So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  DAVID EICK

  The obvious answer of what Eddie brought to the role is gravitas, and belief that there’s a guy who could actually handle all of this shit. And at the time, an understanding that there’s no such thing. And that even the most courageous, accomplished, ambitious leader is human. What Eddie shows, and what he showed over the course of the seasons, was that he was both. He could be every bit the George Patton, the most martial leader of leaders that you would ever want, and you would also see him sobbing so hysterically, drooling on his son’s uniform. That was played by the same guy, and that’s the same character. I don’t think one obviates the other.

  I think if you look at him in the first frame of the first episode, you recognize both the command and the vulnerability. And maybe even a bit of something broken. Something that’s not well. And something therefore that needs to be taken care of. And that’s a lot, man. The pockmarks and rivets in his face, which he’ll talk about freely, aren’t just his signature, his trademark. In a way, they kind of symbolize exactly what I’m talking about. It’s the command and it’s the vulnerability, and it’s that something is maybe hurt in there somewhere. And it’s not that we could have ever predicted that, because we couldn’t have. We were certainly thrilled at the opportunity to work with him, but I would be lying if we said we knew any of what I just said.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  I’ve got to give him all the credit in the world. He went to some pretty dark places with that character, especially in season four, and he was fantastic. He really showed the rawness of how command had eaten at him, and how discovering his best friend was his worst enemy impacted on him. He had a gravitas to him that was unmistakable and so fun to watch when you’re on set. He’s an amazing actor, and it was really just interesting to watch multiple takes and to see how he would evolve the scene a bit. Actors always try to do their best, but they really brought it to Battlestar. Some of that comes out of a pride in the material. That they were trying to be true to the material they were given, and you don’t see that on every show.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

  Toward the end of the show, the ship is just a mess. It’s on its last legs. Adama goes out there and starts painting. He’s got a roller on a roller stick and he’s painting. The script called for him to just sort of paint and have people come in and see him, like, “Holy shit, look, it’s the admiral. He’s actually … working. He’s doing manual labor.” But Eddie sort of ad-libbed and started painting, and then started to weep. He started to cry, and then he fell to the floor and rolled into the paint. It was beautiful. It was him kind of realizing that it’s the end of the show. It was sort of the living embodiment of the show going away and how everybody kind of felt about it. He acted it out.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  He inspired everybody on the set to really rise up and be the best that they could possibly be. They all followed that. The star of a series can very much set the tone for the rest of the cast. The rest of the cast watches the star, especially the younger actors, and if the star acts out, if the star has temperament and rebels, then the other actors follow that, which can be hell for writers/producers. So that impressed me enormously.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  During “33,” I remember Eddie wanted us to bring in someone who was an expert on sleep deprivation, and talked to the whole cast about the effect of sleep deprivation on people. Eddie wanted them to actually spend five days without sleeping. Some of the actors were going, “Really? We’re not really going to do this, right?” Eddie did stay awake like twenty-four or forty-eight hours or something going into his scenes. Some of the others might have stayed up a night, but I don’t think they had full sleep deprivation in preparation for the show.

  EDWARD JAMES OLMOS

  It was the head of British Columbia University. He came in and talked to us for hours. And, of course, some of the kids thought it was kind of funny, because, you know, we brought this guy in to tell them how to act? It was kind of weird and they weren’t ready for it. Michael Rymer and the producers were there, because it was the first episode and we had been away from each other for almost thirteen months—they took forever from the pilot to the first episode we shot.

  Anyway, this doctor said, “You guys are saying that the characters are under attack every thirty-three minutes, twenty-four hours a day for five consecutive days. If you’re not getting at least ten minutes of sleep in that thirty-three minutes, you won’t make it. It’s impossible. Your brain will snap.” And that was it. It was just amazing, because from then on out we knew what we had to do. I didn’t sleep the night before we shot the opening sequence, and a lot of us had to do some method work on it and did. Some of us just saw what other people were doing and went further. Everybody was pushing everybody, which was really wonderful.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Here’s the thing about Eddie: He never gave me one note on the whole run of the series. He’s the only cast member who never did that. Everybody else did, you know, to varying degrees. It was all fine, you kind of expect them to have notes or thoughts or, you know, “Does this line make sense?” or “Would my character say this? Why am I doing this?” You know, there’s an ongoing dialogue that you just kind of expect as part of the production, which is completely fine. You want that. But Eddie, he never gave a note. He never questioned a line, he always did the script as it was written, and he was dedicated to that idea. And he held it all the way through the whole show. I’m still kind of amazed that he did that. He just respected the word. That was how he was trained and he just approached it from the point of view that his job was to bring these words to life, not to rewrite them or substitute his own judgment. That was just his point of view on the craft. He was willing to take a leap of faith on all of us as long as a bug-eyed monster did not come in the door.

