Andromeda's 'living cartoon' thrives on running on familiar ground

(From Parsec Spring/Summer 2001)

Gordon Michael Woolvett relishes his role as Seamus Harper on Andromeda for more reasons than just being "a big Roddenberry fan." The role gives him a chance to tread on familiar ground - and expand on the territory while he's there. "It was kind of like a character that I already do, so I didn't have to come up with anything and I enjoy doing these characters," Woolvett said of Harper.

Like his character, Woolvett is not a stoic person and takes the success of the series and of his place in it in stride.

"This is the fifth series in which I'm one of the leads, it's just the first one anyone has heard of," Woolvett cracks. "But that's one of the joys of working in Canada, you can cut your teeth and get a lot of experience failing...just not creating enough of an audience to keep going.

"In the States, when a lot more money is poured into a show and a lot more publicity is done for a show, a lot more people see it fail...like The Michael Richards Show."

On Andromeda, Woolvett's character serves as the ship's handyman and comedic element or, as he puts it, "Bugs Bunny meets Han Solo."

"He's not a fine, upstanding citizen, he's like a living cartoon. He doesn't take anything seriously, he's pretty wily and a smart-ass.

"But he can be pretty brilliant when he whips out the Acme directions and puts stuff together... Ok, maybe he's more like Wile Coyote."

And that was the kind of actor-slash-character that producers had in mind when they cast the role.

"We needed somebody who represented the younger audience for us. Somebody who could present the audience's experience," explained executive producer Allan Eastman. "We needed somebody who would react to situations with attitude and humour and be a counter-weight to the intenseness of Tyr or the military bearing of our hero."

"One of the things that attracted me to the character," Woolvett recalls. "Was that I could see on the page that this was a part that would meld really well with ad libbing."

Rather than work entirely from a script during the audition, Woolvett ad libbed. It was a strategy that worked. During the casting session, Woolvett did read the dialogue presented to him ... he just added to it and threw in some of his own gestures and smart-ass comments into the mix.

"I sort of re-interpreted some of the insults that they included in the script," Woolvett said, adding that one of the insults was a lengthy shot at Keith Hamilton Cobb's character of Tyr Anasazi.

"For the record, he's not really smelly," Woolvett said of the multi-adjective description of the character.

As part of the audition, Woolvett had to handle a two-page speech which compared life to a bug hitting a windshield interspersed with techno-babble.

"I don't have too much with the techno-babble. I enjoy it. I'm like a kid on a space ship."

The ad lib caught the fancy of the official from Tribune Entertainment (the distributor of the series) and the person who was handling the auditions during the latter stages of the process - Woolvett describes him as a kindred spirit.

"I missed out on the first round because we were driving up the coast and we weren't in Los Angeles and we didn't want to return to Canada because we'd just moved to California," Woolvett explains. "But later on I was available and decided to audition."

Coming to the series late in the pre-production process meant that he had two weeks to uproot him and his wife in Los Angeles and move to Vancouver.

"In retrospect, I'm really happy and I'm really excited about it."

"Whenever you do these things, you step into a sea of hundred people involved in the project and you never know what you're going to get," he said. "I think I've been really lucky we ended up within the production and creative aspects."

Woolvett points out that the professionalism of the cast and the crew and the relaxed attitude on the set made his hasty entrance onto the series easy.

Once in Vancouver, Woolvett got caught in the whirlwind of meeting the producers and some of the people, such as Majel Roddenberry and John de Lancie, whom he admired on Star Trek.

"I was a huge Star Trek fan and a huge Star Trek: The Next Generation fan," he said, explaining the attraction of the show was from a television standpoint rather than from a Trekkers' perspective. "I like it mainly because of the acting, but also I loved the fact that every episode could feasibly happen within the framework that Roddenberry created and the place of humans in such a politically charged atmosphere."

"That's what's neat about Andromeda, it's sort of the antithesis of Star Trek."

Being such a fan of Star Trek made joining the cast of a production carrying the Gene Roddenberry moniker a head experience for the actor.

With the character of Harper, Woolvett walks a fine line between becoming just comedy relief and serving as a comedic character.

"I try to have fun with what I'm doing, but I don't go for the laugh from the audience, I go for the laugh of my fellow actors," he explained. "It's not me Gord trying to come up with a funny way to do the scene. It's Harper messing around and joking with his friends."

"When a character so neatly and immediately etches itself out as a certain kind of thing, you want to play against that and start bringing out characteistics that completely surprising that you don't expect."

For a character like Seamus Harper, that means plumbing the character's darker side or a sadder side or a dangerous aspect. Woolvett points out the series' head writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe is steering toward the latter.

"I think he wants to say 'Because this character has such a dark past which fuels his sarcastic, smirky nature, there's also a side to him that could ignite into a very large fire and explode any time.'"

Darkness Exploring such darker natures is easier on Andromeda than on Woolvett's favourite show (and Wolfe's former employer) Star Trek. There, Woolvett explains, the characters are bound by a code of honour to uphold the virtues of Starfleet. There's no such restrictions on the Andromeda crew.

"I think Robert wants to feel like nobody on board this ship is ever 100-per-cent safe and, if push comes to shove, someone will have to give."

But after almost 20 years in the business, Woolvett wants a challenge that comes with pushing the dark side of his character.

"I just wanted to perform when I was young," he says of his time in dance and pantomine classes when he was a child. "Originally, I just wanted to make people smile," he said. "The best sound a crowd can ever make is complete and utter silence, that's when they're in the edge of the moment and that's the most phenomenal thing," Woolvett explained. "That's all I wanted."

"Now, I wonder what I'm contributing. I haven't done it yet whatever it is I can say, 'Yeah, that's my contribution to humanity.'"

Woolvett started attending acting classes when he was 8 and continued on for the next eight years. Woolvett's first movie role was with James Woods and Alan Arkin in Joshua Then And Now.

"I saw two stars being so far off the page and continuing on and on until the director called 'cut' and they had everyone in stitches," he recalls. "And I have thought, 'Oh, so you don't have to follow the script.' I think that was the beginning of the end."

While the experience enamoured Woolvett to the craft, working as a professional actor didn't gain him any favour among the acting school instructors since the roles took him away from school productions.

"I would get into more trouble with my teachers in acting school for going and doing a television series than I would from my public school teachers," he explained.

On the big screen Woolvett has tackled parts in the Bride Of Chucky and the upcoming Clutch, while his television credits include Mysterious Island, Mission Genesis (Deepwater Black in Canada), Wildside, PSI Factor, FX: The Series, Sliders and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues.

"I don't know if I'm supposed to be some sort of archetype that's supposed to be in a sci-fi show. But it seems to be that way," Woolvett said. "I love sci-fi."