Thankfully, he's as quick-witted and mischievous in real life as Seamus Harper - ace engineer, cool surfer dude and self-confessed genius - is in the show. Woolvett almost missed the boat when it came to joining the Andromeda's crew. "When the auditions were being held, I passed because I'd moved to LA just prior to them and didn't want to up sticks and move back to Canada so soon. However, you do need to eat, and having lived the usual actors' life where a year goes by without work, I took the opportunity to audition for the show the second time it came around." It was a fortuitous decision. "As soon as I walked into the audition room, I took one look at Seth Howard, executive producer for Tribune Entertainment, and basically saw myself. We are so alike in thinking, temperament, everything. Basically he's like Harper, I'm like Harper, we hit it off straight away and I ended up with the job." Seth Howard was delighted when Woolvett accepted the role. "This guy came bouncing in, spouted off a series of incredibly difficult speeches as if they'd been written for him and grabbed me with his over-the-top, quick-fire approach and totally blew us away," the enthusiastic Howard says. He's been known to refer to the Andromeda cast, male and female, as his 'babes in Vancouver', and says Harper is one of his favourite characters in the show. Woolvett shares a love of computers with his beer-swigging, babe-watching alter-ego: "I like to design websites - I'm redoing mine so that you can squash my head and pop my eyes and cool things like that. I also like taking heads apart. This site has heads that open and little signs stick out." OK... That's just the sort of thing you can imagine Harper constructing when he has a spare five minutes.

Away from his keyboard, Woolvett shares Harper's love of surfing, but it's surfing at the end of a four-metre kite that gets the actor going. "Basically you strap on a harness, hook yourself up to a length of balloon fabric, hop on your board and you're away." Kite surfers not only scream along at high speed, they very often jump or get carried upwards of 50 feet in the air. Not a sport for the faint hearted. "It's pretty amazing," Woolvett says. Not that he has that much time to surf these days - his wife gave birth to their first child in August 2000, so pretty much all of his spare time is taken up "just being a dad".

Unsurprisingly, Andromeda is not Woolvett's first foray into sci-fi. He has had a fair bit of experience with the weird and wonderful. "I was in Bride of Chucky. Man! That was fun," he enthuses. "It had incredible visual effects, but the best thing about it was that it was a comedy. I loved it. It was the funniest script I'd read in a long time. I play David, the gay friend. It's nice to know they didn't typecast me when it came to auditioning for Andromeda - Harper is most definitely not\n touch with his feminine side." Before that, Woolvett made several appearances on such shows as Deepwater Black, Psi Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal, Sliders, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues and FX: The Series. Given that Andromeda is one of a new breed of sci-fi adventures, Woolvett admits that it was both daunting and exciting "to boldly go where no one had gone before. See, I am a big sci-fi fan, and so whenever I see something new I want the stories and the effects and everything else to be better than the last time. I think sci-fi always has that challenge to overcome, and my feeling is that Andromeda covered those angles very well in the first and second seasons. It had a lot of gloss for the first season of a brand new show and, despite major changes with regard to the executive producer and writing team, I think the second season has just got better and better."

Given that there are so many similarities between the character he plays and the man he is, Woolvett agrees he didn't have much to do in the way of preparation for the role. "I find it very easy to play Harper - not because it's an easy role, but because it's an enjoyable role and anything that's fun suddenly is no longer work. I'm always drawn toward these characters that have some despicable qualities, and Harper certainly has a few of those. You know, the sneaky things he does with circuits - and as for making Rommie look the way she does and lusting after her..." As season two progressed Woolvett was happy to get rid of the Magog eggs, if only because "it was good to know that I was going to be able to put food on the table for the coming year!" On a more serious note, he adds, "I think the show, like our characters, is coming into its own and into its strength. The ideas of the past, where we had a crew that could fall apart at any moment and had people that could leave or have someone just overthrow the ship, are fears that are going by the wayside. I feel we've become more of a solid crew and can battle against outside elements. "My favourite scene that shows how far we've come occurs at the end of Belly of the Beast. We've just been through hell and back and it's only this intangible bond that we have that saves us and brings us through. There's a scene we are all dancing on the command deck. I liked that. I like it when we get to see those moments between great jeopardy. I mean, what would we do in those few minutes? My guess is we would want music, we would dance or do something crazy to celebrate. I love it when the writers throw in that sort of thing. I thought it was a really cool script."

He feels the same sort of thing has happened with Harper too. "Throughout season two we get to see that, endearing or annoying as Harper can be, he has a tough side. I've tried to bring that out. The ways things are, the writers will go in one direction, then they'll go in another direction and then another - which is all good news. It creates different colours and facets of the character, so it all ends up being more layered and interesting." For Woolvett, one of the most intriguing aspects of the series has been his character's relationship with Trance. "Dealing with her transformation - her Trance-formation - was a very difficult thing for Harper to do. In the episode after it occurred, Lava and Rockets, there were

a few little scenes between Harper and Trance in a conduit, fixing something or other. Harper didn't want Trance's help and it was written as though Harper was ticked off at Trance or had problems with her new self, so I had to delve into why that would be. Why it would be such a big deal for Harper to have problems with Trance changing? Having thought about it, it came to me that maybe Harper only discovered he had feelings for 'Purple Trance' when that Trance was gone. What if he suddenly thought that there were opportunities and things that maybe he'd fantasised about that were gone, things he should have acted on but didn't? "I think that as season two progresses from Lava and Rockets onwards, Harper finds out that she's the same Trance. She's just from the future. I also think he's getting to grips with the fact that he has a new opportunity - like maybe there are things that he didn't do earlier that he should act upon now. The developments in Ouroboros were a wake-up call for Harper. I look forward to seeing what develops in season three."