Starlog # 296 - March 2002

Harper's Bazaar

There has been a baby explosion on Andromeda. Well, to be more accurate, an explosion of infants among the cast and crew of the popular syndicated space series. Among the new arrivals are a son for Kevin (a.k.a. Dylan Hunt) and Sam Sorbo, and for Gordon Michael Woolvett and his wife, Michele Morand. Thus far, there hasn't been a Best Dad award given out on the set, but Woolvett claims to have a head start. "My baby is bigger!" he jokes. "But that doesn't really count for much because he's three or four weeks older."

This Andromeda family affair extends further than just swapping a few baby pictures, though. Both actors' pregnant wives appeared in second season episodes of the show. "Michele was in 'Last Call at the Broken Hammer,'" says Woolvett, "and Sam was in 'Home Fires' - we call it 'Home Fries' on the set. We have pet names for every episode. Michele is an actress and model by trade - that's one of the ways we met - and she was pregnant [at a time] when we needed a pregnant character for an episode, so it worked out. But she had to go in and audition; it had absolutely nothing to do with me.

"I actually mentioned her for another part a few episodes earlier, but they didn't bring her in for it. It just came up that she was pregnant and her agent pushed that angle. Allan Eastman, the executive producer, didn't even know she was coming in. She just surprised them, so it was done completely of her own accord. In fact, the casting director wasn't even going to bring her in. They didn't want to cast somebody who was really pregnant because pyros were going to be used and they would have to worry about doubling for her. But her agent said, 'Come on, you can't fake that!' She was the only pregnant one in there, but they ended up doubling her during the explosions."

Baby Boomers

As it turned out, both babies were born during the mid-season hiatus, so the actors had most of the summer to adjust to fatherhood. "We had expected actors' and writers' strikes, so the second season started up two months ahead of schedule, with a plan to break regardless of whether or not there was a strike, so it worked out great timingwise," Woolvett notes. "Rogan was born right in the middle of that time, so I had a full month to be at home with Michele and the baby, and it worked out for Kevin, too. Sam had the baby a little early, so Kevin did have to rush in and do a few days' work, but then he got to go back home and spend time with Sam and their baby, too."

"We were also moving to a different place while we were shooting, and on the day we moved, Michele went into labor, so we were surrounded by wall-to-wall boxes. The next-door neighbours were having some kind of party, too, and a busload of people literally pulled up and started singing folk tunes. So all this was going as Michele went into labor. After she delivered the baby, I ran home, unpacked everything and cleaned the place up as much as I could in a day-and-a-half, so that it would be semi-ready for Michele and the baby to come home to. I was actually looking forward to going back to work so I could have a rest!"

Now into the second season of Andromeda, Woolvett's character, Seamus Harper, has become more than just the ship's wisecracking engineer and computer genius of Season One. For one thing, Harper has to deal with the ever-present Magog larvae that he has been infested with, which could emerge at any time with gruesome results. With that potential death sentence hanging over his head, Harper has good reason for not being his happy-go-lucky self.

"All of the characters are evolving," Woolvett claims. "Harper got plenty of jokes in the first year, but they're trying to challenge me dramatically more this season. They're bringing out this deep-seated angry guy, so we're getting to find out about some of the personal reasons why Harper covers everything up with humor, because below that humor is a really tough firecracker ready to kick some butt. Plus, there are some major repercussions from last season's finale that I hope Harper overcomes, because I would like them to renew my contract!"

Those Magog larvae aren't the only inner demons that Harper is carrying. As viewers will discover, he's lugging around some emotional baggage as well. "We just shot an episode called 'Bunker Hill,' where we go back to Earth, and in that episode you find out the answers to some of those questions. Earth is a hideous place, and we only show a little corner of it, but we find out that that's what I'm carrying around. The future of our Earth as we know it is pretty grim according to our show and my character is the one carrying that in his memory."

Woolvett ppints out that the darkness in question has always been there, which is why Harper tends to cover things up with his sardonic wit. "That humor has always been in a sarcastic, fatalistic vein," he explains, "but now you're seeing more of that darkness coming through. The cool thing is that it's not just a lame attempt at, 'Oh, let's be dark now.' There are some dark things that I get to actually overcome. It's one thing to have demons, but it's more heroic and interesting for a character to face those demons."

Wise Crackers

Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda is only the latest television series for the young actor, who landed his first agent when he was only 12. It wasn't long before he was appearing in commercials, television and theater, as well in his first film role, playing James Woods' son in Joshua Then and Now. "As a 12-year-old kid, I was standing between James Woods and Alan Arkin, and the director [Ted Kotcheff] would just sit back and watch them yammer as they finsihed a scene and kept on going. They would go in all sorts of different directions, and that's what really got me excited - to watch these two actors bring their characters to life. Not just sputtering out lines, but bringing them to life in front of the camera."

After that, Woolvett kept working and never looked back. "I've done five Canadian television series, and the thing about Canadian television is you can do a season or two, and if it's bad, it's not that big a deal because not many people see it. I hate to say it, but it's an amazing accomplishment for a Canadian television series to continue, period. Just to get enough people to watch it so that it's worth putting money into is a feat in itself. I love Canada, and it's a great place to cut your teeth and learn your process."

Over the next decade-and-a-half, Woolvett appeared in such films as Bordertown Café, X-Rated, Bram Stoker's Shadow Builder, The Highwayman and Bride of Chucky, in which he co-starred with future Roswell alien Katherine Heigl. His television work includes My Secret Identity, Forever Knight, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, Mysterious Island, Sliders ("The Young And The Relentless") and PSI Factor; he also hosted the Nickelodeon series Wildside.

