MARY MCDONNELL
That’s why I say they were soulmates from the beginning, because he was an annoying, compelling foe at the beginning. When someone is that compelling to a woman who’s intelligent, it usually means that there’s something else there. And they very quickly switched the classic male/female response to life, and she becomes more of a hawk and he the dove. That idea blossomed in me, which is whoever this man is, is actually part of my world. Whatever we go through is going to have an afterlife. You go through things with a soulmate in life that could set you apart for the next three lifetimes. Then suddenly they’re there again. It’s like there was a deeper connection that they had and the universe sent them there together to accomplish this. No matter what they ran into, when it was time to take the next step, if that meant coming to agreement or a new agreement, they were both pretty willing to take it. Although I was a little pissed off when he threw me in jail. That was a tough season.
EDWARD JAMES OLMOS
Mary is a consummate artist and brilliant. Very committed. She and I took on our roles with a tremendous amount of passion, and she looked at the way I was doing it, of course, and I complemented the way she was doing it. That was very much a situation that grew, and it grew in such a strong way that it helped the character. It helped both the characters. We both became totally involved with the story, and it was wonderful to work with her. I fell in love with her. She’s such a joy and to this day, fifteen years later, we’re very close and dear friends. I’m friends with her family; I know her husband and her kids.
MICHAEL ANGELI
She was always gracious. I never heard her get angry or stomp her feet about anything. That’s not true about a lot of people on the show, a lot of actors on the show. She’s just such a sweetheart in so many ways. Eddie and Mary were the mother and father of the show. They were the parents. Everybody else were the kids. She played that role so well.
DAVID EICK
You got the sense that Laura Roslin had to develop her sensibilities on the fly; you didn’t get the sense that she necessarily held them her whole life. But just as Adama has to force his heart open and realize he’s not just an admiral, he’s also Daddy around there and he has to figure that shit out because that’s as important to their survival as the other. She’s learning, “Okay, I’m a lover and now a fighter, and I never wanted any of this, but if you’re putting me in this chair, here’s what I think we’ve got to do.” That pragmatism has to supersede your own nature sometimes, and you wouldn’t have ever gotten there with a different actor in the role of Laura Roslin. That combination is what allowed us to do that. You cast a brute or a Nurse Ratched in that role, you go, “Okay, I get it.” Then you cast some total softy in the role and you think “Bullshit” when she throws someone out an airlock. But Mary’s able to do both, and that’s the miracle.
The character was diagnosed with breast cancer in the miniseries, and that was something that plagued her throughout the series, on and off. At one point, the drugs designed to help her cope with her pain—which came with warnings of hallucinogenic side effects—led the character and the show itself in a different direction.
MARK VERHEIDEN
We wanted to play some of the reality of that, and clearly we had episodes where she’s undergoing chemo and lost her hair and things were getting pretty dire. We really wanted to be true to that idea that there was no magical cure, though we did use Cylon blood [which put her in remission for a time].
RONALD D. MOORE
“Flesh and Bone” was an important episode for us. The “Laura Getting Visions” episode, with her tying into the prophecies, felt like that was going to be a big path forward for us. We started to talk about Laura and her role in the show as president; I kept referring to her as Moses. I would always talk internally about the fact that “I don’t know when they’re going to get to Earth, but when they do, she’s going to be Moses. She’s going to lead them to Earth, but she’s not going to be able to go there.” Like Moses was not allowed to go into the land of Israel when he leads the Israelites there. So that was always where I thought the character was. We just kept talking about her as Moses, and at some point, you start talking about if she’s a secular character, she probably doesn’t believe in God. In their system, the Gods. In their society, wouldn’t it be interesting if she started to have prophecies and she is starting to see things, starting to believe that they’re possibly true. And then you force the president to have to go to the very matter-of-fact, very secular Commander Adama and try to convince him to listen to a prophecy. And we thought, “Well, that’s just great drama. That’ll be a lot of fun in itself.”
MARY MCDONNELL
I felt like Laura’s whole experience was the universe asking her to stretch. This was just another example of that. Am I really having these visions, or am I actually seeing something that could help us survive? If so, where’s the information coming from? Is this chamalla-induced or is the chamalla actually just opening me to be able to see what is actually here for us? You’ve got to understand, I was doing these psychedelic drugs inside a story where the actors know that in the very first episode, in the pilot, there’s a woman walking around in a red dress who isn’t really there. By the time we get to this question of whether or not it’s a drug-induced hallucination or really information that the heightened awareness of the drug is allowing Laura to see—a survival road map—those negotiations were fun, because who knew? What I liked about Laura Roslin is that she clearly had the capacity to continue to innocently process new information and develop the courage to take action with no background in it whatsoever.
