We met up with Andromeda's Gordon Michael Woolvett, aka Seamus Harper, to discover just how unlike his character he is...

One of the most endearing of the characters in Andromeda is ship's engineer Seamus Zelazny Harper, an Earth-born genius who can fix almost anything. He has an eye for the ladies and a motormouth that has a tendency to cause trouble for him from time to time. Gordon Michael Woolvett is Harper. Interviewing him on set for the second episode of the show's third season, he rattles off answers just as quickly as his character, often causing his flustered interviewer to completely forget what he was going to ask next.

"I'm very close to my character," Woolvett confirms. "I take him to bed every night." He laughs an infectious Harper chuckle. "No, I'm not that close. The character of Harper is an extension of the vices of my personality. He's not selfish, but he's a little more petulant, he's a little more snappy, he's tougher than I am. Just all those things that I am, he's a little more of. Talks a little faster, a little more of a smart ass. I might draw the line before Harper would. Not always."

Part of this sentiment doesn't quite ring true. Surely Harper has never given the impression of being tough. "That's because the friggin' writers can't get it together and realize how tough Harper really is!" Woolvett claims, adding for any writers reading this, "I'm just kidding guys, just kidding.

"He's tough, he's just not stupid. He's not gonna go running into a sea of Magog if he doesn't have to. When push comes to shove, he's a tough guy, and we've seen that. I think it's better if you see someone be tough when it's difficult for them to be tough as opposed to someone being tough when that's just in their very nature. Then we see somebody overcoming parts of their personality. They're being tough while inside they're scared; that's more interesting, more true."

Speaking of Harper's traits, it's clear that the fast-talking is also common to both actor and character. Kevin Sorbo has mentioned in the past that he ad libs from time to time, as does Woolvett. "The other day I stopped Kevin in his tracks when I had an ad lib. Unfortunately I didn't do the line while the camera was rolling, I only did it during a rehearsal and then we were rushing so I didn't get a chance to get it in. But Kevin's line was, 'Why do we always think about luck when we're in danger?' and the line that was scripted was, 'Well, because when you're in danger, that's when we need it most' and so during rehearsal instead I said to Kevin, 'Well, 'cause when you're kissing your ass goodbye, a little luck makes it taste better'. Kevin just had to stop. He got the visual and then he thought and said, 'All right, okay, we have to stop'.

"It's not that the scripts need to be changed, it's just that all these things pop into my head and I like to throw them out there because they might be usable. They might be good and they might make even the writers laugh. Kevin prepares us; me, I've got things that pop into my mind as we're going and that's how I was trained and that's the kind of performance I prefer to do."

As the end of Season Two approaches in the UK, Woolvett reveals that season finale The Tunnel at the End of the Light "is a cliffhanger, although it's not a traditional cliffhanger. We come to a [he provides a musical sting] 'bum bum bum!' to be continued. It's an episode unto itself. There is a good, satisfying ending, but something else happens where we go, 'Oh no!' and it's a big 'Oh no'. It's really the beginning of the next episode at the end of this episode. And I'm glad. I think they did a real good job with it because I hate cliffhangers where you watch the whole episode and nothing gets tied up. LIke, why did I spend that hour and have to wait months and months and months? This one's not like that."

And so on to this season. Harper is still in one piece by the end of Season Two; presumably after his brush with death by Magog infestation, the writers felt they should go easy on him for a bit. Woolvett is delighted to be back for more, but doesn't want to give away too much about what is going to happen. "You know, they're kind of keeping it a little mysterious," he says, clearly wanting to keep things under wraps. "One thing I do know is we get very close to achieving some major goals and so we get to start exploring things like corruption and a hero who now has come so close to getting everything he wants, now that he gets it, he has to realize, 'Oh, wait a minute. Now I may have to start fighting the very thing I created because it's not exactly what I thought it would be.' So while our main goal continues, we now deal with other things. And I like that. I like the hero who suddenly gets everything and realizes, 'Oh no, it's corrupted, now