  EDWARD JAMES OLMOS

  I was so honored to get those scripts, because I had no idea what was going to happen. No one did. No one knew, and I never complained once. If anything, they would complain to me about taking it too far. They’d say, “You really want to go there?” and I’d say, “Yeah, I’m an alcoholic as far as I’m concerned. You want me to take a drink? Watch.” As we got into the third and fourth season, I took it away. I mean, Adama had lost it. It was the sadness, because there’s our core, our admiral, and he was completely gone. Many times he was left on the ground, and yes it was devastating, and it hurt everybody. As I’d watch, I might say, “Well, this is really not healthy for everybody to see. We don’t really want to know this about ourselves.” And yet it was what drove the UN to say this could be the finest television series ever. I just sit back and go, “Oh my goodness,” but it came down to one thing: the writing. Period.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  With some actors, there is a tendency to complain and to just criticize about their character, their part. There’s none of that with Olmos. Consequently you didn’t see that a lot with the other actors. I mean, there is definitely creative conflict and discussion with scenes, characters, story arcs, but it was all with the best of intentions. It wasn’t about ego.

  There was no place that we were going to send him that he was not going to go. We knew that. Like he’s beating the Cylon Leoben to death. He was like, “Bring it on. I’ll beat him to death with a flashlight; spray blood all over me. Go for it.” He was like that with just about everything. We couldn’t go too far with Eddie. Eddie would go as far as you wanted him to go and then some. I say this a lot, but it was an honor to work with Edward James Olmos. It was truly an honor and a privilege to work with someone like him.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

  We had our moments, too, where he got a little autocratic. He was acting in an episode where there was a cat, so we had to get a cat trainer. The cat had to jump up on Mary’s desk, the president. We did seven takes and the cat just couldn’t do it. Finally, Eddie comes up to me and says, “Dude, why don’t you just write the cat out of the show? This is a beautiful script, a beautiful thing and it’s ruin
ing everything.” I said, “Just one more time,” and I literally took the cat and tossed it up on her desk. It worked, and Eddie’s like, “You got away with it this time.” He could be difficult, but you always ended up liking him. There’s something about him that he’s an extremely likable guy who’s willing to do anything. He was in the movie Wolfen with Albert Finney. He played a shape-shifting Indian who worked on skyscrapers and whatnot. Actually does a full-frontal nude scene where he’s running down the street. And he was like, “Stay on the cock.” Like I said, he’ll do anything.

  Moore does admit that there was a moment of trepidation about Olmos during the making of the second episode of the series, “Water.”

  RONALD D. MOORE

  The director of the episode, Marita Grabiak, did not have a happy experience that I remember. It was a problem with her and the cast, I think. Particularly Eddie. They just did not hit it off. It became apparent kind of quickly. I was doing something else in the studio lot and I was walking by the soundstage and I asked Marita how it was going and her response was, “I just think you’re going to have major problems with Olmos. He doesn’t listen, he’s strongheaded and thinks he runs the set. I’m just telling you right now, you guys are in big trouble on this series” [laughs]. It was like, “Wow, what?” It was early in the show’s run, because Rymer did the first episode, so she was the only person who ever directed him on the show other than Michael Rymer. Suddenly she was losing her shit … and didn’t like it, thought he was a problem. That was the only time that had ever happened and we figured it was just Marita and she did not have a good experience for whatever particular reason.

  But I will say, with Eddie sometimes you had to kind of roll with some of the things that he would try to do. He was always professional, but he would try things. Like there was a scene in that episode, in one of the conference room scenes, where he’s talking and Adama’s on his feet. He walks around the table, and over to a corner of the set without the light, driving the DP crazy and the director crazy. But they kind of were pressed for time and had to move on. If you look at the cut, it’s still in there. Like he just walked out of the light, walked into the shadows because he was trying stuff. He wanted to experiment and he didn’t want to be locked into a performance just because the lighting was set up that way. That was one of the beautiful things about the show as it developed and went on is we all were willing to play with stuff, not be traditional, you know, walk out of the light, shoot stuff on characters’ backs. All that kind of stuff. It really threw Marita in that second episode.

  EDWARD JAMES OLMOS

  During the miniseries I remember telling Rymer, “I’m not going to stand where you want me to stand. I’m going to go be with all the crew. I’ll be back there with the crew.” We were all standing there and then when we started into it, I started to move and I said, “How many cameras do you have there?” He said, “I’ve got three.” I go, “Great. Then I can move, right?” He goes, “Yeah.” That’s all I needed to know. I just started walking around the space.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  We won a Peabody Award, and the studio would pay for Ron and David Eick to go, but nobody else. So we all, as writers, because the show meant so much to us, bought plane tickets, we all bought hotel rooms, we all bought a table at the Peabodys. Which cost an enormous amount of money, by the way. After the Peabodys, after everyone accepted their awards, we had some kind of talk with journalists for something. Edward James Olmos got up and he said, “I just want to thank every writer on this show. The writers are the reason this is a great show. As a matter of fact, they care so much they all flew themselves in, and they are sitting in the audience right now, and let’s give a standing ovation for the writers.”

