So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  During those auditions, Tricia Helfer and I were paired together, which was very, very lucky for me. Insanely lucky for me. I don’t think I was actually paired with anybody else from that collection of very lovely-looking people in that room. I’d seen Tricia before at another meeting at David Eick’s when I’d been going into an audition, and she, I presume, had been leaving, but we hadn’t spoken to each other. In fact, we didn’t really know each other until our first day on set, pretty much.

  But it was challenging. In the beginning I knew that Baltar was not good, or at least a spanner in the works. I’m trying to find the best way of saying bad things about the guy. So I know all of that, and that’s a challenge. Then there’s this person, this beautiful lady, who’s in his head, which I really didn’t understand. I just couldn’t really get my head around it, because it was like, “How on Earth are they going to film that? How is that going to look believable? How are we going to make that real or look like it’s credible?” Up to then, I’d not seen anything like that, but the only thing in my mind was, “That’s like kids, isn’t it? Having somebody in your head and you’re talking to them? It’s like your imaginary best friend.” I brought that up to them and they said, “You’ve read the script. You’ve seen that millions are killed, right? It’s not for kids.”

  I certainly got that. I’d gotten that from the auditions—they constantly had us auditioning the same scene, and it was the scene of Gaius Baltar in bed with another woman, found by Six. I just thought the whole thing was funny. I said to them, “You know, after the bomb goes off and he realizes that he’s been implicated in this massive tragedy and possibly treason, his life is going to change. He’s going to be a different person. But right now, he’s somebody else. He doesn’t think there are any consequences. It’s all quite fun.” I thought that scene was really fun in something that was very dark.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  James really surprised me the most, because the character of Baltar in the miniseries was not particularly funny. I didn’t really write him that way. I thought he was morally ambiguous. You know, we talked a lot about the origins of Baltar, but I thought he was brilliant, egocentric, flawed as a person, ladies’ man—all those kinds of things. I really didn’t think he was funny, but James kind of brought this humor to the character that just made the whole thing wonderful.

  JAMES CALLIS

  Any actor, coming to a part, you’ve got a series of choices you can make, and I made them about this series. One of them is that early on they were talking about if you were going to be on the show, you were going to be in a boot camp. I was like, “What the eff.… Why? Why would I be in the boot camp? I’m not going to be in the boot camp. Somebody else can be. It’s not even my character.” They’re like, “It’s because you’re aboard the battlestar,” and I was like, “Read the script. I’m new to the battlestar. I’m from the planet.” And then there were meetings on makeup and they’re saying, “Cut your hair, it’s military.” “No, I’m a scientist. I don’t have to.” So the series of choices I made was that I was surrounded by a group of heroes, essentially. They were all heroic, to greater or lesser degrees. Mostly greater. Think about Adama and Roslin and Apollo and Starbuck and Helo and the chief.… Do you know what I mean? They’re rounded and they’re heroic, and they’re heroic because they make sacrifices of themselves for other people. So I was placed in this thing where I was like, “Okay, I’ve got to be totally different to that.” Essentially it’s not even an antihero, it’s just somebody who’s not a hero.

  He’s his own man. He’s dancing to his own rhythm.… I think they call that irritating, but it’s beyond irritating. In some fashion he’s kind of magnanimous, within his own mind. He’s not really interested in playing politics. He’s into science for the advancement of technology, science, the species. He’s complicated and, like I always say, he’s very bad on paper, but not all bad. In a more brutal or slightly more savage Battlestar Galactica, I’m sure that Gaius Baltar would’ve met his just desserts.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  James really changed that character. Now we started playing more of the humor, sometimes too much humor. Sometimes you’d just write straight-up comedic beats and he’d go, “You know, I’m not a joke. You know, we have to rein ourselves in.” We knew James would just be so great with comedy that we started just writing comedy and the character becomes less mysterious. So we had to kind of watch ourselves.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

  James was kind of shy at first with writers, but then he liked what I had written, so we started to talk. His wit was just amazing. Really funny guy. His wife is from India and so they spend a lot of time there. He’s totally into Bollywood; I think he even acted in a couple of those films. I don’t think anyone else could have played that character. I mean, Ron created the character, but he got the right actor. Somebody who could play it straight, but funny and venal at the same time. That was James.

  MICHAEL RYMER

  Ron was very tolerant and we would always try to honor the writers and do a take on a script and then if we knew a way to make it better, we would. Or try different ideas. And the writers usually were very non-precious, non-nerdy about it, and they’re going, “Wow, that’s great…,” and they would write to that. I think probably the biggest example is James making Baltar a comedic character. It was not that way on the page, and James just naturally played those beats. He was a bit of a genius in that he can play the humor, but never undermine the threat that is driving his situation in the story. It never became silly. It never became Batman & Robin. It’s pantomime and brilliant pantomime. He was treading the line. For me, in a lot of ways, Eddie and Mary were the big guns, the big gravitas producers, and it was James and Katee that gave the show its fizz. You never knew exactly what they were going to do or say, and they were just very naturally entertaining as performers. I love watching those two do other things just to see what they’re going to do with it.

