MICHAEL HOGAN
(actor, “Colonel Saul Tigh”)
A lot of people talk to me about Battlestar Galactica on different film sets. It always takes a couple of days before they bring it up; some people aren’t saying it right away, but eventually the director of photography or somebody will say, “I know you’re tired of hearing about it, man, but Battlestar Galactica.…” And I always say, “You know what? I’m not tired of this. Quite a while since we did it and I love talking about it, so anytime during the shoot if you want to ask me something, feel free, because it brings back these great memories for me.” It’s just one of the shows that everybody involved is so incredibly proud of the product, incredibly proud of their work as opposed—not that there’s that many—to some shows that one is involved in where you, “Oh, you want to talk about that?” Battlestar is, “Oh, yes, bring it on.” There’s no question, and I think that everybody involved means that. Battlestar was a movie that took us five years to shoot, and what a gift as an actor that is.
ALESSANDRO JULIANI
(actor, “Felix Gaeta”)
I think of Battlestar as a life changer. Childhood wish fulfillment. It’s a rare thing to get to actually become the things you played with as a child, so that’s totally what it was for me. When booking the series, I didn’t really believe it. But going into my basement and finding my old Battlestar action figures, and my board game, and thinking, “This is pretty fucking cool.” So what instantly comes to mind is, “Wow, what a cool, atypical thing to get to experience as an actor.” And to then have action figures of yourself in that same universe is pretty wild.
JAMIE BAMBER
I think about Battlestar Galactica, and I think about all those wonderful people that we got to know so well. It’s the people, really, and the fact that we were all in one place together, many of us away from home. Brought us closer together and it’s a period in time for me and it was a very key point of my life. I got married, had three kids up there, basically. A golden few years of a journey that I had no idea we would ever go on, and the further it retreats in the rearview mirror, the most halcyon those days seem, because they were very special.
At the time, Edward James Olmos said he felt sorry for the younger members of the cast, of which I include myself, because he said, “It’s happened to you too early in your careers and you’re never going to have another experience like this.” He’s definitely been right. When you’re in the middle of anything, it’s very hard to appreciate every moment, but it’s wise advice to live in the moment as much as you can.
GRACE PARK
The show evokes that time where we were all thrown into it together with this wonderful script. But the writers were figuring it out as they were going along. So there was something about the show, but it’s hard to tell if it was just the script. Was it the people? Was it being in my twenties and thirties? There were a lot of magical little pieces. Even the making of it was pretty special.
MICHAEL TRUCCO
(actor, “Samuel Anders”)
If you were playing word association and said Battlestar Galactica, it conjures up so many images. I see Eddie in the CIC with the microphone in his hand; the gravitas and the weight and the charisma that that man brought to Adama as a microcosm for what our show was. I don’t think people saw it coming. The caliber of storytelling and the acting. The tone that was set by guys like Eddie and Mary and Michael Hogan and James Callis. These are heavyweight actors that brought the level of talent and—there’s that word again—gravitas to the show.
MARY MCDONNELL
(actress, “President Laura Roslin”)
Not only did we collectively engineer a whole new idea for the elegance of Battlestar Galactica, without betraying the first one, but while we were shooting and it was airing, this brand-new business was emerging that we all are part of now with the new platforming and literally transitioned from film to high-definition video. We also made the transition from your acting space being sacred and no one ever got to come visit you unless it was a very special event, to people sending out pictures and message of life on the set that day. Everything was changing right before our eyes; as we were shooting it, our whole reality was changing. We were going through the primary between Clinton and Obama … just so much change in the air and so many different ideas happening, but every time you heard “Rolling,” the focus would instantly be in this galactic universe where we were trying to explore these very same ideas through.
JAMES CALLIS
(actor, “Gaius Baltar”)
We’ve been saying this kind of stuff for a while now. Battlestar is worth more than the sum total of its parts. You only look good when you’re next to other people who look good. Otherwise, nobody’s watching it and it’s not any good. It’s one of those things that I think you’re right to highlight it, that again it’s something that I suppose I slightly took for granted, that everyone was just phenomenal. Your imagination or what you’re bringing to the party is enhanced, supported, generated, by the other people around you and your interaction with them. Whenever I think about the show, essentially I think about all the people, and there were a lot of us. The cast and the crew and the postproduction and the executives who made it happen. I see faces more than anything else. I would imagine that every person in the show wants to acknowledge as many people as they possibly can, because every person in the show was so instrumental in making the show what it was and is.
AARON DOUGLAS
Once you get to a place where you know that you’re making something extraordinary, you can’t take your foot off the gas. It’s like we’re the ultimate team sport. You don’t want to let your fellow cast members down or the writers are trying to out-write each other, and the actors are trying to out-act each other, and the grips are trying to out-grip each other. Everybody knew that this is a really special thing. Don’t show up hung over. Don’t mail a scene in, don’t take any time off. Just put your head down and keep going. I’ve seen so many other shows where you can tell that they’re just tired of doing it and there’s no oomph left. But I don’t think we ever lost our oomph, and that’s from everybody at the top in L.A. all the way down through where we were filming and down to the person guarding the parking lot. They were proud to be on Battlestar Galactica. It was a very cool thing.