Last season, Harper wasn't just Mr Fix-It. Into the Labyrinth saw the engineer fall for a beautiful woman, who appears on board the ship in Harper's cabin with an offer to help him remove the Magog eggs within him. Did Woolvett enjoy this encounter? "It's funny. When you have to do kissing scenes, it's actually the exact opposite of what you'd expect it would be because you're working and the whole point is you're trying to make the camera believe that it's all this stuff that it isn't, and it's the ultimate in being self-conscious. Just get a friend and if you have a lover or a girlfriend or whatever, kiss that person, but have your friend sit next to you and watch you and afterwards tell you how you did and ask you to do it again, doing it this way. You can't. Now turn that friend into a camera with 100 people behind it and then put it on TV; the last thing you're gonna do is enjoy it.

Surely all this making out helps Woolvett improve his technique offscreen? He laughs. "My technique must be pretty good, because I was lucky enough to marry a gorgeous woman. Either that or she's just got the tolerance and patience of Job, my wife Michelle."

Woolvett reveals that this is unlikely to be the end of Harper's dalliances with the opposite sex. "We're starting to delve into that. There were some things back in Season Two; Harper realized feelings he had that he hadn't realized before, so I think we're gonna pursue those. I won't say who, or when or what or even if it's human." He bursts out laughing and it's suggested that Harper has a thing going with one of the ship's robots. "Well, that's been going on forever." He chuckles again, then adds with an impressively straight face, "Harper built Rommie; Rommie has this sub-program that happens offscreen. I would say it probably happens nightly..."

Returning to the start of the third season, "This episode and the first episode have actually both been good ensemble pieces and I hope to see more of that because at conventions and things, those are the complaints that I've heard most from fans, that they don't like that this episode is missing Trance, and they say their favourite episodes are ensemble episodes."

Woolvett has his own ideas about what he'd like to be doing more of this season. "I love the physical. I think it probably comes from being a smaller person. Your strength to body ratio is a little better because you've got less to carry around. I think probably because of that I try to find ways to throw myself around; if there's a railing I try to go over it, and so when you're doing things in green screen you have a lot of room to move. They've built a new slipstream core and it looks like there are some poles and railings and things, basically like a set of monkey bars, so I'm looking forward to getting in there and swinging around."

He's also keen to do more green screen work playing opposite himself on the occasions when Harper ends up talking to a hologram. "I did another Sci-Fi series called Mission Genesis; it was called Deepwater Black in Canada, and on that I had to do the scenes acting opposite myself using the green screen just like we did on this. It seems to be part of the meat and potatoes of Sci-Fi; a character is going to meet themselves. I don't know why that is: man against man, man against nature and man against himself are the three main [damatic devices]; Sci-Fi is the one where you tend to get man against himself literally as opposed to figuratively.

"What was difficult was trying to come up with differences between the character because the character is the same person. I was trying to keep him as energetic and crazed, as cuckoo as he was before and trying to maintain that so you can see the subtle difference between the two. Which was difficult because the easiest way to make two things seem different [is to] make the other character a little less energetic. So when I was trying to do that opposite myself, I actually realized, 'Wow, I really am energetic!' I had to really go far to be more energetic. I think I threw an ad lib in there when I said, 'Now I know why people hate me!' I think that was an ad lib; that may have been a good line. They all start to blend together. I'll take credit for it, sure, what the hell. Zack and Ash [Zack Stentz and Ashley Edward Miller, staff writers] will get mad at me because I think that was theirs. Sorry guys."

There is just time to get a hint of what to expect in Season Three. "There are fresh new directions but it's still Andromeda, it's still the same show. Towards the end of Season Two, the last couple of episodes you start to see the new direction the show is going to go; maintaining throughlines, keeping the characters the way we like them to be, [but] having them change little by little over time. Not a lot, but still having those same things week to week that we're gonna see that we love to hate or hate to love or love to love. Or hate to hate."

Paul Spragg