DAVID EICK
The whole messiah thing—I wouldn’t do that now. I think there was something about the manifest destiny of Iraq, and the fact that it felt like we were following a messianic or religious trek, because there was no evidence, there was no attack, we’re a sovereign country and we’re doing this thing. And we’ve all had to kind of persuade ourselves that there’s a moral righteousness behind what we’re doing. So it starts to feel messianic. You have to rely on the fact that Bush has had a vision, or he sees into the soul of the bad guys and he just knows this. He feels it. And you start believing in feelings. I’m not even mocking any of this; I think this is all very real. A lot of this happened in World War II for the good. You know, my country right or wrong. So I think at that point, because of the eleven o’clock news, you could say someone’s going to follow their vision, someone’s going to follow not logic, not weapons of mass destruction, not evidence, but their visions. Their feelings.
Now I say I wouldn’t do that today, because the zeitgeist is different, and I just think it would go down differently. Or at least it would to me. But at that time it seemed very much like an echo of what we were all doing as a culture anyway.
RONALD D. MOORE
When we came up with the idea of Cylon blood putting her cancer into remission, I did that because I was pretty determined that Laura was going to die by the end of the series, but there did come a point where we wanted to play it realistically and we wanted to go through all of the stages of it, dealing with the ramifications of it, but there was a point where it started to feel like it was going to take over her storyline. We just needed to press pause on that story; we’d gotten a little further down the line than I think we wanted to a little too fast. She would have gotten confined to the sickbay, which nobody wanted. So it was a total cheat, but here’s this magic blood and it’s Cylon blood and we’ll cure her cancer and it’ll come back later.
When the storyline came out, I said to Mary, “I’m not getting rid of this,” because she was concerned. It was how you met her. It was one of the defining characteristics of the character. I said, “Don’t worry, this isn’t going away, but I need to press pause on this story for a little while. For now, let’s play your character in terms of the miracle cure and what that does to her and how she looks at life differently after a moment like that. And how it influences her view of t
he Cylons, the Cylon baby and all of that.”
MARY MCDONNELL
As a person, we started out with a woman who was a bit lonely and grieving the loss of practically everyone she knew. On top of that she’s diagnosed with a fatal disease. In the beginning there was a sad, lonely person there, whose life had not really manifested much. Her life wasn’t asking her to use herself much. Even though she was secretary of education, and I do believe that she was really good at it and very fulfilled, the little bit that we did learn about her on the way in flashbacks, etc. It became clear to me that she was living one of those mysterious lives that wasn’t really full and out there. There were certain things about it that were secretive and she was having an affair with the president, but that wasn’t out in the open. She didn’t have her own children and she’d lost everyone. There were just certain ways in which her life was not really quite full.
By the end of the series, her last line is, “So much life.” That killed me when I read it. That was not what the woman was experiencing at the beginning. By the end she had seen so much of the world inside this particular lens. She had seen so much about what she was capable of. She had done things that she was ethically in disagreement with as a human, but as a human had to make a choice for the greater good. She had fallen in love, probably with her soulmate. She had learned how to comprehend other realities. None of this was available to her as a human being. The idea that she had to become president is almost secondary—to me—to the fact that this particular woman went from living maybe her life at fifty percent potential to it took everything she had.
The alternative is that she could have died along with everyone else and not experienced any of it. Instead, she has to go on an obligatory trip that she already promised she would do, up to that stupid old battleship, and try and convince some stubborn old dude on a big ship that she be taken down, to let them use it as a learning tool for kids. Having gotten her news about the cancer, she could have said, “Excuse me, I can’t come.” How interesting that she didn’t do that. Her life is radically changed and she is asked by the universe to use her mind, her heart, her courage. She has to discover and then develop a backbone of steel. She has to figure out how to not be intimidated by anything.
The relationship between Commander Adama and his son, Captain Lee Adama, was a difficult, tentative one at best, the backstory of which comes from the show’s bible. Both Lee and his brother Zak were the children of divorce, admiring their father from a distance, seeing him only occasionally. Both nonetheless idolized the legendary commander. Lee quickly rose to the top of his class at flight school, with a great potential future for himself. Notes the bible, “It was about this time that Lee and his father began to have a falling-out. The boy’s hero worship had turned into the young man’s resentments at being abandoned and neither he nor his father knew how to bridge the gap, and so the visits became rare and the phone calls grew terse.” His brother graduated the academy and wanted to join flight school, more to impress their father than anything else, and it was obvious to Lee that Zak wasn’t cut out for the military. That seemed to become more evident when his application to flight school was rejected … until their father pulled some strings.
Continues the bible, “Then came another shock: Zak wrote Lee to tell him he was engaged to one of his instructors at flight school. Lee made time to visit and it was then that he met Kara Thrace for the first time. She was the polar opposite of Zak—where he was quiet, reserved, almost painfully sensitive, she was brash, loud, and had a thick hide. Lee liked her immediately. Maybe liked her too much. And he was pretty sure that she felt the same, but never seriously considered anything further. Lee wished them well and left to rejoin the squadron. Two weeks later, Zak’s plane went down while he was flying a routine solo mission and he was killed. Lee’s resentments and griefs boiled over at the funeral and he lashed out at his father, blaming him directly for his brother’s death, saying in so many words that Adama had all but killed his own son. Father and son never spoke again. Lee spent the next two years focusing on his career, having no personal life and working to become the perfect fighter pilot.… He was at test pilot school when the orders came in to report aboard Galactica for her decommissioning ceremony.”