TRICIA HELFER
I hope to be working for many more years to come, but when people say, “Do you ever get tired of hearing and talking about Battlestar,” I’m like, “Not at all.” Not only was it an amazing experience, but the fact is that audiences are still finding it and still passionate about it, and there are new people finding it all the time and still passionate about it; it shows that it doesn’t have a time stamp on it, so to speak.
TAHMOH PENIKETT
Sometimes things are just kismet; they’re brought together because they’re a beautiful project. It’s a very timely project and this group of people were meant to work together. I don’t want to speak in religious aspects, but it’s as if a greater hand had something to do with this, and not many actors in this industry can say that. They might have one experience in their career, or if they’re lucky they may have numerous ones, where they’ve formed that bond and they never lose it. Because they worked on a project that was so relevant and it meant so much to them, that even with the passing of time and not having seen that castmate, or that writer or that director, for a long time, they still have that. They still have that shared experience.
JAMIE BAMBER
Battlestar Galactica was like the little hammer on the patient’s knee in the doctor’s office. We just hit the right spot and the knee jerked to hit that spot within the world of television and cable TV and the media, and just to get a reaction from people. I’ve never worked in anything else that has had that reaction, that immediately hit the tone right for the time that we were in, and that everyone was talking about. I’ve done shows that have been great and things that people have admired, but nothing that really captured the
imagination of a global audience in those years, the way Battlestar did, and is obviously still being talked about. Just for the last few weeks I’ve fielded several requests for reunions and get-togethers and retrospectives and things like that. So obviously it’s something that’s touched people and that made people reflect a bit on the world that we were living in at that time, and are still living in. And entertain them, too.
ALESSANDRO JULIANI
It tapped into something deeper. Something about our basic humanity. Anything I say right now is not going to really do justice to it, but any great piece of art, or any great thing, reflects back on us. Battlestar must have done that in an expected genre, maybe in an unexpected way. We must have all seen ourselves in the show in some capacity for it to have inspired so much of life beyond its short little run. When we go to these reunions and things, I remain sort of flabbergasted at the longevity of it. The people who watched the show when it was first out, they are now showing this show to their kids. So their kids are discovering it on their own and so now families are coming and the kids are now dressing up, or the teenagers. So there’s this sense now that it’s going to go on forever. It’s going to perpetuate itself and beget itself. What a remarkable thing. What a phenomenon.
RONALD D. MOORE
From the outset, one of the first things that David Eick and I talked about was the fact that we wanted the show to be relevant. That we thought to do a science fiction show that isn’t purely escapism, that isn’t about people and civilizations that mean nothing to us. Let’s do a show that’s more along the lines of older and more traditional science fiction that’s sort of common to the audience and contemporary society through this interesting prism.
DAVID EICK
Most of the things that were created and now are being analyzed by the United Nations and others were dreamed up in sports bars. It’s surreal for me to contend with that, but we were averse to attempting to adapt headlines. That wasn’t what we wanted to do.
RONALD D. MOORE
I think that while we’re both sort of historians and science majors, we also decided that the show was not really a soapbox for our particular political viewpoints. You can’t help but let your own worldview leak into what you do—I don’t think any of us can fool ourselves into thinking that it wouldn’t—but it was important to us that the show was not really just an opportunity to say, “This is what we think the right answer is, and this is what the answer to these difficult political and moral questions is.” It was really an opportunity to examine them, to ask questions or look at them from a slightly different point of view and say, “Here’s a group of characters that we are now going to ask you to invest what you will in.” As we got into the series, we started dealing with more and more of these kinds of things.
DAVID EICK
There was a sense, of course, of this fairly restrictive administration and a period of time when it seemed like human rights and freedoms were being restricted and that we were not clear about why we were doing things that we were doing, and why our sons and daughters were being lost. That just uniformly indoctrinated itself into the world, and the work was all about drama and about trying to make people feel what we were feeling in the room, what we were feeling as we discussed things with each other, and it wasn’t that dramatic, it wasn’t that situationally specific. It was really about just trying to tell good stories and finding ourselves amidst this period in time in America where those good stories were being informed by the sick and upsetting world. And in the final analysis, that has borne itself out, that there’s a sickness and a darkness and a tortured quality to the heroes of Battlestar Galactica. If we had done this show ten years later, that never would have happened.
