Stargate Universe executive producer Joseph Mallozzi is offering to host a fan Q&A with SGU actor Jamil Walker Smith in his weblog!
Here are his instructions:
Yes, you read correctly. Actor Jamil Walker Smith, Stargate: Universe’s explosive Master Sergeant Ronald Greer, has kindly agreed to swing by the blog and field your questions – in exchange for my recommending him a couple of good local French restaurants with the understanding that if they fail to impress, he plans to call me out during his Q&A.
I’ll be gathering questions for Jamil over the next few days and plan to send him the batch sometime next week so that he’ll have something to do…besides learning his lines. Oh, and acting!
In order to ask your questions, visit Mallozzi’s March 6 entry, scroll all the way down to the bottom to the comment form, enter your information, and then submit it. Mallozzi moderates every comment, so it might take a little while for yours to show up.
Smith and the rest of the cast and crew are busy with Season Two, but we haven’t seen the rest of Season One just yet! The countdown is getting closer to April 2, 9 PM ET, for SGU’s return with the eleventh episode “Space” (you can see spoilers and images at Chicago Now).
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 
“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.
“[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!
“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.”
“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!”
“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!”
“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.
“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!’
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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]
“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.”
“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.”
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
From “The Warrior Within” in Stargate SG-1/Atlantis: The Official Magazine #13 (Dec./Jan. 2007):
“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.”
“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!'”
“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.
“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!
“‘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 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.
“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.
“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.
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!”
In his introductions, Mallozzi gave some of the credentials each new writer/producer carries. Aubuchon has worked on projects for Caprica, 24, Persons Unknown, Summerland, and The Lyon’s Den; McGibney, Homicide: Life on the Streets, Family Law, and Chicago Hope.
