James Callis on Portlandia

I know this has been online for a week or so, but I wasn't able to view it for some reason. So I've been grumpy and keeping out of the discussion (thanks to Nicole for screenshots and description though!). But now, through not entirely legal means, I have seen the episode and it was beautiful!

For those unfamiliar with the show, Portlandia is a sketch comedy with observational humor. Based on this episode, I really liked it. There are some pretty funny skits on bad tattoos (featuring Eddie Vedder), an artisan knot maker (Jeff Goldblum), and an allergy pride parade. The James part is at the very end, where BSG-obsessed Doug and Claire have gathered together James, Edward James Olmos, Ron D. Moore (who's just some black guy with the same name), and a "local actor", played by the real Ron D. Moore. They do a table read of "one moore episode", and the hilarious part for me is how excited James is to just play along and please the fans. He's basically playing himself, Nicest Guy in the World.

Eddie, on the other hand, is visibly uncomfortable and openly grudging about his role in all of this. He even gets up to leave at some point. The script is a bit ridiculous, including lines like "I need you here, now get out of here!" The "local actor" pronounces "frak" as "frayk". Even James has some issues with the script, although he's nice about it: "Do I just repeat 'you gotta listen'?"

Then - the fake Ron Moore's wife comes home, unhappy to find all of the strange people still there. Dramatic drums, zoom-ins on everyone's face. James breaks the tension: "I've got an idea, something we can all do together to relax. Are you familiar with Dr Who?" And then they watch Dr Who, and Eddie falls asleep, and they all agree to watch one more episode.

Also, James is pretty frakking handsome in this, with long hair and some kind of facial hair stuff. And he wears shorts. (And he drinks Coke I think, and you can kinda see his belly when he's sitting on the sofa, and it's all very sexy.)

Oh goodie, it's already on Youtube!



With many thanks to CZDeus.

James Callis in America

EDIT: ah, they already have it on Youtube? Embedded.

Edward James Olmos' film America, starring his wife Lymari Nadal, has a website now at americathemovie.net.

If you're interested in the film: watch the trailer. It seems interesting, I'll probably watch this. Someone was complaining on Twitter about the overpowering soundtrack, and I can already tell by the site and trailer that it has that. I'm interested in the premise though. Based on the trailer, it could go a little too much in the "violent husband is evil" direction, although I'm not sure how sympathetic you can make a beating husband. What I like is that the protagonist, America, is trying to change her life. 

If you're only interested in James Callis: skip the trailer and go straight to the selected scenes for him. (Edit: it's the same as the above embedded video.) There's a brief interview with behind-the-scenes shots, where you can see him talking to the cast. (And laughing and being adorable <3.) He plays Mr Charlie Leverett - another Charles? -, who he says is a computer nerd who likes comics, and he's the opposite of America's violent husband. Also, you can see him at the piano a little, so I'm hoping he's going to be playing some music in the film too. (In fact, if he's playing the overpowering soundtrack, I forgive it.) He looks boyish, with spiky hair and kinda nerdy thick-rimmed black glasses. It's amusing that he went straight from this to Gabriel McDow, whose hair was very messy and bushy. I guess it's all in the styling. He's in two photos in the photo gallery: 5 and 42. I can't link directly because it's a flash site. 

Here's what James says about the movie (and this is why I'm interested in it too): 

"It's quite a feminist movie, if I can say that. Women have to stand up for themselves and... seize the power, seize control. And if you're in a relationship that is no good and you can't change it around, you actually have to get out of it and start fresh, start something new." 

James Callis Interview at Galactica.tv!

This is something I've been waiting for, because Galactica.tv does awesome interviews. Here's their article on James Callis, interviewed by Marcel Damen last month. I talked to Marcel about a year ago, and he worked hard to get this interview. I also see he snuck in his question about the glowing spine! Hee!

Firstly, some good news: he has a small part in an Edward James Olmos movie tentatively called America, and he's got many other things lined up for this year as well. He just can't talk about them right now. Whew!

There's quite a bit about James' background as an actor, which is not something that comes up in most interviews.

I left school, I went on a gap year and I actually went touring around Europe with an amateur theatrical company. The person who was directing that is now actually my best friend, but the play that we did was a disaster. It was really... A lot of people don't do this stuff anymore. It was like taking a play around Europe in one of those Volkswagen campervans. A lot of people didn't get on, we were young and we didn't have audiences. It was tough as all hell.

Aha, that must be the Beginner's Luck backstory! Maybe it's a remnant of older theatre tradition - theatre groups travelling Europe and such to put on plays, when cinemas and TV weren't around yet. It sounds like a pretty difficult way to engage an audience these days. I'm not sure if I'd try that out. It just sounds like the recipe of a disaster, a bunch of people you don't know traveling around doing something really emotional for no money. Beginner's Luck certainly didn't make it look like fun.

And apparently they took him into university because of that experience? Hee! He doesn't sound that excited about what he did at university, which feels like an odd sort of relief. I didn't do that well at university myself. (Well, I did get high grades, but I dropped out of some courses and my thesis was a disaster.) I'm also interested to hear he was working at a kibbutz for a while.

A bit about his family:

I think my mother had done some acting before and my grandmother was going to be an opera singer, but when my grandmother was younger it wasn't correct -- in my family -- for a young lady to be on stage. That was like a disaster. Things had changed a lot by the time I came around, so they were very supportive. I think they knew it would make me happy.

That's really interesting. It must be where his performing/singing talent comes from. It's also really sad - if his grandmother had lived now, she could have pursued the career she wanted. My grandmother was a great writer, but she couldn't afford an education and never pursued a writing career. Sometimes I think of her and how I can carry on that legacy. I can get my words out, she couldn't.

I tend to glamourize James, I think, but it sounds like he's seen a rougher side of life with the theatre group, and he's seen the ordinary life. Maybe his life is still pretty ordinary everyday life - kids, taking them to school, going to the supermarket, what have you. Considering that he's been through all that, maybe that's what makes him so humble. (Yes, even his ordinariness makes me put him on a pedestal, I am hopeless.)

About the threesome bed scenes:

Tricia is beautiful, Lucy Lawless is beautiful and I'm not! What I mean to say is that when we were there lying in bed, it's just a shot (snaps his fingers) and then it's: "Get up, get out."

Yes you are beautiful! Oh James, always so self-deprecating. It's interesting that he doesn't seem to find those scenes that sexy. As a viewer, like he says, you're always imagining more to it than they're showing. I know I've thought of it several times.

I'm trying to not quote the whole thing, but I found this really interesting:

Every other day you'd finish and there was this thing and I'm like: "Oh my God. I'm covered in blood and grime and shit and tears. I've got a headache, my head hurts from those cigarettes we had to smoke, which had some really strong tobacco -- they were nauseous things." So I was like: "Yeah, I'm on Battlestar Galactica."

It sounds like it was a really tough experience on all levels. The reality of it all really came through, I think, and he played it for real, so I'm not surprised it was hard to do it.

(Also, he mentions smoking, which I'm kind of obsessed with since I kinda took up smoking and am trying to quit. Mm, smoking. I wonder how strong the cigarettes were, doesn't he chain smoke anyway?)

It's always a surprise that they had so much fun on set, after all that. He mentions telling Lucy that her body double had a spot on her butt, which made her give up the body double. Hee!

Most importantly of all - why didn't Baltar notice Six's glowing spine when they had sex?

(laughing) I just don't know about that myself. I imagine on some level in the relationship that she was always on top. That's about all I'll say.

Hee! :D Yeah, on more than one level, probably. You know, I've seen a lot of interviews and this hasn't come up before, surprisingly.