  JAMES CALLIS

  I didn’t mean to bring the humor. It just kind of happened and I’m cool with it. Like I said, that audition scene with Tricia, and Gaius caught in bed with another woman, I thought was funny. Also the whole idea of trying to explain it by saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry. It’s not what you think. I’m not even in love with her.” You know, it’s ridiculous.

  I kept saying to people, as it were the powers that be, this is not really the right scene that you should be watching to audition the character, because the character is going to change very, very much when he finds out actually what he’s been involved with, isn’t he? Essentially I wanted to bring somebody to the party that was not heroic. Who didn’t know if they were going to move left or right. It’s like walking down the corridor and everybody else walks with such purpose. They’re on their way to something. Something military. So, what if there’s somebody walking down the corridor who’s like, “Did I have breakfast this morning? Is that important?” It was just a different energy. The writing was incredible and you started to fall in love with these people, but unless there was an element of humor or something, I’d have just been the person that you just hate totally. And what he was earlier involved in was monstrous. Totally monstrous. So if you knew what you were doing at the time, then that makes you a monster, and that wasn’t what I wanted to be.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

  We had Head Six and then we did two Baltars—one being a “Head Baltar” the way we did Head Six—the idea for which was mine. Nobody liked it except James. He said, “Oh, man, I want to do this. I have to do this.” Ron’s like, “Okaaay,” and we did it and it worked out really well. He went to bat for the character and for me. I thought it was great. I don’t know if anybody else did. I think it kind of worked. The episode was really terrific.

  JAMES CALLIS

  I think that Number Six is one of the most brilliant creations in the show. Their relationship is the closest and the only time really Gaius Baltar came to love, and in loving there is something redeeming and redeemabl
e, and that’s a beautiful thing.

  MICHAEL RYMER

  Baltar was very sympathetic. And extremely selfish in a Machiavellian way. He is not evil. He is weak. He had a huge ego. He is lustful. He is a wonderful sort of human being who happens to bring down the human race [laughs]. I almost can’t separate him now from the way James Callis played him. James made him extremely sympathetic and engaging, yet plausible.

  JAMIE BAMBER

  We all hated him, but we all loved him as well, because he was human. He’s the most human character in the show. He’s spineless, scared, and vain in equal proportions. We can all relate to that. When you actually put yourself in these situations that are life and death, maybe we’re the ones that are the weakest and the most scared and we’d love to think we’re the heroic, selfless types. But the way James brought this wide-eyed, almost childlike vulnerability and humor to it … he is a human being and he did evil things, but he did it from a place of weakness not strength, and as a result there’s something redemptive in him.

  With Baltar, you could see the self-preservation just seeping out of his pores, and there was something unnecessarily needy about him, even in the playing. But people like that exist and they can infuriate you, but they can waste your energy and all these things. Yet Baltar galvanized people and reinvented himself, a bit like Lee in other areas. He became the cult leader, the politician; whatever he needed to be, he became that to guarantee his own survival. I thought it was a wonderful performance, and I’ve always admired James’s work on that show, particularly.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  Baltar serves such a key role in the original. He was the one human villain that you had in the piece, and it was only natural to figure out how I was going to work him into the show. The problem with the original is that I never understood why the hell he did what he did. I watched it a couple of times and was trying to figure it out.… All they really say is they promised him some kind of dictatorship over a planet or something. But they were going to wipe out all the humans, so who is he going to be dictator over? And why does he think that’s attractive? “What’s in this for Baltar?” was always such a tough nut to crack. And I just thought there’s really no reason why a human character of any kind of depth, or any kind of intelligence, is really going to betray his entire race to genocide, regardless of what the Cylons promise. So that didn’t make any sense.

  We started to ask, “How could this happen? Maybe he’s someone who betrays all of humanity without meaning to? How could that be a flawed character? He has weaknesses and he’s prone to giving in to temptation. Maybe he has an ego issue. Maybe he’s super smart and is intelligent, but he loves women and women are his weakness.” I started just going down that route. So it became Baltar’s ego is such that he betrays the human race without even meaning to. Once I got to that point, then I thought, “Oh, that’s a great character.” I knew people like that. I think there were elements of myself in Baltar. I mean, I’ve certainly liked women in my life, and there’s a lot of me in Baltar in lies I’ve told other women. Situations of being caught by one woman while I’m with another. Setting yourself up as someone enjoying your fame and pretending not to enjoy your fame. There’s certainly aspects of all of those things in Baltar. I mean, he’s probably the one that I identify with the most in the show as closer to my own self. And my own perceived flaws. You know, I can be tempted into things and I can tell myself it’s not such a big deal, I’m just going to do this one thing and then you find yourself in a difficult situation. Oh shit, how did I get here? And yet still trying to do the right thing. Still trying to tell yourself that you’re a hero of your own story.

  And I started to understand who this guy is, and started writing him as someone who likes fame, and someone who’s comfortable being interviewed all the time. Someone who’s getting a lot of awards. I’m starting to see this guy and I’m starting to like him. At the same time, I’m kind of being held captive by him, and I thought that was a fascinating mix.

