So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  For me, it wasn’t the audition process that was grueling, it was my acting school and a class that I was in which really prepared me to be able to do Battlestar. It got my foot in the door essentially. I auditioned for the part of Dualla and I think it was a scene in the head. I had to be in my bra … I think I was washing up or something. I did the whole scene sideways, for some reason, as if the mirror was on the side. So I did it and then they’re like, “Can you do the whole thing, but swing it ninety degrees?” So I did that. Now, my acting class really pushed us so hard … we called it being in a cult. Just an intense, unusually dark experience. So the audition room seemed minor in comparison, because it was, like, “Shit, I just need to get through this fucking audition so I can get back to study my shit for class,” because you didn’t want to get effed over in class. That was the problem, because she held the bar really high. It didn’t matter how much you were pouring your heart out. You and the other actor might be sobbing onstage, and then she’d wait five seconds and say, “Get off.” It’s, like, “Stop wanking off up there.”

  So when you get used to that kind of “tough love,” the audition room seems much simpler. Anyway, I was told to come back for Starbuck and I did go see the same acting teacher. When I read for that, she was like, “What are you doing? Are you doing all this weird stuff because it’s a lead now?” When you go from going for smaller parts to principal parts, and then suddenly it’s a lead, your subconscious is probably amped up and definitely nervous. So, yeah, she had to work me down from a number of those things. But I didn’t have the process that Katee Sackhoff did, so after one audition, Michael Rymer gave me a note and I did it again. Gave me a note, did it again, gave me a note, did … eight times. Usually by the third note you’re thinking, “Oh, I fucked up.” Then that starts working in your head at the same time while you’re trying to do the audition. Then with every added note it’s just going to get worse. But somehow I was able to stay on track, even though I was pretty off.

  The thing that Michael told me is maybe I just didn’t get the gravity of how dark the series was going to be. After that, I went to L.A. and that’s where I saw Katee and Jamie Bamber for the first time. If Katee and I and this Hispanic girl were going for it, it was obvious that the casting was pretty open. They weren’t rigid on the ethnicity of the look, which was cool. When I went in for the screen test, I was told, “Okay, now it’s not about the acting. They know you can act. That’s how you got here. Now it’s about getting through the room.” That’s all she had to say, and somehow it clicked and I got it. I was like, “Oh, this is a completely different test.” Basically, are you going to crack or not? Everyone was brought up in different order, because it was as soon as your contracts came through. The girl that had left the room just before me was like, “I don’t know what the fuck happened in there,” and she walked out. Normally that would have made me nervous, but instead I was just feeling super ready. But the thing is, maybe I was too much in my own kind of space, because I went in with Jamie and there wasn’t chemistry between us. That’s one of the reasons—and I’m sure there are many—why I wasn’t going to get Starbuck. But I suppose I offered enough of something for them to throw me a bone.

  So I didn’t get Dualla or Starbuck, but then when I was told I had gotten Boomer, I was pissed. I didn’t like that. I was like, “Who the eff is Boomer?” I didn’t read the pilot for Boomer, and then we were shooting the miniseries and then also you do a little bit of research and realize, “Frak, I guess she’s a Cylon.” I asked Ron, “When did you change this? Was there something about me that made you change it?” She was always that and I just hadn’t realized, because I wasn’t reading for that and I wasn’t picking up on the clues. But in the beginning, the character didn’t seem interesting. Maybe I remember a general feeling of sadness or self-pity. More like sadness or melancholy, and it just seemed like the part was quite small. Whereas Starbuck seemed interesting and bold and more kind of fun to play. A brash character. Katee had said she wanted Boomer and I was like, “Why would she want Boomer?”

  Park got a mistaken sense of the character’s part in the hierarchy of the show when she and other cast members participated in a boot camp designed to give them a “modicum of militariness” in the way that they walked or saluted.