("on some level" count: 6. He also says "at an early age" twice and "a really young age" once.)

Also - he doesn't plan on appearing in Law&Order UK. I'm a bit disappointed, it doesn't seem like a half bad show, and Jamie's on it. But I'm glad he feels like I do: that it's hard to find roles that... oh sod it, I'm quoting again.

Then you read other stuff and it doesn't come anywhere close to the moral complexity, ambiguity, tarnished nature of the human soul. So it's hard finding things that for me have the integrity that this show had. I think that will be a problem for everybody who was involved in Battlestar Galactica essentially.

It's like that for the viewers as well, I think. I hope he can find something that lives up to Gaius Baltar, but I might forever compare his every role to that. It's great he was involved in that, but it's also a disappointment to see him in a role that isn't as demanding or giving to the audience.

An Evening with James Callis - the Panel: Part 2

Part 1 here, video here at Scifi-trek.de and audio here at VDV Magazine.

OK, I promised more chest hair. I can't find the exact spot on the video, but at some point he apparently got hot and the shirt kinda opened a bit and you can see more chest hair, so before we go to the serious and intellectual discussions of BSG, let's just have some eye candy.

Thanks for the photos to the lovely René Kissien of Caprica-City, as always.




Mmmm. Oh, James. Sweaty AND hot, that's...

OK, minds out of the gutter, girls. Let's get to business. First a note: [ev] means Eddie voice. I.e., Edward James Olmos voice. He does that so much that I actually need tags. :D Which is all kinds of awesome.

Asked if he's doing any theatre work right now:

No. Um, no. The last theatre work I did was a play in London called "Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight". [laughter] Again it was rather risqué. Basically, I ... Beginning of the play, I'm having sex with my girlfriend and we're really going for it, and whereupon... when she climaxes, she ... envokes... it's rather difficult to say.. but she basically says a racial slur while we're having sex. And I'm like, "What did you.. what did you just call me?" It's a brilliant play but it's a bit like Friends, and we're having such a bad time in our relationship that she decides to ring up her friend to counsel us through the problems we're having. So we were on this side of the stage, she rings up her friend, the lights come up on this side of the stage and suddenly we're in the light of her friend, who's having an affair with a gangsta. So it's a four-way conversation.

(Aha! He's describing how the stage was divided into three parts :D)

And these two people then can't sort out our problems, so she rings up her shrink, and the stage then splits up into three parts, and the shrink is having an affair with a man, and it ends up this six-way conversation between myself and my girlfriend, her friend and her gangsta boyfriend, and the shrink and his boyfriend, and... There's a lot of um.. I say something that gets misheard or misconstrued, a lot of... I don't know what they call that, but I say something intended for somebody, and it gets heard by somebody else, and there ends up being a big row, but in the end, everything works out nicely.

A bit like Friends, maybe more like Three's Company though. Seriously, this sounds like a great play. Talking about it, James looks amused and like he's got fond memories of it. There's an article here that mentions the (pretty bad) racial slur - James sounds like he wants to say it but can't, either because it offends him, or he's shy to mention an anti-Jew sentiment in Germany, or he's just too polite. I do wish I could see him in theatre, although there's a very tiny chance of that ever happening. I understand some of the Unofficial Website people have been to see his plays, to which I can only say: lucky bloody Londoners.

That's the last play I did. It's rather difficult getting into, back into theatre cos it's such a huge commitment. Yeah, I haven't even read any... any scripts for going back.. Oh no, one thing was presented to me that I didn't want to do, straight after Battlestar. It was like, will you be a almost 50-year-old short order chef? And I said no. No. What would I do that for? How would I get.. they said, "It's a perfect opportunity for you to be..." I said, "Yeah, to be fifty years old, and then never get a job as a thirty-year-old while I am in my thirties." So... didn't seem like a great idea at the time. Not as yet. If the right thing came along I'd do it, that's kind of where.. that's my background in that way. You don't start out doing television and films, you start out doing plays and theatre and that stuff.

He sounds a bit like he misses the theatre days, but maybe I'm just reading into his tone. Also, late thirties, James, late thirties. Closer to forty. I can tease since I'll be (gulp) thirty next month. But he definitely doesn't look anywhere near fifty. On the other hand, he did go and play an ancient grumbly Merlin right after BSG, so if he only gets roles as old, bearded, grumbly men with Welsh accents, he only has himself to blame.



A fan begins by asking if he's comfortable standing up. "Are you gonna stand up..."

All the time? I might as well, you know, cos I've been sitting down on a flight, and sitting down in a car. And I suppose... this is the thing whereby one is peripatetic when one moves between the great seas, so... forever? I suppose ocassionally, I was thinking about sitting down on the chair here, but then half the people in the back would have to stand up. So it's absolutely fine. If it doesn't make you uncomfortable, I'm not uncomfortable.

Peripatetic. A person who walks around. I had to ask kixxa about the word. You know, it's nice and considerate of him to explain "risqué", but it's kind of telling that he doesn't even seem to notice all the other big words. I love how animated he is in this panel (and most panels I've seen). He's constantly moving, talking with his hands, walking around. He has all that energy. Is it the caffeine? Or just his natural thing? (I had written "hair" instead of "chair". And it took me three reads to catch that. Freudian slip?) Edit: and it's peripatetic with an i in the middle, thanks to kixxa for the correction. I'm apparently in the slow class this week. :D

The actual question is what parts of himself he brought to the character. (James' face: Hmm, I like this question.)

Everybody on the show brought large elements of themselves to the character. it's kind of... I don't kjnow... It's not a historical drama. You're not playing anybody who really lived, so you don't have to be real or true to anybody's image or idea in that way. Everything's up for grabs. And I think about.. you know, when you asked me that question, I think about everybody in the cast. What would Adama be like if Eddie hadn't done it? Or what would Roslin be like if Mary hadn't done it? Everybody brings HUGE amounts of themselves to the party. Um... I suppose I just came with, um... [laughter; a guy comes up and moves the chair James was just talking about closer to the table.]

I'm just trying to think of the words... I wasn't so concerned, you see, I'm not from America, I'm from England. I was doing, as far as I was concerned initially, a science fiction.. show. I was like, OK. By then everybody was going crazy: [crazy voice] "I'm doing science fiction!" [jumps around madly] Alright, calm down, it's just a TV show. So what I wanted to be was and the way I was, as well, is slightly... I dunno what the word is.. It's not necessarily unconcerned, but nonchalant. Nonchalant in a way that .. the rest of the ppl who were incolved with Galactica, it's about Galactica, in that fashion, I would say American fashion: Go, army! And there was, I suppose, myself with my own sense of humour that finds that slightly ridiculous. So that would come into the um... in the fray.

OMG, thank you for saying that. Because I found the army aspect very American also, watching the show. Sometimes it would annoy me, even the fan-favorite phrase "So say we all". It's this spirit... it's a bit hard to pinpoint, and of course it may be necessary at war, but there's something American about the spirit of fighting an enemy together and being so proud of your own nationality.



Also: I love how he spins his sleeve at the elbow while thinking of a response. It's like his hand is thinking with him. (L)!

If I had to do ... If I had any control at all about anything, one of the things I wanted to do was not come across as malicious, cos I was playing a monstrous character already. It would have been very... kind of? easy to not give out so much, be a bit colder and a bit... and that was something I desperately didn't want to do. So that it was surprising. It was surprising that Gaius should actually admire someone like Laura Roslin. I'm thinking of other conventional dramas, I'm trying to be out for her and get her! That's not really the way...

