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 Andromeda
Interview part 2 – UK DVD C.4 - Extra Features Transcribed by Hannah the Writer I used to be a sci-fi fan. I’m sure I will be a sci-fi fan again when the show is over, but when you’re doing sci-fi this much all the time – and we talked about the writing – when you’re writing it as well you start to have Andromeda dreams.
Once we were actually on the ship and, um, what happened? I think it involved me, Rommie, Beka and Trance … and I don’t think I need to go into any more detail. No, I’m just kidding. [laughs] I didn’t have a naughty… But I have had work-related dreams, they’re usually on-set. Lisa has told me, I remember last year, she told me she actually dreamt she was Beka and we were on the Maru. Cut to Lisa Ryder interview Lisa: [laughs] You know, I don’t know why, but Gord Woolvett has been in my dreams a lot lately – in a totally non-sexual way – but he’s been there a lot lately. I don’t know why. Back to Gordon interview Harper is not a very difficult character to play at all. Harper I put on at the beginning like an old shirt; he was sort of an amalgamation of a bunch of characters, a couple of characters … a genus of characters that I have already played. You know, he’s not, sort of, the same old thing but an attitude that I know quite well. It’s an attitude that I’ve got to know personally in my younger days, you know, when I would have one beer too many [laughs] when I was out with friends. That’s Harper. In fact, to this day if I go out and have a glass of wine at dinner Harper starts to take over and then I find myself in trouble. I never think about other people watching my performance, so it’s generally, I mean it’s genuinely surprising when someone comes up and says “Hey, I like what you did there” because you’re reminded “Oh wait, this is being watched by however many hundreds of thousands of people.” You don’t remember. Or maybe not, maybe I’m lying to myself, I don’t know what the numbers are. [laughs] I only think about what I haven’t done. I go into a scene and if the scene doesn’t play naturally, or even if it does play naturally without having to really think about it, I try to find things that I’ve never done as an actor, and I try to go to places so that when I watch it I go, “Hey, that’s something new, that’s something I’ve never done before,” and then I’ll have a new tool in my arson. We had a great episode this season, season 4, so it won’t be relevant to this DVD, but I get to play an alternate- I get to be the bad guy. And I’m the Commander of the Commonwealth – Commander Harper. And I’ve got this headpiece and I can’t move and it’s a totally different character. What I tried to do was to make him the educated version of Harper. Harper has street smarts and he knows a lot, but he didn’t go through years and years and years of school, but he is educated. But I tried to go the route of someone who had been through the academy, and then fell sort of the way of the Patriarch – someone who started out good but then all the corruption in the universe corrupted him and he has a totally twisted view and doesn’t realise what he’s doing is wrong, so that was fun. On where he gets his energy… Coffee! [laughs] I’m cutting down though! I just – you have to have a natural energy, I have a lot of energy. And I see it because it’s in my son. He’s up at 6AM, he doesn’t want to go to bed at night, and that’s when he sleeps in. He doesn’t want to go to bed at night, and he never wants to sleep and he’s just go-go-go all day long. You just have to find the fun. If you can find it and you can make it fun then the energy’s there. It comes to the point where you don’t have to- you can plan less and less and less and you can actually feasibly look at a scene the morning of if you need to, if you were doing something else the night before. I don’t, I do prepare. Sometimes I’m less prepared than I should be, but you literally can look at the dialogue and know intuitively where the character is coming from. The writer starts to write to the character and you sort of start to meld and you don’t have to analyse as much to understand the subtext, it just sort of comes. I’ve been very lucky in this show in terms of scheduling. I have an average of three days a week, so I get a lot of time off to spend with my boy and my wife, and on the days that I do work, you know, my make-up is just basically some powder and then this. [Points to dataport] This thing, which takes about three minutes. So, considering how it could be on a sci-fi show, I thank my lucky stars – pardon the pun – [laughs] that I have such an easy schedule. Every time I come back into work after a couple of days off, Dylan says, “Oh, thanks for joining the cast.” Dylan! [rolls eyes] Kevin. See! The Harper takes over! Kevin says, “Hey, Gordon, thanks for joining the cast.” He said it this morning, it was very funny. |