  GRACE PARK

  It was at that point that we’d watched an episode of the original Battlestar, and someone said, “By your command.” It was to the ruler or whoever it was. I want to say “queen,” but I don’t know if it was a female. But at that point is when it dawned on me, “Oh my gosh, I’m the queen.” Because Six says to one of the Eights, “By your command.” So that’s what I thought, though later, of course, I found out that I’m absolutely not the queen. Once again sent to the bottom.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  When she started out, she was very green and brand-new. I couldn’t tell you if it was literally her first gig, but it was certainly one of them. You watched her grow into the role over time, and kind of quickly. It was a quick learning curve, and she just stepped up her game kind of fast.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  In the first season, Grace Park was good, but she wasn’t the strongest actor, honestly. But by the end of the first season, when she tells Helo that she’s pregnant, I remember thinking, “Holy shit, she’s great in these scenes.” She improved more than anyone in the cast. She really applied herself, and by the end of the series was as good as anyone in that ensemble, which is saying a lot. You could tell when she was playing Athena, you could tell when she was playing Sharon just by the way she walked or the look in her eyes, and that was an amazing feat for an actor who wasn’t that experienced in the beginning.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

  When Grace started, she was really pretty, but she just was not very good. It was hard, but we asked her, “Listen, we really love you. We want to keep you for the show. Would you mind taking a couple of acting lessons?” She was like, “No, of course not.” No pretense at all. And by the end of the series, she was amazing. One of the best actors on the show.

  GRACE PARK

  In the first season, Michael Rymer told Tahmoh and me that we improved a lot. We were feeling pretty good about ourselves, and affirmed. At that point he said something along the lines of, “You still have a long way to go, but…,” and we both were like, “Stop!” After the conversation was done, we kind of fact-checked with each other about, “Did you hear what I heard? I think we improved a lot this year.” Then, of course, four years after that, we were just laughing at ourselves, rolling our eyes and thinking, “Can you believe we thought that we were pretty good at that point?”

  When considering arcs for the various versions of her characters on the show, Park admits that she actually never recognized arcs because she was “too green” and was more concerned with individual scenes.

  GRACE PARK

  It’s like how children look at really small things, and they’re really big, but we can tokenize the entire situation and go, “It’s a carnival, and there’s a Ferris wheel and a roller coaster, and candy corn, and stuff,” but they’re, like, one thing is a world to them. So in a way everything was kind of expanded for me, so I was lost in each scene. So for myself, the Eights [her Cylon model] in general did not have an arc. They were just the Cylon prototype, kind of really neutral. It was really just Boomer and Athena that really had arcs. For myself, Athena really seemed like a side character for the first season. Whenever she was on the planet, she basically had to play a disguise that she was Boomer and getting this other raptor pilot to fall in love with her and she’s not growing much. Everything is just a smoke screen. Meanwhile, Boomer was the one I had my hands full with, and she was conflicted, trying to kill herself, self-sabotaging. She didn’t know what she was. I myself didn’t even know what was going on. She would wake up and the word “Cylon” would be written on her mirror. I knew that it was her writing to herself, kind of giving herself signals and such. But I didn’t even know how to play those sce
nes. It would be so much better if we were able to do it once again, kind of near the ending. So that character just seemed too lost in herself, and the conflict of who she was and her identity, how she fit in with the others, how she was an outcast.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Grace would be one of the people that come up and ask questions about the mythology and backstory, even when I hadn’t worked them out. She was always kind of surprised that I hadn’t worked a lot of things out in detail, but she was always eager to ask questions, like, “What’s going on here? When I’m doing this, what are they doing on Galactica?” Always trying to orient herself in the larger mythology of the show. I remember there was a sense of her being an intense student of her craft. Just a great spirit to her.

  There was, however, a moment when Athena and Boomer had a scene together on the Galactica that would require split screen in which the actress would play both roles in separate camera passes.