Another thing I loved about BSG. It's not about good guys vs. bad guys, and Gaius was never the typical bad guy who just wants to hurt others and destroy all the plans of the good guys. Gaius never wanted to hurt anyone, he just got caught up in it. The good side of his narcissism was that he was totally self-sufficient in some way; he was happy with the life he had, as long as he had women and money and fame.

I came across this idea that basically, if he was as brilliant as he was supposed to be as a scientist, then one of the things that he absolutely wouldn't do is play politics, you know. Politics for me on some level is a game of "how am I gonna screw you? But I've also got to look over my shoulder right now, keep all my bases covered." I was like, if you're extraordinarily brilliant, then you won't give a.. give a flying hell about that kind of stuff. I don't have to look over my shoulder, you know, I don't have to... Gaius of course is looking over his shoulder, but that was about his self-preservation, not about politics. So I tried to make him... very much like a square peg in a round hole. Everybody else on the ship would know what buttons to press and what to do, and they knew wehere they were going, I'm going to the bridge... [walks around a bit in determined steps] and Gaius would have no idea.

We actually filmed lots of stuff with Gaius getting lost. [laughter] With several directors and several episodes, and I just got back from the producers like, "It's not funny. So what, we've got.. whatever it was, we've got only so much like 42 minutes, we need to show the drama. It's not dramatic having you getting lost every week." It was one of my fine ideas, you know, just constantly getting... [looks around confused] getting lost and.. yes, I suppose as well, becasue I didn't take the genre very seriously before I came involved with it, I wanted to have a lugh. Let's do the thing that is possibly the most inappropriate thing to do, because that will get a reaction. So I remember there was one scene where Gaeta says something about, you know, billions of people have died, which is you know... what would you do? And it could be his fault. I remember making this face... [makes the face he made in the miniseries; shrugs shoulders and rolls eyes. It still looks hilarious. Laughter] I was like, who'd make a face like that? if you really were.. it was like.. don't do the thing that you would do.

I kinda would have liked to see the bits where he gets lost. It sounds pretty funny. And it would have been a nice parallel to those later scenes where he walks around the cylon baseship getting lost.

I just had to make a few screenshots of him doing that face, and it probably looks crappy next to René's beautiful pictures but here goes:

This is actually as well, now you're making me think... Not just something I brought to the party, but [my family knew somebody] in London who I really respect. He's a brilliant writer, and he's a really briliant doctor. And he happens to be the worst liar I've ever met. So he's really brilliant but he's utterly transparent, and I really wanted to make Gaius a bad liar, so it's like "I'm sure this guy's lying to me", but there's nothing that they can do or say. You think, "If that guy were straight, would he really give me an answer like that?" And that's something I wantd to bring to the party, that he was a really bad liar. And I think he was, I look back at certain things and I'm like, "Oh *I* don't believe me, so how do they believe me?" Part of the fun...

I suppose as well to have as much fun as was humanly possible and as I could. You know, when Americans play the president, there's a big deal there, like they're taking on the mantle of something terribly important and very serious. It goes thru their history and the constitution, it's not to be taken lightly. When I played the president, I just drank a lot, slept with prostitutes and took drugs. [laughter] And it was like, "How could you do that, you're the president?" Yeah, you know... ok..[shrugs] So I suppose I took everything with a pinch of salt, which was quite helpful. Does that answer the qestion? I bet it's answered not just that question but loads of other questions as well.

Finland has a president, but s/he (right now it's a she) doesn't really have a lot of power. So maybe the idea of American presidents - which is like a personal cult more than just reverence - seems a little different from a Finnish perspective as well. The real power lies with the government and that's the whole "corrupt politicians" thing. It's interesting that while the Americans may think of politicians like James does - i.e. that it's a bit of an ugly, dishonest game - a lot of them think very highly of the president and his integrity. But come on, if Gaius Baltar were a president, wouldn't he do just that? Would his moral fiber suddenly add up 100 % and make him straight-backed and non-narcissistic? It's amusing really that they'd say that.

The lying aspect is really amusing and one of the things I enjoy the most in the earlier seasons. Why would anyone believe him? I guess he can, to some extent, fool the military types with his science babble and obviously invented words thrown in there, but still. His expressions give him away.

The next question is, what was Gaius' goal or aim? Did he have a long-term plan? (James' face: hmmm, I don't really know how to answer this question)

I really don't know. It's a good question, but I think in that way.. He never had a long term plan, he couldn't. His whole thing was like, how am I surviving from one second to the next? There was never anything that he could really put into action, some plan, a long way down the line. He was just flying by the seat of his pants every minute of every day, and I... I don't know wha the wanted.. I suppose... like anybody living in some kind of dreadful nightmare, what you want is on some level is to go to sleep, and then when you wake up, it will all be... like you will be back in Caprica and the bombs haven't started and you're not part of it. You want the impossible, and therefore you clog your mind and your life with everything you an do to.. it's about, on some level , it's about living in the now, living right now. Then you're less afraid about other stuff and your demons that are chasing you constantly.

I like this answer. I think he doesn't have any real answer to the question, but he still manages to make it pretty deep.

A question about Taking a Break From All Your Worries, and how that episode was shot. This is awesome.

("Must be clean-shaven, you'll look a lot nicer!")

Yeah, it was an amazing episode to do. It was amazing also because Eddie was directing it. What happened then? I think we filmed it after the summer hiatus, so we'd had four weeks away and... I'd come back with a thick beard that I wanted cos I was like... We weren't the first to the idea of you know... lifting things iconically from the headlines, and I was like you know, several people are like, what about Saddam Hussein when he got caught in his... I dunno what they call it, in his fox hole, or rat hole. So I was like, yeah, let's be looking a bit like this. And several people were like this, "No no no, mustn't mustn't! Must be clean shaven, must be! You look a lot nicer!" it's not about looking a lot nicer the guy's a war criminmal and.. so we really went there.

And I think we really, as well, we went to this place, this really dark place, in a big scene that they had written, where I'm confronted by Laura Roslin and she basically, in the script, BREAKS me! BREAKS ME! And I was like, excuse my French, fuck off! No, she's not going to break me. I've been thru hell and high water, I've tried to hang myself. I've tried to do so many... This woman screaming at me means nothing, so you try and break me. And then suddenly everybody's, "No! That's what it says in the script! We have to do what it says in the script!" I'm like, "No, I don't have to do whatever I don't want to do. I don't!" Mary was getting very irate, going over to Eddie going, [in American accent; the first part is a bit mumbled] "? ? it says in the script he falls down in the corridor and breaks down, he cries." I'm like, "Well, you do something then that's really gonna make me do that." And then Eddie was saying to me, [ev] "It's written this way, give us something, you've gotta break..." [/ev] So I said, Eddie, you're a man, aren't you? And I'm a man too. So if somebody comes up to you and they're giving you all this crap, what are you gonna do? Listen, I'll do it if you do it first. You break down like a little girl right now and like slide against the corridor. Let me see you go that way. let's see it.

("She just BREAKS me!")

He went, "OK. Give her hell!" [laughter] Which I'm not sure he told Mary. And we went for each other in this room, cos essentially what she wanted was... That's all that thing about throwing those photographs at me, have you seen this one, have you... What she was in, that... as it were, like a train on a track, she's following the lines of the script: the more I carry on this line, this guy will break down against the corridor and simper like a little girl. And what she got me was going utterly crazy back at her, to the extent of.. it was...possibly the closest thing to like a real row. And watching back that scene is an entry?. I can't hear what she's saying I can hear what I'm saying. And that's very interesting; it doesn't really matter. It's about the raw emotions kicking up. I'm not giving her the satisfaction, which is what she wants.. Just because it's written that way doesn't mean that it's gonna play out that way. I imagine in a lot of other shows, in a lot of other circumstances, that's possibly when I'd have got my marching orders. "You don't wanna say what we've written for you? Guess what? Meet hte airlock, James!" [laughter] "That's it, bye!" But we all had a lot of lee.. everybody wanted the best from one another. And... yes, I felt very much like, I suppose, that was one of my big episodes, big chances to really show...