RONALD D. MOORE
I took the approach that we were going to try to represent all of the sides of these debates fairly. We would try to sort of take Lincoln’s phrase of “With malice toward none, with charity for all” and make that what the show is about. We were going to give everything their time and their place, and we would give these very difficult, very thorny issues a hearing and sort of watch how characters like Adama and Laura Roslin would grapple with these issues, but not pretend that it was a simple or a political instance, one of the two. We didn’t want to say, “Well, the liberal point of view is there, therefore the show is going to promote that.” And at the end of the episode, the captain will say, “This is what the right answer is.” It’s always going to be difficult to get to anything resembling a right answer in these very complicated questions.
TODD SHARP
(production executive, Battlestar Galactica [2004])
Did we know that people would love it? Did we know that people would watch it? Did we know that we’d still be talking about it all these years later? Did we know there would be a United Nations panel with cast and crew? Did we know that we were going to be at the Peabody Awards? We were making a show for Sci-Fi Channel, for crying out loud. I don’t think anybody was thinking about that at all. Actually, Eddie Olmos was. He was the guy going around telling everybody you have no idea how this show is going to grow over time. “It’s like Blade Runner,” he said. “Twenty years from now, this show is going to find a brand-new audience and people are going to embrace it all over again.” Sure enough, it’s happened.
MARK STERN
A lot of people adopt successes after the fact—“I always knew it was going to be a hit”—but none of us knew what Battlestar was going to become. That it would become a phenomenon. I don’t care what anyone says, you don’t really ever know. But what we did know is that it was different, and we knew that it was special. We knew that there was something about it that really resonated, and that it deserved the best shot it could get. It was really one of those things where you wanted to make sure it had the time it needed, that these guys had the support they needed and that they had the best possible talent we could find.
DAVID WEDDLE
(producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])
Battlestar Galactica was a product of everybody getting so excited about going to work, and knowing they were doing something so innovative, that everybody pushed the envelope. Every department. I can remember seeing set guys building flats, talking about how they were pushing the envelope on set design. It’s a rare thing that every department and everybody on the crew were all together. There was such a high morale and such a feeling we were doing something extraordinary and everybody trying to go beyond just doing a job. It was thrilling to be a part of all that.
JANE ESPENSON
The power of the show comes from a combination of everything. I like shows that mix tones and goals, and this had this mixture of tones where Baltar could be hysterically, broadly funny, and you had action—“33” has this very tense situation where the Cylons are attacking every thirty-three minutes—and incredibly actiony, tense, suspenseful stuff. I’d never seen a show before that dealt with things as honestly as this show had. The notion that the right answer was to run away. We’ve never seen that, because it’s not the normal thing to do, but it is if it’s the only way to save what’s left of humanity. Then that becomes very much the right thing to do. Most people in the drama business would say, “Yeah, but why depict that? It’s not dramatic, because the choice to run away is so unsatisfying.” So it had a mixture of tones, and then it also has these really high aspirations. That it wasn’t going to settle for just being a ripping yarn, but it clearly was there to say something.
BRADLEY THOMPSON
We tapped in because when we were making it, we were going, “This is probably the coolest thing we’re ever going to do, because we got to tap into all this stuff and everything was working.” We had these great actors, we had a studio that more or less backed what we were doing. We had incredible visionaries running the thing. We had Gary Hutzel making stuff happen that nobody had ever seen before. It was just this conglomeration of really cool stuff all at once. I’m glad that still sells and people still react to it. We were talking ab
out things that were real even in the best science fiction. I’ve always loved talking about real things in a wacky place, so you can divorce yourself from your own biases and look just at the issue itself. You’re never looking at it as the issue, you’re enjoying the life with the characters. Then you go, “Oh, wait a minute. What did they just do? Why was that a good or a bad thing, and how do I feel about that?” I cared whether Sharon got to keep her baby and all those kind of things.
MICHAEL RYMER
(director, “33”)
When people say to me, “Battlestar was the first of the great competent TV shows, good TV shows. Not the best of them, not up to The Sopranos level, but certainly part of that wave,” I agree. It was the writing and that we had a feature-level cast who were acting and creating behaviors. It was much better than what anyone was used to seeing in science fiction. Then, of course, Ron was writing much more human, complex stuff that you weren’t seeing on Stargate or all these other shows, which were good, but this was more a saga for the ages.
KATEE SACKHOFF
Star Trek and Next Gen had this thing where they talked about real issues, which is so important in television, but I think that Battlestar was the first time it was talking about current events as they were happening in real time, and making people take notice, in a science fiction show.
RICHARD HATCH
(actor, “Apollo”/“Tom Zarek”)
My experiences on Battlestar, classic and reimagined, have provided me with the love, support, and sense of family that I missed in my childhood and given me a home where I could finally grow into the actor I always knew I could be. The original cast of BSG was truly a family, led by the gracious Lorne Greene, and this current family of Colonial actors has only taken the true meaning of family to an even more elevated and rarefied place. I love both BSG series and feel very blessed to have been part of two great shows. Art is about life and exploring our wildest imaginings. It’s about touching the infinite and exploring what’s possible if we only believe. Battlestar embodies all of this in the most personal and intimate way and she will always be in my heart.
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