes. There wasn’t time to show all the interpersonal relationships. Carter had to deal with Martouf. So if we had had a Carter and Fraiser scene, then we wouldn’t have dealt with the story as well. But that’s the one thing with ‘Ripple Effect’ that I missed. That was a scary one. I looked at that [script] and went, ‘Oh, crap. No sleep for the next seven days.’ Up at 4 o’clock in the morning, sitting with a breast pump trying to learn my lines…”
From “Woman of Substance” in TV Zone reprinted at 
“The last thing I thought they were going to do was turn Teal’c into an orator! It’s been fun, getting to do scenes with all these great actors and actually talk during them. I never envisioned that. I’ve said more in these last two seasons than I have in the previous seven put together. I had a talk to the writers about getting Teal’c back to the ‘less-talk, more ass-kicking’ character he was before. So I think for next season, he will talk when it is appropriate, but he’ll also do a lot more ass-kicking!
“I’m ecstatic to be doing yet another season of SG-1, and I can’t wait believe we wrap next week.
“Because the Vala character is so ‘out there’ I wasn’t sure if Teal’c could ever truly like her. However, in one of the scenes we shot just the other day [in ‘Crusade’], Vala was talking about a man she’d met in another universe and had grown to love and what he’d been through and what he would be going through. What she was describing was Teal’c’s life. It was truly beautiful the way in which Claudia related this whole series of events, and it got to me not only as Chris the actor but as Teal’c as well. It was like a light switch had been turned on. Suddenly I realised that there is honour in this character and what she’s doing, so I finally had a platform from where I could take Teal’c’s relationship with her next season.
“So we started out SG-1’s ninth season with great hopes and dreams, and Ben and Claudia as well as Beau Bridges and Lou Gossett, Jr have not only met but far exceeded anything we expected insofar as how they would fit in and what their work ethic would be. It’s been absolutely terrific. … We’re having so much fun, and to have this new dynamic is incredible. It’s as if the first eight seasons we were building the rocket and now this year we’re blasting off to even greater heights.
“A couple of years ago Brad [Wright] and Robert [Cooper] called me and asked me if I would be the new general on Stargate SG-1, and I said, ‘Well fine, send me some of the scripts.’ I hadn’t seen too much of the show at that time, so they sent me a bunch of episodes from the past, and I really liked them. I liked the stories that Brad had written. About 10 years before, he had written a two-hour show that I was in, called Sandkings. It was a pilot for The Outer Limits, a series which also ran for almost 10 years, so Brad and I had that in our history.
“And because I was stepping in a pair of shoes that I’ve not experienced—I’ve been in positions of leadership, but I’ve never been a general before—I went out and researched all the American generals from General George Washington up to present and made a collection of things they said and believed. Wrote it all down and then actually put it into categories, because the generals, I found out, were talking about things they had in common: like family, battle strategy, life, death, and all these things. So I categorized all my notes, my findings, and then I handed that into the producers and the writers and they used a lot of that in developing my character. I had played presidents before, the head of the CIA, and guys who were in positions of leadership, and have directed films before, so I have been in positions of leadership myself. I also had two men that really impressed me in my early life, who were leaders: that’s my dad Lloyd Bridges, who was an actor and kind of a leader in his field, and also my college basketball coach, John Wooden, who was one of the most successful college basketball coaches that ever lived. He won ten straight national championships. I use those guys as inspiration a lot. My father, my coach. That’s kind of how I came up with General Landry.”
“He’s a man who really loves his service to his country, loves his job. He’s sort of married to that aspect of his life. And because of that, that’s one of the reasons he had problems personally, with his family—he loved his job so much, he kind of short-shrifted his wife and his daughter. And I think he’s the kind of guy who—if you meet him out on the field of battle, he’s the kind of guy who’s going to enjoy the fight. And the tougher the odds, the stronger the enemy, that just jacks him up, because he’s that kind of a warrior.
“I must say they were really gracious to me coming in in the ninth season. I didn’t really know anybody there. I had met Richard Dean [Anderson] years before, but he was not really doing them anymore. But the rest of the people, they were just so kind to me in welcoming me to the show, it made me feel really at home quite quickly. So it wasn’t a tough transition at all. And Ben Browder, who also was new to the show with me, we happened to live very close to each [other] in L.A., so we got together before I even came out, which was nice. And we’ve become good friends.
“I had one [favorite], I really love an episode, I forget which season it was in, but it was with Dr. Lam, with Lexa Doig, and we were beginning to break through our estrangement and I had basically asked her for forgiveness when I thought I was going to die. And it was a good scene. One of those scenes that you never know quite how it’s going to turn out but you hope for the best. And in this case I thought it turned out pretty good.” [Note: Bridges is referring to ‘The Fourth Horseman Part 2’.]
“Apparently, the casting people from Stargate were trying to track me down for a while. They had, in fact, contacted me last year about a part, but the timing didn’t work out. When you’re on a long running show such as Farscape, people discover you and want to use you in their project. However, you either never seem to be around, or are in the wrong country. If both sides are lucky, you’re eventually able to connect, which is what happened here.
“Vala tends to fit and suit the moment in terms of survival, and I think the textures and layers we saw of her in ‘Prometheus Unbound’ are typically all she’s willing to give away about herself. What’s interesting with her six story arc this season is that just when you think you’re peeling away another layer of the character, she’ll flip everything on its head again, which I believe is just a part of her survival mechanism. So she’s intriguing to me. At the same time, there’s a potential for the character to become a one trick pony. I was lucky though, in that she was important to the story. Vala drives the story forward in the beginning, because she brings the adventure to them, the SG-1 team, even though she’s not part of the group.
“I’m an adrenalin junkie, so I love doing slightly dangerous things, but in a controlled setting and around a team of professionals. When we were shooting this [death] scene, they to put a mat across the fire, rather than extinguishing it when it got too hot for me and I needed to get out of there. As I stepped on the mat though, all these flames sort of shot out from under the mat and towards Dan Shea. I said something not fit for publication. I ended up staying in the shot for quite a while. I remember thinking how cool this would look for director Andy Mikita and for his sake, let’s keep the camera’s rolling for as long as possible. Obviously they used a professional stunt person for the final bit, and then one of the stand-ins, Nicole, who had been doing a lot of stand-in work for me, was put into what someone referred to as the ‘crispy critter’ make-up. That’s when you saw Vala after she had been burnt, and Nicole did some incredible stuff. She got herself into positions that were both very uncomfortable and visually amazing. Much of the footage wound up being too brutal and violent so it didn’t make the final cut. However, we shot extensively and with real stakes, pardon the pun, in the sense that storywise it actually happened. Apart from Vala being resuscitated by one of the Ori minions, who are called Priors, she really does go through that death experience. There’s no wink to the camera about it at all.”
“As we started to get into the more macabre elements, such as when she’s burnt [in ‘Avalon’], I was actually very impressed. I really didn’t think they would go that far with it. I know that that would have been disturbing, because it is an early time slot and it’s got a big family audience. So in terms of the story telling I was very impressed that they took that risk and they took it that far, because it’s rare to be surprised in television these days. So that’s when I started to feel as if I was edging more into the Aeryn territory, when things were getting a bit more tragic and serious. But it’s a welcome texture and shade to her as well, and I think it’s important for Vala to have those layers and levels of complexity. I think that she operates in a very childish way, on a superficial level. But she’s had to survive a lot. Robert [Cooper] and I have talked about this. She has been damaged. A good liar always keeps as close to the truth as possible, so I would say a lot of the time when she is talking about what’s happened to her, most of it is true. She will lie and steal and do whatever, but she has a moral compass.”