I didn't want to cry like a girl in front of her, because she didn't actually get it out of me. I was like, you know something, this guy cries for himself because of what he's been involved with. It actually cheapens him in a big way, you're not going to get the sympathy for this man if he cries like a girl in the corridor. No. He actually has to shout and scream back at her and try to punch her face off. Then you might actually have some respect for him. Um.. And so ... That was actually the spring board for the whole of the episode.

He sounds very passionate when he talks about this. I love when he talks about his vision, his idea of how Baltar would react. He really thinks of these things deeply, and I'm always grateful and happy hearing about his influence. I'm trying to imagine the scene with him crying, and I think I would have felt the compassion anyway. It would still have been powerful. However, given his growth, the baseship, the suicide attempt... I think he's right: Baltar's already been broken, he needs to get stronger now and hold his own. Awesome.

The beard: honestly, I hate it. It ages him and makes him look not like himself. BUT I must grudgingly admit it fits that phase in Baltar's development. I'm glad it was only a couple of episodes, is all I can say.

Yes, Eddie wantd me to be in the shark tank at the Vancouver Aquarium. He was convinced, convinced, that he'd make one phone call and we'd be in. He was like, [ev] "Are you good with sharks? You don't have to worry bc I will be in th shark tank with you." [/ev] [he pretends to look at someone all weirded out. Guh so cute.] What are you talking about, Eddie? I'd actually just been to the Vancouver Aquarium, because like I said, we've got children and we take them there. You can't sneeze over the shark tank. If you do, you're like lifted out of there... "You're contaminating the sharks!" You can't put your hands over the barrier of the shark tank.

There was one lady who dropped, I think, a pair of glasses in like the dolphin pool. She was arrested. It was a mistake, but she was arrested! And the dolphins were siphoned out into another pool while their whole thing is totally turned over with.. whatever it is, chlorine or whatever.. and then they're allowed back in, because even like one pair of glasses [shows his own for emphasis] could contaminate the water. I told Eddie that. I said, that's one pair of glasses, Eddie. And now it's you and me and the film crew in the shark tank.[laughter] Are you nuts? It's never gonna happen! Actually I should have put a bet on it, because I would have won. It didn't happen.

What we then did was, he went like, "OK, what about snakes?" OK, snakes, [go and get a snake]. Surprisingly, or as if not surprisingly, we couldn't get any snakes. Nobody who was a snake wrangler actually wanted to use their snakes in this. So I don't know if you've seen this, but it was not a real snake in the tank. I don't.. It was so dark that you may not even have seen that that was what was going on, but it was really, I think, you know, am dram, amateur dramatic. It was like a few coat hangers stuck together with cellotape and like a woolly sock stcuk over them. And like this man in the tank very near me going, "oooo..." [laughter] Eddie went, "You're terrified, you're terrified! Scream!!" I'm like oh.. god...[amused voice] boohoo help me help me! So and.. I suppose that was.. That was a difficult day flming in the tank. That was finished when we didn't do the sharks and had this fake snake.. fake snake [smiles].

Edit: "siphoned" edited in thanks to kixxa, see comments below. :D An interesting word choice - I thought it meant fabric?

I love how much he enjoys word play. He has to stop and repeat "fake snake". Maybe he loves words, like me. These are the little things that make me love him more.



It's hilarious about the snake, and I don't think I actually saw it in the darkness. It's weird that the darkest, most depressing episode would be so comical to shoot. Maybe he also likes to talk about the comical aspects to keep the darkness and the memory of it all somewhat out of his mind.

I guess I could see how a pair of glasses would contaminate the tank, because glasses must have germs from behind your ears, as well as from your temples (sweat and all that). But arresting someone for that? What's the charge? Attempted murder of dolphins?

And the episode finished off with me being stabbed thru the neck by Alessandro. Where those really simple things... An interesting thing, they planned it, they said, "the plan is.." you know I had to write something for Alessandro, something about.. some algorithms.

Wasn't it his - or the cylons' - calculations of how they'd get to Earth? It didn't seem to matter very much in the end, did it?

I really love how he goes over the whole episode. It seems to have been a particularly meaningful one for him (and for good reason).

And they said, "Listen, the whole scene has to be on the floor. You have to be on the floor doing this." And uh.. This is an interesting thing about my acting or performing. If you get on the floor like this [gets on the floor] and having a conversation isn't civil. There's nothing civil about it. I look like some kind of cave man with drawings. What's really fascinating is if you're in a prison and it's like, I dunno, several prisoners spring to mind that are on the news all the time, at some high security thing.. that people still have the air of civility like they're in the outside world. You have a table and chairs. But it's all wrong. It's like at any moment, gods can come in and take the chair away, and you're back in your cell. I was like, if I'm going to give something to this guy, then there has to be some form of creature... I have to believe in my mind that there's some air of civility about it. If you want me to draw a map on the wall and you're not gonna see the connection.

A simple thing like that took something like an hour and a half or two housr discussion. [ev] "It has to be on the floor" [/ev] "I can't do it ont he floor. [ev] "No, it has to be on the floor" [/ev] "I can't do it on the floor." Little things like that and then you see the scene back, it's like.. I'm really glad we stuck up the table and chair.. the simplest thing like table and chairs can change practically everything.

So... It was a great episode to be directed by him cos he can really go to those places and he really.. We followed him to god only knows where, Eddie. Cos he really is quite amazing and a very powerful man. When he has an idea, when he wants us to do something, also he has this beautiful, artistic view, his mis-en-scene, the way he creates things. And he's very friendly and he's been schooled on some level by this guy called Bob Young, who's one of the first documentary makers. And this is a phrase I had never heard before Battlestar, but they were constantly talking about the psychological truth. The psychological truth of the matter. I know you've written this, but what's the psychological truth? Where's this one coming from, where's that one coming from? And that word was nearly always bounced around in any.. nearly heated arguments. And it would always be the decider, wherever the psychological truth landed is actually what we would film or what we'd gravitate towards.

That's very interesting. I think it's a way of making a show that is truly character-based, and this is one of the strengths of BSG. You can tell they really thought about these things before shooting them, and the actors were on board with giving the characters realistic and relatable emotions.

I suppose like anybody in that show, what you're trying to do... Cos you're trying to make it look as real as possible and not like acting. Being tortured like that was .. that was horrible for everybody. There are some of the scenes you love to do, you could do them again and again and again and again. Some witty line you have to say, something funny.. some clever thing you're doing with a prop and whatever... These are things that you just like, you know you're gonna do them again and again so they get the shot on me, the shot on Mary and Eddie and the ? and everything.. and it's like pulling teeth. It's a real... you're obviously not being tortured but you're going thru something that's like.. you're waiting for a bell to go on and them to say "stop" and that's the same for like.. everybody involved.

It's torture to watch it, too. I love those episodes in one way. They show James' range so well, and they're so ... realistic on some level. Yet I can barely watch them again, because I can't stand to see him in pain. It really becomes tangible and becomes my pain, and that's when I have to just turn it off. Torture can very easily be comical if the actors and directors don't know what they're doing. If the emotion is too overdone, the music is too loud and booming, the moral dilemmas are presented too obviously, it's just a disaster. I think this is something that only the most intelligent shows should attempt, in that way. BSG did it well and that's one of the great things about the show, even if I hate watching those episodes.