Obviously this is where the miniseries picks up, with the Cylon attack and Lee remaining aboard the Galactica. Writes Moore, “He’s a young man with a lot of anger, a lot of resentments and a lot of frustrations who knows not what to do with them. But he’s also a fair and decent human being whose deeply felt sense of right and wrong have kept him afloat when so many around him have sunk. He’s the kind of man few would call friend, but many would follow in the jaws of hell. He is his father’s son.”
Playing the character is British-born Jamie Bamber, who, prior to Battlestar Galactica, had been seen in the television series Band of Brothers, Peak Practice, and Ultimate Force, and the miniseries Daniel Deronda.
JAMIE BAMBER
(actor, “Captain Lee ‘Apollo’ Adama”)
I’d done a body of work, but was still having to struggle, still hustling and working mainly in the U.K. I’d done Band of Brothers and some American stuff, but I’d never actually done a TV show in the United States, so I was pretty keen to do whatever it was coming down the pipe. Everything was an opportunity. I do remember at the time thinking, “Why on Earth would anybody want to remake Battlestar Galactica?” When my manager handed me this script over, I think I had just landed in L.A. and was staying in his studio apartment under his house. He poured me a glass of wine and then pushed this piece of paper across the table. I just thought, “Tell me Hollywood’s got its own original ideas and isn’t just having to do this,” but then I read this mission statement that Ron Moore had written. Two and a half pages, I think it was, which was included with the script. I’ve since found out that Ron had never intended it to be included with the script. This was something he had written, obviously, to be kept to the executives and producers and stuff. But anyway, it was there with this script and I was really taken aback by the boldness of the ambition. It’s what really sold it to me. Then I started reading the script and looking for the name Apollo and couldn’t find him anywhere, because it wasn’t there. There was loads of this character called Lee. Someone else called Kara, but on a quick glance Apollo and Starbuck weren’t there.
So then I had to go back and read it, and I’d like to say that it immediately said to me this is absolutely the best thing I was ever going to be involved in, but because those names weren’t in it, I was sort of stitching the childhood memories that I had of the show, which were very, very hazy, because I was very young when it came out. But that’s really what I was doing, trying to work out what semblance this had to the one I had seen before. And then the more I read things like the idea of Galactica being turned into a museum and the ship being this old junked-up waste of space in a fleet that had moved on, and there were things like that, I suddenly went, “Wait a minute, there’s something here.” And it was the moment when Boomer was a Cylon that sort of got me going. Another moment was a line about the Cylons believing in one true God, and the humans not. I just suddenly thought, “Okay, he’s doing what I like about storytelling and drama,” which is turn what we naturally think to be right on its head and asking us to empathize with those that we expect to dislike and distrust.
And that was really the mantra of Battlestar Galactica: Anytime you thought you were comfortable, the good guys were going to do something worse than the bad guys and the bad guys were going to seem better than the good guys. As a result, you’re forced to redraw all sorts of allegiance lines, and any show that does that is really using the most out of the dramatic form, which is about taking us to places of understanding that we can’t achieve just by reading the newspapers. And, yeah, Ron did that, but on the first reading of the script, it was just a job for me. It was just an audition and I was desperate to get the part, though it was a long process. I had a few hoops to jump through, but there were two
moments it became special. One, my then agent Michael Lazo called me and said it’s the best thing he’d seen all year in terms of all the TV that he’d seen that season. Michael always had high taste barriers, so that shocked me.
And then it was when the very current political parallels started to be drawn between some of the stuff that Ron was writing about. The stories about torturing prisoners, the stories about things that were going on in Iraq, literally as we were filming. I suddenly got goose bumps when you realized that this show that was set in outer space is nothing but what we’re doing to ourselves right now. You may have distilled it right down to the barest elements that made you think it’s in another time and place, but it was the human experience distilled and made more shocking as a result. It was a bitter drink to drink as you watched the show. And it was really challenging to me. It was challenging to America at the time. There were some uncomfortable messages, and I loved that. I loved that we were trying to do something that’s not safe, that’s not easy, that’s going to make people hopefully uncomfortable. And we did that.
RONALD D. MOORE
I’d say the biggest thing we struggled consistently through the years in terms of the story and characters had to do with Lee Adama. I sort of wanted to get him out of the cockpit early in the first season and make him a military advisor to Laura. I thought that would be kind of an interesting thing, and maybe there would even be a romance between the two of them. And that would be interesting, her being president and older. He’s young and Adama’s son. It felt like there was some drama to play there. I started edging around that a little bit, because I knew I didn’t want to play Laura and Adama romantically for quite a while. I said in the show bible, if there’s anything that’s going to happen, it won’t happen for a while. I was just looking for other colors to play and I thought, “Well, let’s move Lee over and do that.” But then, as the stories evolved, there was less and less of him to play with her, and there was more for him to play as the commander of the air crew. For a while he was kind of straddling both worlds, and then he kind of became more of a pilot.
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