  GRACE PARK

  I was not nervous for that scene, because I thought it was going to play as kind of how they did with James Callis when the two Baltars were in the scene together. But this version was trickier, because the camera was in one spot, and they were both in the same scene. Whereas mine, you cut from one version to the other, so it was actually way easier. But in my head I thought it was the worst possible version. I was so nervous about it, but I did the scene and I remember doing something with Boomer as a character. Michael Rymer once again comes over, totally bursts any bubbles, and he’s like, “Why are you making her such a bitch?” And anything I was feeling was like, “prrew”—complete deflation. It doesn’t mean you’re right, but it’s, like, you’re trying to do something creative and someone’s like, “That’s dumb.”

  RONALD D. MOORE

  The character of Sharon was sort of the vehicle through which I figured out we would do the different Cylons in a real way, because, A, she was the last one that we said “Oh, she’s a Cylon” by the end of the miniseries, which was kind of surprising. Something David came up with and we put into a draft much later on. I hadn’t given a lot of thought about where to go with that character. Right off the bat in episode two we started doing things, like, she’s a sleeper agent and she’s going to get into the water tank; that these Cylons cannot even know that they’re Cylons in some instances. In the episode before that, “33,” we start setting up that there’s another Sharon on Cylon-occupied Caprica.

  Now I had two of them. Over the first season, because I had two of them playing parallel stories, it was an opportunity to start figuring out how we’re going to do this overall. Six was kind of in a different category, because she’s in Baltar’s head, we’re not going to talk about what that is or what it represents. Let’s play a lot of games with it. Let’s make it a chip. No, it’s not a chip. It’s an angel. It’s not an angel. Let’s do all these different things and then we’ll bring one on board, and that’s mostly to screw with Baltar’s head. With the Sharons, it was more, “All right, if we have multiple copies of all these, how would we delineate the differences between them? How would they be similar? Would they have certain characteristics that all of them share? How different could they be?” What would it be like in the show in editorial terms to be cutting between two of them? Are we going to confuse the audience if we’ve got these two actresses playing the same role? How would we differentiate them editorially and mood and so on? She was really the test case that allowed us to then branch out deeper and deeper as the show went on, because that taught us a lot of lessons about how to do it and how not to do it.

  The Sharons were very similar up front, deliberately. We wanted the one on Caprica to be so similar to Sharon that Helo wouldn’t know the difference. There weren’t that many differences, but as you got deeper into that storyline, she actually acts on the feelings between her and Helo that had been buried all those years, and she hadn’t acted on them. The other one’s on a very different journey regarding Tyrol. That’s where they started to branch out and then you started writing in subtle differences and their character voices and how one would respond and how the other would respond. A key insight, kind of a late-breaking idea in the middle of the season, was, “Oh, we’re going to arc these two in the other direction. The Sharon that we know aboard Galactica, who has literally been there from the miniseries and is their Sharon that is established right away, she’s going to go dark. And the one that’s on the planet, she’s going to go toward the light. She’s going to be the one that we actually invest in and she’s going to have a child and we’re going to play the love story between her and Helo for real, and we’re going to come to like her.”

  All that made us realize that not all the Cylons had to be villains, or she wasn’t going to just screw over Helo and kill him or something once she got pregnant. It opened up the box in terms of what we could potentially do with all the Cylons. All the Cylon models, each one that we encounter, could have a different motivation, slightly. Could have different characteristics within a set of parameters, and then you could take them in any direction you wanted. You could redeem some, you could condemn some, you could have some that were weak and never figured anything out. It made them all interesting individuals.