It's funny that he says "you're waiting for a bell to go on", because while he's saying this, there are church bells in the background. Maybe the same ones he heard on his way there?

[The next question is quite long. During it, James sits down, takes a sip of water and takes off his coat. Mm chest hair... He rolls up his sleeves as the fan explains that he was unsure at first about the new BSG bc he loves the old one, but he's grown to love it. James looks happy about the reaction.]

The questions are if James has seen the old show and if he tried to be like John Colicos while playing Baltar; and how he felt about playing the scenes on New Caprica in the beginning of season one.

(Adorable boyish smile, after the first sentence below..)

I'll answer the first bit first, if I remember it. [laughter] Of course I've seen John Colicos, he's like an icon, legendary. Who's going tgo forget John Colicos, if you've seen the original? What a mean.. like.. what a bad guy! And I always joke that there was practically no incentive for his character to want to sell out the human race. I used to joke that he'd ben offered a bathrobe by the cylons, some monogrammed bathrobe that said "Baltar", [laughter] He's like [silly voice] "OK, I sell out [?] but I do get this bathrobe, it's pretty nice."

So from the very onset I didn't want to be on Battlestar Galactica, I was surprised that I was given the scirpt. My first time in Los Angeles, I was like, "I don't want to do this! Why would I want to do this.. and it's for the part of Baltar? Why would I want to do that? That's revolting, this revolting man!" So I just wanted to be as different as I possibly could from... him. I was lucky cos the writers had written Number Six, and therefore they'd given Baltar some motivation in our show for why he'd sold the defense codes or.. what he'd done. Which is not there in the original.

I must say I don't think much of the original, based on what I've heard. Especially Baltar, I mean why would you just have a bad guy be plain bad and just sell out everyone for no reason? It's his world being destroyed too, isn't it? But I haven't seen it, so as usual, I'll try to be civil about the original. It did inspire the new show, and James sounds genuinely impressed with John Colicos' acting. And as always, I must mention how similar a name James Callis is to John Colicos. I also think it's amusing that Jon Cryer auditioned for Baltar. Is there some rule about initials JC?

And I also started off on the first day with an American accent. I decided it would be a bit more like everyone else in the show...
[in an American accent] Why should I be the only guy on the show who had an English accent? I started like this on the chair and I was doing that interview and I was like, "Thank you Kellen...Well you know, the thing..." The director Michael Rymer ran out, "What the hell are you doing?" I said, "Well, I've you know, it's months since the autidions, I've decided that I'm gonna be like everyone else." "Yeah well, decide again, you're not! We can't have that, can't have that at all!" I'm like, "It's gonna stick out like a sore thumb if I'm the only English guy." He went, "No no no, that's why we cast YOU. We want you to do what you were doing, that's why you got the part. And you won't have the part if you put on an American voice. I don't want your character to do any posturing, I don't want it to look like you're acting. I want it to be the most natural thing for you."

Because he knew even then, "The audience are going to see Galactica thru your eyes. You're like the touchstone. And if you're not on.. if you're too... much like something or like a stereotype, then suddenly you've become not real or natural and can't... we've lost all sympathy for you totally. I think it was a good decision.

Hee! His American accent isn't bad, but it always sounds like he's putting it on, and that would have destroyed Baltar a little, I think. Besides, his British accent is very sexy. ;) I do think they explained it well in the later seasons: he's from Aerilon and his accent is an imitation of a Caprican accent, not a real Caprican accent. It makes perfect sense to me now.

So that's the one-hour spot. He continues with the second question, which is very important stuff, but I'll divide the posts here. I'm actually almost done with the third post as well, so expect it soon.

James Callis at the Spike TV Scream Awards

I was really confused there for a moment, as I just posted the awards will be held on the 27th of this month. Turns out they will be AIRED then and actually took place yesterday. BSG was up for some awards, and apparently also received something. There was a mini-cast reunion with James, Tricia, Katee, Eddie, Jamie, Grace, Tahmoh, Michael Trucco, Kate Vernon and Nicki Clyne. David Eick was also present. It sounds and looks pretty awesome.

Pictures here and here. James looks very happy to see the castmates again, and he's adorably tiny and dapper in his suit (L) - but he's cut his hair really short, so I'll only give it a mini-squee. I must admit I'm a bit sad. He still looks gorgeous, but I miss the luscious mane. Of course, this is intriguing in terms of possible roles - maybe he's preparing to play Tom again on Bridget Jones? Or maybe he had a role stateside that demanded short hair? Or maybe he's just sick of the shampooing and finding stray hairs everywhere?

Edits: More pictures here - again, James looks tiny next to Tahmoh. So endearing! (L) He's very handsome. I love the tie - is it grey or pinkish? I guess that's just the light. And there's that particular smile - I can't put my finger on it, it's just very James. Something about his lips. Beautiful pictures. And even with a short going up that high, his chest hair tries to come out and steal the show! Gotta love that. :D

A recap and a lovely picture of James here. Apparently EJO had the crowd chant "So say we all!" No surprises there. James' hair looks about the same as it did in MegaCon. Hmm. I'm trying to figure out if that makes him look like another type of dachshund, but maybe I'll leave that analogy for now. :D

There's a thumbnail here with James next to Tahmoh. He looks so tiny :D (L)!!

And here next to Katee. (Ears! (L))

“BSG,” honored for its high quality contribution to the sci-fi soap genre received a special “Final Farewell.” Actors James Callis, Katee Sackhoff, Tricia Helfer, Edward James Olmos, Tamoh Penikett, Kate Vernon, and Grace Park were on hand to thank fans for obsessing over the critically acclaimed show. The celebration did not last long.

"Sci-fi soap"? BSG is "soap"? I'm not sure if I agree with that assessment. The whole tone of the article is a bit odd - "thank fans for obsessing over" the show? - but whatever. I'm trying to read James' expression. He looks like he's trying to smile but not all that happy. Maybe the award show was a bit lame and he was just trying to play along?

Somehow I feel happy and proud seeing James in a fancy suit like that. Our stylish man. (L)!

I'll add to this post when/if I find more stuff.

An Evening With James Callis - The Panel, Part 1

So this is the panel from the con An Evening With James Callis, held in Bonn, Germany, this September. The main post for the con is here and you can stream or download the full video for this panel - the high quality link is the second one - here at Scifi-trek.de. There's also an audio stream file at VDVD Magazine here. This is a ninety-minute panel, so each post will cover about 30 minutes.

All photos by René Kissien from Caprica-City. Thank you so much for letting me use them! I was going to pick the right picture to go with each answer, but truth be told, I don't have that kind of patience, so apart from the one where he's fiddling with the bottle, these are pretty much picked at random. He looks great in all of them, and that's all that matters.

James is introduced and comes in to much applause, smiling charmingly.

Thank you very much. This is a very.. I would say quaint gathering, thank you very much indeed for coming. And I've just literally hopped off the plane from London, um.. so I'm here to answer some questions. Whatever you'd like to kind of ask me, within the bounds of reason [laughter; he removes the scarf and places it on the table.] And if I can answer, I shall. It's my second time in Bonn, I thought I'd say, I was here earlier in the year for FedCon. It's a really beautiful city, and just as I was coming here, we heard the church bells ringing. It's a beautiful sunny day as we head into the winter. I imagine that you're all Battlestar aficionados but I don't know. And you've all made your way here. Is everyone here from Germany?
(laughter)

Voice from the audience: NO!