  MICHAEL ANGELI

  Baltar was like a cockroach. He found ways to wiggle out of disaster constantly. That was by design. That’s why he did survive until the end. He also had a nice arc where he went from betraying humanity to being sort of a good person.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  Baltar sort of starts out like a villain, somebody despicable, but then he became one of the best-loved characters on Galactica. And we all loved writing for him. James Callis was another amazing actor who could improvise moments and find dimensions in that character who could have been just like Dr. Smith in the original Lost in Space: cardboard cutout, you hate him, crazy coward. But James Callis brought such layers of emotion to his scenes that we wrote for that, too. We saw what he was doing. In our minds we all want to be Adama, but most of us are Baltar. You know, we’re afraid, we run away, we don’t do very well at things, we falter, we betray … I think people can really identify with that.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  He was an incredibly nefarious spirit on the ship, but, it’s funny, there’s people in real life where I think if you ask, “How is it they keep walking around and yet others don’t? How is it Baltar survived and so many others on that ship didn’t?” He had a cutting way of self-preservation. He was useful to some extent being the scientist he was. The other thing is, when you have a finite number of people and a finite number of experts because of who those people are, who’s left, what do you tolerate in terms of misbehavior or bad behavior—or, in Baltar’s case, extreme bad behavior—to continue to use their expertise?

  If you lost those people, regardless of how evil or ill-informed or mentally ill they are, what would the impact be? Was he better to keep alive than to just kill? I think that, yes, he was a nefarious person and tragic toward the end, but especially during the mutiny when he was trying to talk to Gaeta and trying to at least help a little bit, you got a sense that there was a little more going on. James Callis, by the way, was fantastic as Baltar, and maybe that’s why Baltar didn’t end up with a bullet in his head. Maybe it’s because Callis played him in such a way that you wanted him to survive. You are involved in his story and he had a certain curious sense of humor and self-awareness about himself that was always fun to watch. I would have hated to lose that from the show.

  MICHAEL RYMER

  It never occurred to me that it was a story hole that they didn’t kill Baltar. I guess because the show was an allegory and it was a fairly didactic allegory of who we are, how should we behave, what’s acceptable, what isn’t, and putting up with the Baltars of the world, owning them and so forth, is sort of who we are supposed to be. We don’t execute people. We don’t murder people. I know you could break that argument in a second by other moments in the show, but he’s like Dr. Smith on Lost in Space. He’s the man that you love to hate. He is the essential ingredient to our acute salvability as human beings. That selfish, frightened, greedy, self-aggrandizing sexual predator … all those things.

  MARK VERHEIDEN

  James brought in a character who could have been arch one side or incredibly dark on the other. He straddled the line in between. He had a self-awareness about his absurd relationship with Head Six, and then there was the fact that she would be giving him oral sex behind a table when someone would walk in and his pants would be off, but there’s no one there with him. So it’s, like, “What in the world is going on here?” but his reaction just busted in that situation. That was the sort of smoothness and yet self-awareness of how insane that was that he was able to bring to that. I thought that was really remarkable.

  DAVID WEDDLE

  As the series unwound, it became “The Nine Lives of Gaius Baltar.” There’s a resiliency in Baltar of reinventing himself constantly, which lots of us do try to do, hoping for some sense of truth, some sense of peace, some way to come to terms with our demons, so we might embrace different things. We might become born again. We might discard our religion. We might change careers, change marriage partners, move to a different place. I
t’s all in a search for identity—who we really are—and Baltar eventually does find out who he is. And you sort of end up admiring the guy, because he had such resiliency, and in the end he’s kind of redeemed. By being with these people, and the fact that they didn’t kill him when they put him on trial, he sort of earns his place, finally, among the crew.

  JAMES CALLIS

  Basically the guy grew up. He started off life as an adolescent, almost, or like a child, and then that child is traumatized by his own actions. I’ve often said, when people are like, “Oh, he’s really bad; he’s really evil,” I’m like, “I don’t think he was evil. I think that he was very weak and narcissistic, and those are dangerous combinations.” So over the course of the series, he grows up, but he grows up between the five stages of grief. There’s denial for a large part of his journey on the trip, and then there’s anger, and bartering and depression, and finally acceptance. He goes through a lot of colors and loads of different kinds of things, but that’s one of the arcs that the man goes through.

  ALESSANDRO JULIANI

  (actor, “Felix Gaeta”)

  When we were on New Caprica, I worked closely with James and we had the most complete arc, I think, going from total hero worship to something a little more like family. It was a great time with James, who’s up for anything, down for whatever and constantly a source of humor and fun, but rigorous, too. He wants to talk all the time. He wants to get in there. So many actors don’t want to talk to you at all about what’s going on. They just want to do it. But James is the opposite; he wanted to get in there and that was always a great pleasure. Particularly if we were working with a director who happened to also share that vibe. There were great discussions and great collaborations, and great changes that were made to scenes and script and moments based on those debates.