  Dr. Gaius Baltar, a brilliant scientist in artificial intelligence, is seeking to create an AI that could solve humanity’s problems, while avoiding the situation that had in the past allowed for the Cylon uprising and subsequent war. His work moved to the next level thanks to the arrival of an enigmatic woman whom he connected with instantly. “She was beautiful, intensely sexual, funny, smart and with an intuitive sense of Baltar’s every mood and thought,” writes Moore in the show’s bible. “… She understood how secret affairs both titillated and challenged him, so she told him she was from an unnamed corporation interested in defense contracts and that their affair was not only illicit, but probably illegal. She also shared his interest in A.I. systems and encouraged him to push the Defense Ministry further into computer networking than they were initially prepared for.” Things progressed for two years, with Baltar inadvertently providing her with exactly what she was after: a means for the Cylons to try and wipe out humanity once and for all, with this woman revealing herself to be a Cylon just before the attack began.

  “Gaius Baltar is not without conscience,” notes Moore. “Indeed, he is aware of, and regrets the harm his actions have caused to both individuals and the society at large. While his guilt is not so keenly felt as to put himself at risk of discovery and punishment, it is important to remember that he is neither amoral nor sociopathic. He is a brilliant man, whose intellect usually finds a way to both justify his own behavior and yet at the same time condemn himself for those very rationalizations and obfuscations. He is weak without being craven, duplicitous without being untrustworthy, in league with the enemy without being treasonous.”

  Playing the character is British actor James Callis, who, before boarding Galactica, enjoyed great success in a number of West End productions in London. He wrote and directed the independent film Beginner’s Luck (2001), and appeared in such films as Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and Dead Cool (both 2004), as well as a number of television series.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  There was a point during the run of Battlestar when I was nominated for an Emmy for a script. They had a nice little event somewhere in Hollywood for the nominees. I went there and met some of my fellow writers, which was very cool. I met with the creator of Mad Men, Matthew Weiner. The emcee of the event was Jon Cryer, and he would say nice things about each of us in turn. Then we got to me, and Jon went off on this whole thing about how much he loved Battlestar Galactica and how desperately he wanted the role of Baltar. That it was between him and James Callis at the very end.

  Which was true: it was him and James. Jon Cryer was the other way to go, but then he went off and did Two and a Half Men, and it seemed that things worked out pretty well for him. It was very funny that he still thought about that, an
d how much he loved that character and how excited he was to have done the show or would have had a chance to do the show. It was very gracious of him to talk about that. Obviously his would have been a whole different take.

  JAMES CALLIS

  My friend Jamie Bamber was already cast as Apollo and I was in the States for the first time. I knew who Baltar was from the original story, so I had some trepidation about, as it were, stepping into those shoes. I was assured that it would be very different, and then reading the script of the pilot, it was very different. One of the people at the studio I knew was Angela Mancuso, who I had worked with on a show called Helen of Troy two years beforehand. She thought I would be great for it, so I went up for a series of auditions—though for the first audition I was there on the wrong day, which would probably explain why they didn’t want to see me. In that case I was, as they say, fresh off the boat. Later in the casting process, I just went to some big meeting where there were five or six different actors who were all going up to be Gaius Baltar, and five or six different Sixes—young actresses going up to play Number Six—all in a room together, and we were paired off with each other to go and do a scene in front of the network executives. It felt like there were twenty people behind desks in the room. Then when they weren’t happy with somebody or it didn’t go somebody’s way, then somebody would come out of that room, a bit like Big Brother, or one of these reality game shows, and tap somebody on the shoulder and say, “I’m terribly sorry, but it’s not going any further today.” And then that person would collect their stuff and leave.

  That’s what you do at a test like that, and it was quite an extreme situation. It seemed like a bad day; I want to say it lasted three hours. I know I was there beforehand an hour and then getting back is like five hours, and you still don’t know what’s going on. So it got to a point where I’d been auditioning for the same part for, like, a week and a half or two weeks. Since I’d arrived in L.A., I’d done almost nothing else. I was very excited to finally receive the phone call saying, “This is going ahead and you’ve got the job,” but when I did receive the phone call, I couldn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted, because I was physically exhausted from the stress of this whole thing. And for me, this would mean a big thing, because I was living in London at the time and it was filming in Vancouver. It was a question of what I was going to do with my family.