No? (laughter) Goodness me. So why don't I just open this up to the floor and try and answer your questions. I don't know where I'll place myself.. I might look more nonchalant standing here by this desk. (leans on the desk; laughter) So does anybody have a question at all? No? You all came here just to look at me? How disappointing, I'm very sorry. Who's gonna be the first? There aren't any prizes for the first person. But come on, ask me a question, I'll try and answer it if I can.

Always good at breaking the ice, and he seems completely at ease and relaxed in this setting. He's warm and friendly, and he gives very loqacious answers. I'm actually glad there weren't that many questions, because he gets to really elaborate on the questions he does get, and it's one of the best panels, if not THE best panel, ever.

The way he describes the day and the church bells makes me think, once again, about his attitude and personality. Some people are always complaining, while others see beauty wherever they go. It's an odd thing. I'm sure James has bad days and bad moods, but there's something positive about his general disposition, like he sees the world as a beautiful, fascinating place and the people in it as inherently good and ... well, fascinating as well. There are many instances of that in this panel. He just makes things and people sound so... interesting. I feel uplifted by it.


(Gotta love the scarf!)

Fan: I would like to ask you what do you remember about the first day and the last day on set?

James: First and last day. Well, this has been um..chronicled, because I suppose it's like... the first day on set and I was the very first person to film on set. It was basically number Six and Gaius Baltar meeting each other for the first time in the story, where she comes into the house and we end up kissing. That was the first day. That's quite a memorable day. [laughter] If you remember, I was actually sat doing a television interview with this... I was sitting in my own house, and then the TV screens showed the interviewer. The funny thing about that was, the interviewer was actually in the next room behind me, not in a TV station (?) science. So she was being filmed on another camera while they were filming me. There was a discussion, I believe, into my role in developing methods of artificial intelligence.

The first day was really just um... just this thing where Tricia and I have this huge embrace and we end up kissing lots and lots. [laughter] And I think possibly, in a rather cynical way, they wanted that to be the very first thing, because they weren't particularly sure necessarily about me or Tricia. So it was like "le's get this in the can first of all" that's what they call it.. as in the film can. "Can" is also used colloquially as bathroom or toilet in England, but that's not what they meant. [laughter] They said "Let's get this in the can", and I think so that it could be hurried to the executives at either Sci Fi or NBC, so they can look at it and say...

They are very ruthless, these people, genuinely. If they don't like what they see, then you're out of a job. And there's no... it's like X Factor without laughs, or Pop Idol. It's just like "Hey, you - bye." By that stage already, cos I'd been involved... I'd had this before where somebody I was working with.. After about a week the producers and directors, they didn't like what they were seing, and it's a very... like I said, very cruel and ruthless. So whilst this person I knew was sacked, there were four people waiting in the hotel, to take that person's part. And I assumed that one of the reasons we filmed that thing first was because both myself and Tricia were unknown entities, quantities, for the network. And they wanted to check that that worked ,or tht scene really worked. I was just lucky that I was opposite Tricia, who's very beautiful and fantastic. I think that the people watching it were like, "Yeah, this works, ok." So we had some reprieve..

[leans on the table and tips over a glass] Oops! There's nothing in it, it's ok. [There's a bottle of mineral water next to the glass, and he finds it's already been opened] How am I gonna get... oh, it's been done already. [pours water into the glass.]



So that was the first day. Actually it took me several.. I dunno, about three weeks to actually get on Galactica. You know, the whole show is Galactica but our particular storyline, we didn't get on set, we were filming somewhere else. It was memorable in lots and lots of ways. The director Michael Rymer, who was with us all the way thru... was very bold. And because it was the first day there's a lot of tension, and there's a lot of... There were several people on set who were executives, and they kept on crowding in by the monitor, you know, checking. Basically at some point, the director Michael Rymer just said, "Can you guys let me frakking od my job and get lost?" It was quite brave, really, a lot of people wouldn' t have said that. So they disappeared and things became slightly easier.

This has been told lost of times, seriously, but I was very self-conscious getting undressed in front of all these people. And I asked the camera crew if they would be gentle with me and maybe not make fun of me when I got my clothes off, to which the cameraman replied, just seriously went, "Do you think anyone's looking at YOU?" (laughter) "You're in the room with Tricia. Doesn't matter what you do, you could be chopped liver, forget it, don't worry." Which was quite helpful. [laughter]

I'm amused that he stops to ponder on the meanings of the word "can" - and looks rather amused at the toilet connotation. Does the British humor rely heavily on toilet stuff? Kixxa tells me it does, but I do wonder about James. Hmm.

I don't think he's mentioned that thing about the interview in the first episode before. It's a nice addition, because I often feel like he skips that bit to get to the hot sex stuff (well, who wouldn't?) I started to think about the woman who played Kellen the journalist. She appears on screen at the same moment as Gaius, it's the first time we see Gaius Baltar, and that's a moment a lot of people in the world have seen. Yet I don't remember ever hearing what her name is or hearing anything about her. I should look her up. Hmm. She doesn't even seem to be listed as "Kellen". I guess it's Suleka Matthew? I'm impressed James still remembers her name.

I think I've already commented on the sex scenes as much as I can - I won't get into the donuts here - but just one more thing: I cannot imagine what BSG would be like if James wasn't Baltar and Tricia wasn't Six. Can you? Honestly, that sounds like some hellish parallel universe where everything is wrong.

I was wondering why I made a note of him being so natural about the glass and not being distracted by it. Maybe it's because, had it been me, I'd already be sooo nervous about talking in public, and the glass would have made me even more nervous. (Little things like that really put me off at work.) But he keeps acting like he's talking to friends in a relaxed setting, and this is one of the reasons why I love him so much.

The reply continues:

And we kinda jump, like Battlestar, I dunno, five years in the future, to the last day. The last day was terribly hectic and I think it was filmed until something like 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. Normally when you finish the season and you forget something, you can always go back and do little bits you haven't done before. But on the last night, nobody's was ever coming bak,so it was just finishing when you finish.

There was something like three units, that means there are three cameras on different stages. It was like being part of some big battle, because... While you were doing your scene, I'm waiting to do my scene, I'm like "when are you gonna do my scene?" Well you have to do the scene, Jamie's in your scene, and Jamie's on a sound stage over there, filming. There was trouble coordinating everybody together, people hanging around for ages. And we were all, as you've seen in the finale, everybody's in like fighting gear, everybody's got their guns and wahtever. You're just like... honestly felt like being in some battle. you stand there having a cigarette like that, and over the radio they go, "second unit! second unit!"I remember one man running up to me, pointing at me very.. "third unit, third unit, quickly quickly!" and just disappearing into the night. (laughter) And there were a lot of battles that we were filming, you could hear sporadic gunfire.

I think I got home at something like.. around 3 o'clock in the morning, I was gonna have a, you know, little drink or whatever.. and i remember ringing Jamie Bamber who's my close friend, and he was filming until something like 5:30 in the morning, he was very disappointed. He was like, [indignant voice] "Yeah, you go have your drink. You know some of us are still working!"[laughter]

And the last scene I filmed, actually, there's something slightly poetic about it but it was also with Tricia. Funnily enough, I don't actually think it actually made the cut. It's not in the final show. But it was her and me running around the corridor firing these huge guns at imaginary cylons. I think there was only like one chance to get it right and you can only rehearse so many times. Actually you may know, firing these guns is genuinely dangerous. You've got people who are armors who tell you what to do, but... if the magazine jams, these things are... they're called blanks, but they're like real bullet casings that can come out and hit you in the face and burn you. And there are so many ppl around firing guns that uh... I don't know, people were getting shells in the eyes... so that was the beginning and that was the end.
(applause) Any other questions?