  MARK STERN

  (former president of original content, Syfy)

  I remember when I called Eddie Olmos and told him we were picking the series up for season two and that there would be twenty episodes, he bawled me out. He said we were going to ruin it. “You can’t do that many episodes and have them all be good.” I had a lot of new experiences on that show, and this was definitely one of them. I’d never had anyone yell at me for ordering so many episodes before. Of course we ended up breaking up that order, so we actually did them as ten and ten, and did manage to maintain that consistent quality. Because he’s right: If you’re doing them all in a row, inevitably those middle few episodes just suffer, because you just don’t have the time.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  Adama has one of the greatest arcs, because he started out as part of a rivalry with the civilian side, with Roslin. Eddie Olmos always brought a great humanity to it, so I don’t want to reduce him to archetypes, but the character started as the military man who was in command of these ships. His job was to protect these people and to maybe take the fight to the Cylons, but really it was to survive and he would do whatever it takes to protect his people. Roslin’s side was, “Yes, but we have to do that in a way that continues to support the morality and the humanity that we had as people, so we can’t just throw away everything, all the laws and rules that we had, because we’re under crisis, or we lose everything that we were.” That was the fundamental conflict, but in time what would happen is both of them evolved in a way. Adama had to loosen up a little bit as things went on. He had to learn to function with the civilian government. That the civilian government did bring something positive to the world.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

  The one constant that remained, and it was good that it did, was being this kind of solitary leader. That didn’t go away, and I think that was important. Over time he started to wear his emotions on his sleeve more and allowed himself to feel a certain way, whereas he was very sort of buttoned up for the first few seasons.

  DAVID EICK

  My takeaway on the Adama character is you watch this commander and this man who’s devoted his life to this, and having to compromise. At first with Laura. Having to learn to be a patriarch more than just a commander military guy. That these were people who suddenly needed not just a commander, but also a father. So you have to watch him develop the ability to be that, even though you saw roots of it, you knew it was a struggle. And then, ultimately, my favorite of many favorites that I would put near the top of the list, the way Eddie played Adama having to deal with Cain, and what that meant to not only his command and his ego, but to his family, which I feel Ron brilliantly placed under threat as well. It’s not just that you’re going to have your balls cut off, I’m going to hurt the things you love, too. So I really think it’s his capacity of stooping to conquer, and watch him open his heart in ways that he never would think he’d have to in order to lead. I really struggled to believe any other actor could have pulled that off.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  He went from the guy who wanted to kill the Cylons to wanting to make a deal with them somehow, and that’s a huge shift for that character. Again, you went along with it, because there was an incredible honesty to every promise it almost gave, you could see the anguish he was in trying to work through these issues. You see that humanity in him trying to come out even in the face of Roslin doing things that he really didn’t think were beneficial to their survival. You could see that conflict in him. You could hear some of the dialogue, too—to give the writers a little credit. His evolution was really fascinating and it was great to watch an actor of that caliber pull that off in the context of a show that’s on a spaceship in outer space. What was really fun about seeing the reaction to the show was after a while, you forgot that’s what they were and it became a show about characters and intense emotions and the worlds they were in. Less about the bells and whistles, though we loved the science fiction and looking at how they would survive.

  That, to me, was Adama’s journey. Roslin is interesting because she went the other way, which was in over her head to becoming almost doctrinaire in some respects. You know, “We’re going to get rid of abortions” or “I’m going to manipulate the elections so I win,” but then she c
ouldn’t do it. She went from over her head to becoming a very strong leader and staying there, so she and Adama were able to be two very strong leaders in charge of that fleet, which I think is beneficial to everyone there.

  MARY MCDONNELL

  I loved the encounter between Roslin and Adama in the miniseries, because I felt like it just had classic gender problems. Classic gender-power-struggle problems that kind of made me giggle a little bit, because it was sort of, like, “Hey, you two better get it together, because you’ve got bigger problems.”

  EDWARD JAMES OLMOS

  Through the series, Adama went from being an extremely positive, uplifting commander who had served his time and fought his battles, and was very good at what he did. One of the best pilots there had ever been who was retiring. He was losing his strength in the world in respects of he had been retired, forced retirement, and his ship was becoming a museum. The world would get into a universal world war against the Cylons. So he becomes the hope for the advancement of humanity, the person who had to take care of it. Then the responsibility becomes so great as time goes on that he completely crumbles and becomes an alcoholic and a drug addict, and cannot even stand up anymore. Completely loses his sense of balance, only to rise from the ashes and, like the phoenix, continues forward and helps humanity survive. He comes back. I’ve never seen it in heroic terms, that demise of a character brought about that was so strong.

  They didn’t know I was going to take it to that extreme, but because I directed a lot of the episodes, they would see me in different episodes standing by the bar and drinking a lot, or I’d be dropping pills. People didn’t register at the beginning too much, other than saying, “Well, you’re just relaxing.” But then as time went on, he becomes a total alcoholic and found himself just slobbering and throwing up, lying in his own vomit and unable to control anything anymore. He had lost it, totally.