It's interesting that they apparently filmed out of order, with the battle on BSG coming last. I'm not a huge fan of space battles, but there was something endearing about seeing James in army gear. There are certain types of clothes where he just looks... small and loveable. (L)! The big helmet was especially cute on him. Amusingly, Tricia looked much more at home in her army gear, maybe because she's more athletic and taller than James.

The final days of shooting sound like a pretty chaotic experience - even if James described it as "frakking awesome" in the 08 Comic Con panel - and he doesn't sound all that emotional talking about it. Maybe it was one of those things where it just went so quickly, you had no time to process it until later.



The next question is about director Michael Rymer and what kind of techniques he used while filming.

We were terribly lucky to have this man lead us. I've worked with a lot of people over the years, and I'm not... I'm in a slightly difficult position to talk about it, because I am so partisan. I'm a fan of the show, but I'm also a big fan of Michael Rymer, a big fan. So I dunno. Just learned so much, and not just about film, but about the way that .. the way he manages people. He's very nonconfrontational. He always wants everybody's idea first of all before he'll tell his idea. He wants to hear what YOU think and what you want to do. If he likes it, he'll, he'll stand, he... He's someone who has the courage and the confidence to stand back. This is a big deal, because a lot of people don't have that courage or that confidence and they're constantly jumping [jumps forward] in and changing things, that can be quite difficult. This is somebody who's like, "Yeah, do what you want. If I don't like it I'll tell you." Very mild-mannered with a very good sense of humor. But like a lot of people out there, like the ... [he doesn't finish this thought]

Making the show was a gentle experience, it wasn't a hard experience. He's a very nice man who wants the best out of everybody and the best FOR everybody, so I was.. also as well... He would give everybody a chance to do their thing. Occasionally, for example... say you were trying to work out a scene that's going to be a big scene and you didn't quite know what he was going to go. A lot of directors then would be like, "Well, I don't know.. how much time have I got [pretends to look at watch] I have to get this thing in the can. It's just about getting it shot. So you're the guy talking. Right. It's gonna be on you first of all, right, that's it." You understand, even though you do this for a living, that's quite a lot of pressure for somebody, and sometimes if there's too much pressure, you can't do the thing you need to do.

So occasionally I would say... [?] how we're filming this, Michael would put the camera at the back of people, like make it move back. I'd say what for, what are you filming.. He went,"What I'm doing is... this will give me a great cutting point at any point during the scene, but it will also allow you as the actor to get your confidence up. By the time you're cooking? with gas, then I can come around and be on your face." That's a rather marvellous technique, but a lot of people I don't think would have the confidence to do that, because they'd spend five or ten minutes shooting people's backs to see the room, and there'd be a lot of people in the studio going, "Sorry, what the hell is this man doing? He's just giving us lots of people's backs." I suppose I'm delving into the tricks of the trade there, but.. He also said, you know, sometimes that'll give him leeway to see where he wants the angel of the picture to be.



And in my.. I dunno how many years I've been acting now, I think it's like over 12 or 15 years, but one of the .. one of the most generous men, like from the second week on, the whole cast spent most of their time at his house. And it was one dinner party after a cocktail party after.. So in some way he was the person who galvanized the family together. I just remember, my experience is like, when you've done the day's filming, everybody's off on their separate little trip(?). I've rarely been invited into the director's house to discuss what we're doing. Rarely. This was something that happened for five years. And.. that's a pretty special connection. So that then.. I'm a firm believer that actually anybody can act, really, anybody. But you have to feel comfortable, you have to feel confident enough to do that thing. He's somebody who really did make us feel comfortable and confident enough to give it our all.

And I suppose, you know, different things.. he's Australian, he's not American, so he's got a you know, a different... When things got a bit gung ho and a bit like you know, "Let's go!" whatever, Michael would always step back in that, slightly. In a way that I think if you were American, you'd be gunning for it! "No, that's... I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure that's the.. um... " in the sense that he's got a healthy dose of cyniscism, he's not totally... what's the word, your party man or your party line.

And another thing he did, which I think they really liked, although I think they found it tough at the time, was that he'd embroider(?) ideas they gave him. Most people just wanna shoot what they've got, that's it, you know, what have I got on the page? Right. He would always be looking into... where'd the idea come from? How can I make the idea slightly more interesting? "You know, it says this but what if you did that? You come into the room, you're already.. you're already upset." Just little ideas that would then elevate the material. I believe actually his wife, Loretta, was the person - she and Eddie - that come to that song that we used at the beginning of the show, the Gayatri mantra. He's an informed.. spiritual... enlightened individual. An absolute privilege working with.

I don't really know enough about Rymer or film making to really comment on this very much. However, I always love hearing James praise other people, because it brings out his warmth so much. He seems excited to get to talk about Rymer. And I like that he can appreciate spirituality and mentions it as a positive quality (that will come out more later in the panel). It makes me feel like he might appreciate mine as well.

I just have to return to his Battlestar yearbook entry where he wrote about Rymer in a teasing way that, I suspect, he reserves only for people he knows well and who truly get his humor:

Four years passed pretty peacably - although the Hiring of Mike "Boomerang" No reason or Rymer - threatened to sink the whole project down the crapper - For a start no one could understand a word the man said - Think Crocodile Dundee meets Orson Welles - then double it. Luckily his hold over the proceedings was only slight - and when they made him a producer - he disappeared altogether - which seems to be a running theme in this particular line of work.

:D :D What can I add to that?

James: Let's just talk about sex, shall we? [laughter] Any other questions? Cos like we've got 90 minutes. I could tell a joke, but uh...

Fan: Hello, James.

James: Hi.

Fan: I don't have a question, but I'd like to say that you're looking frakking gorgeous tonight and that's already worth coming.

James: That's really sweet, and I believe that there is an eye doctor somewhere in the hotel. You can get... (laughter) And your head tested as well afterwards. That is very sweet, thank you.

[silence]

Um.... this IS the Battlestar Galactica event, right? Not Stargate? (laughter) I have come to the right place, have I? I'm just checking, just checking.

Heee! I'm not sure if James is so much flattered as amused at the comment. I'm a bit curious about him in this respect. Does he, in fact, realize he's drop dead gorgeous but tries to keep himself humble? Or does he genuinely have such a negative body image and self image that he thinks he's pretty bad looking? As for the fan's comment: I SECOND, with a great big Gaius hand raise. Sexy professor charm! *droools* (I wouldn't necessarily have stood up and said that to his face, but then I'm posting it in public where he may read it anytime - so I guess I can't judge.) And he did say "Let's just talk about sex", so it's all his fault if the fans' minds are in the gutter now. ;)



Asked about the lack of goodbye scene between Laura Roslin and Gaius Baltar. "How would you picture such a goodbye scene between Laura and Gaius?"

You know, it's a fascinating.. I've never thought of that before. I think that it would have been a goobye with no words, I think, essentially. There's something that these... we were so lucky the writing on the show was so brilliant, and a lot of the writing isn't just writing lines, it's writing the things you don't say. Several points that.. "Gaius can't reply", "Gaius doesn't know what to say", "Laura wants to say something but doesn't". And I'm thinking now that there was a big deal of things like when Gaeta was going up before the firing squad, there was a thing where I said to him about, "I know who you are." I think this was important for everyone on the show, there's a kind of recognition about "I know who you are", or "I know what you're about". And I don't think, given their history, that there would be any words. It would be a look in the eye... And that look in the eye would say so many things. On some level it'd be like "Go, go do whatever you're going to do." And the fact that we can look at each other means on some level that we wish each other no harm. We've gone thru so much together.

It's a slightly one-sided thing because I think Gaius really had um... Gaius appreciated Laura, Gaius found Laura attractive and briliant and honest, and she was everything that he could never be. And this is something I tried to bring, I suppose, to the character, that he could see it. It wasn't that he hated it, he could see it. But given the kind of character Gaius was, it's not necessarily something she could see in him. So it's like one of the those things, a love-hate relatioship, I think on some level he really loved her and she really hated him. (laughter) Like I said, if there had been a goodbye, they wouldn't have tainted it with words. She's too clever. He, Gaius, might have tried to say something... inappropriate or wrong.. but Laura was a really classy lady, and she wouldn't have needed to say anything. A look, a nod... and then goodbye. That's all.

This is a beautiful answer, and that's how I picture Laura and Gaius' goodbye as well. Again, James sounds very warm talking about it. I love the idea of "I know who you are" as a running theme between the characters. They know each other; humanity has dwindled to very little, and the same people have been stuck together for some years now; everybody knows each other, and maybe it's a bad thing in some ways, but there's also a recognition, an integrity about it. You can see the others' humanity when you know them.

It's interesting how much respect James has for Laura Roslin, and I imagine it also has something to do with his respect and admiration for Mary McDonnell. I personally found Laura's position as the main character annoying sometimes, by the end, because she would do horrible things and yet people would hail her as a heroine. But I'm not saying I disrespect the character in general; she was smart, she was classy, and there would probably have been a really awesome goodbye scene, had they thought to make one. I'd rather have Baltar and Six back together, of course, but it would have been nice to have that too.



The next question is about whether James watches the show. The fan had had seen somewhere that Eddie and Mary do not.

James: They didn't watch the show?

Fan: Yeah.

James: Not true. [laughter] No. I can tell you right now that's not true.

Fan: Okay.

James: I know for sure it's not true about Eddie. Because, I mean, Eddie used to come to me and say, [eddie voice] Have you seen the rushes? [/eddie voice] The rushes are what you.. when you just filmed something, that's called.., before it's processed, before they make the sound and everything, the stuff just out of the film cam... Although it's not a film camera.. by the first season we were shooting on digital video, HD, but the rushes are the thing that gets processed. So Eddie was always like, "Have you seen the rushes?" And I said, "I haven't actually watched anything, no." [ev] "I watch everything. [laughter] Everything. So should you." [/ev] And.. yeah, when I hear Eddie hasn't watched the show, it's not true and not real.

Maybe Mary hadn't, or I don't know about Mary. I find... I was just in London a few days ago, and um... I just come home from dropping one of my kids at school, and I turned in the new.. I had just gotten satellite television for the first time, been away from it... [something seems to happen off camera] Thank you. Thank you very much. [laughter] Don't try this at home.

I just got satellite TV, been away from it five years in Canada, getting back to London and getting all the stuff... Flicking through channels, and there's Battlestar Galactica... for me gen.. I couldn't work out what episode, what season, what was.. you know, in the sense of being involved with so much product and so much stuff. I knew it was our show and not the sone from the 70's. [laughter] Other than that, it was like.. do I appear in this one? Do I have a lot to say? I can't really remember.. Yeah, but they did, or they will. I'll send Mary the box set on your behalf.
[laughter]

I love how he makes the most Eddie face while doing the Eddie voice. It's uncanny. He nods his head, looking entirely serious, and he really does look like Edward James Olmos for a moment. It's weird how he can do that.

It's odd to think of how little he can tell the different episodes and seasons apart. The interviews show that he's seen the episodes when they first come out, and he remembers Baltar's storylines well - because he lived through them - but it seems like the fans have more of an idea about what happened in which episode/season. It's interesting that being inside the thing actually makes you less exact about this type of thing. (He proves this later on by not remembering what episode the nuked Earth was in, "but it was the end of one season".) Or maybe he's just a scatter-brained professor. We can never fully discount that possibility.



The next question is about his future projects. I already transcribed most of this for the original con post:

I've been involved in something in England, a pilot... [Meet Pursuit Delange] It's a rather difficult thing to describe. It was a comedy and it was very risqué, very very risqué. So risqué that the pilot possibly won't be made, but now, people are interested perhaps in a movie that will be less risqué. Do you understand risqué? Essentially risqué is rude.. I think, essentially, rude or crude, or both. I play this guy who was a wannabe, he wanted to be involved in the media in some way. And he's very naïve and a bit... sweet, like a nice guy, sweet, but he gets... he meets up with an old school friend who never was actually his friend at school. And the old school firend is really mean, really nasty. So it's like a duo between myself who was like Bambi and my friend who was like Satan. (laughter) It was very funny to do.

Since then, actually, I've just done a film in London called Re-Uniting the Rubins. Which is about a family, the Rubins family, who haven't spoken to each other in fifteen years. And because of a course of events, they were thrown together. It's kind of a bittersweet comedy. Do you have, in Germany, do you have a show like The Apprentice... so you've got your own Donald Trump? A German version of Donald Trump? -You don't? You just get Donald Trump? Well, in England we have this guy called Alan Sugar, who runs The Apprentice. And he's um... terribly successful businessman but started from very humble beginnings. And the character that I played in this film is.. wants to be a business magnate, and is actually rather... I dunno, unpleasant, naïve..There's just been something on the news about what I was doing on the film... Which I didn't... when I got the script, I was... It's true, and that's on the news at ten.

There's all this mining going on in Africa for [ore?] that ends up in our mobile phones. Do you know about this? Some of you do. You go to the top of the class, the people who do. [laughs] Anyway, there's all this stuff that it's a huge conflict in the sense of the mobiles... Mobile or cell phones are a multi-billion dollar industry and business. We're all slaves to being on the mobile phone. But it's causing wars and havoc in Africa where people are being paid nothing. They spend their whole lives mining this stuff out of the Earth. And that's something that I was doing in the film. I was very unscrupulous. So that was that.

I didn't actually know that. So I guess I go to the back of the class. *blushes* Meet Pursuit Delange sounds awesome - James is NOT the bad guy? This should be a great change to his roles lately. When he described it was gross earlier, I wasn't sure if I'd like it, and I'm still not sure. It sounds very hit or miss. But I'm still eager to see it. I'm trying to think back of his roles, if he had any that were just "nice guy", and I guess he was as Tom and the Wolf, but not in so many others. Most of his TV and film roles have been somewhat menacing - Gaius is actually from the nicer end of the scale, considering crazy cult leader Mason Duryea or Haman the anti-Semitic mass murderer.

Re-Uniting the Rubins sounds pretty cool too. This sounds more like a "baddie" role, but not one he's done before. His role in Going Wrong was a sort of business man, but he was also dealing drugs and other shady stuff. Unless Danny Rubins does that, this might be a different thing. There's a family angle, which certainly isn't very common in his work. I can't remember him doing many roles where he even had a mother or father or sibling. In fact, have there been any? *muses* There may not have been.

Granted, I might actually hate these projects when they come out, so I won't say too much about how awesome they are, but we'll see. Sounds promising and slightly different to what he's been doing.

And uh, possibly some other stuff... Until I've actually got the job, until I'm actually on the set, I don't really like to talk about it, because our industry is so up and down. I have been called out before going, "You'll see me in this." And it doesn't really happen. So we'll see, watch this space.

I wish he weren't quite so secretive, but it's certainly a job where there are no certainties (pun unintended but I'm leaving it), and after getting to translate only 40 pages of a book myself - after bragging to everyone I know about translating a book - I can see where he's coming from. Things can change, and more often than not, they do.

To be continued...


In the next part: More chest hair!