In 1997, the actor landed his first major genre role, playing Reb in Deepwater Black, better known as Mission Genesis. Woolvett portrayed one of a group of clones (who also included future Deep Space Nine star Nicole de Boer) who were headed back to an Earth devastated by a deadly plague. Although short-lived, the series turned out to be excellent on-the-job training for his current gig.

"I recently watched Galaxy Quest," says Woolvett, "which I've seen like five times, and there's that scene where Sigourney Weaver says, 'Conduits. Why does it always have to be conduits?' On my first day on Mission Genesis, in my first scene, I had to crawl down a conduit on my hands and knees, go to a little panel, crack it open and fix some wires. And on my first day on Andromeda, I had to crawl down a conduit, crack open a panel and fix some wires. So when I saw that scene in Galaxy Quest, I was on the floor laughing. There are certain things that are just inherent to SF, and one of them is crawling down conduits to fix panels.

"Mission Genesis was sort of an Andromeda without any money. You really can't do that type of a show unless you have some type of American backing so you can get into the American market and sustain it. Canadian shows generally have to be more dramatic in nature. Granted, Mission Genesis actually had some American money behind it because of the SCI FI Channel, but it just wasn't a big enough budget. IT relied on the Canadian part of the budget, and that wasn't enough to sustain it. Anyway, it was fun. In one year, I did all the SF classics - like meeting another version of myself. I also got to practice my technobabble, and I like my hair much better now than I did on that show."

When Andromeda began casting, Woolvett and co-star Laura Bertram were the last two actors to sign on for the series. "Laura played my girl friend on Mission Genesis," he remembers. "She did one episode, and we had this big kissing scene where she was playing the clone descendant of my girl friend. I don't know the specifics of why Laura was one of the last people cast on Andromeda, but they took a long time before they decided what they wanted for Harper. When they were initially looking around, I wasn't available, so I took a pass on the first round of auditions. When they came back to LA the second time, I was in town and available, so it all worked out."

In auditioning for Harper, Woolvett made the conscious decision to inject as much of his own personality into the brash young engineer as he could. "I did some ad-libbing," he comments. "I hit all the technobabble and gave them a very quick pattern of speech, but I also made sure I got a few of my own jokes in. I felt that Harper was the type of character who would need that kind of freedom, and if there are any characters on the show that style works best with, Harper's the one. Everybody does their own ad-libbing from time to time, and that's part of the process, but with many of Harper's line - if you mix them around and add to them - you're not really changing their nature. I'm usually just telling somebody off, so it's not going to affect the story very much."

Fast Talkers

That doesn't mean landing the role was a slam-dunk. Former executive producer Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who had devised all of the characters, wrote a particularly tongue-twisting audition speech for prospective Harpers to read, which Woolvett remembers as "the Oral Olympics."

"There was so much technobabble," he recalls, "and part of it actually ended up in one of the first episodes, where I'm explaining to Beka about how life is like a windscrean: 'You're just a bug flying along, and all of a sudden, you run into your very own personalized little windscreen, and splat, there's nothing you can do about it!' It was really neat, but poor Allan Eastman had heard that particular speech so many times from so many actors in so many different wasy that when it came time to actually shoot the scene, it was difficult to have any enthusiasm about it. I think they ended up cutting half of it just because they couldn't listen ot it anymore. It was also extremely long. I remember Allan saying, 'Man, I don't know what to tell you.' If you say the same words over and over again, they just become a bunch of syllables with no menaing and you don't want to listen to them anymore."

Despite the fact that Harper generally gets saddled with most of the show's difficult technical dialogue, Woolvett says it isn't that much of a porblem. "I'm a pretty fast talker, so all I really need to do is drink about three or four extra coffees before each take and then I'm ready to go. It has gotten to the point where they know by the size of the speech whether or not I need an extra black coffee or two waiting behind the camera."

Caffeinated beverages notwithstanding, Woolvett says that it didn't take very long to settle comfortably into the role of Harper. "I pulled this character over my head like an old familiar shirt that I had worn many times," he analogizes. "I don't know if I've done aspects of it before or if I just have an attitude problem, but it wasn't difficult. It felt quite comfortable right off the bat. When actors struggle with a character and finally fall into it - where it seems to be real and natural - it's because they've settled down and found that corner of their own personality that's close to the character and are allowing themselves to be that person on camera."

Looking back over the first two seasons of Andromeda, Woolvett has quite a few favorite moments and scenes.

"'Harper 2.0,' the whole thing, we did all my stuff in three days, so that was a huge challenge and very difficult, and I was proud when it all came together in the end," he offers. "There was one scene with Rev Bem where I was supposed to be terrified of him but trying to overcome it, and I'm lying on a bed explaining to him what it's like and he explains to me what it's like to be hungry. That was a really nice scene with some cool moments. And then there's 'Bunker Hill,' where I get to take Harper to another level. You see another side of him that you've never seen before, so I got to do some actual emoting. I haven't seen it yet, but it felt really good."

Woolvett speaks not just as an SF actor, but also a self-confessed genre fan of long standing. "I'm into SF," he admits. "I used to be able to name any Star Trek: The Next Generation episode within its first 10 seconds. My friends and I, all guys living together as bachelors in Toronto and all actors, used to religiously watch The Next Generation every single day because we worshipped Patrick Stewart. He's a phenomenal actor, and has this quiet strength that he projects as the captain. The writing on that show was phenomenal, too. It challenged your morals and it challenged science, and we watched it every day. That's probably what got me into SF. That, and I'm also a big computer nerd."

With the possible exception of Andromeda, the actor's SF-watching habits have been curtailed for the time being. "With the baby, I don't get to watch much TV, period. But before Michele and I got married, started a family and got more responsible, I spent many a time up all night watching old SF movies," Woolvett remarks. "One year, I did the Television Critics [press event] for Mission Genesis, and I shared the stage with the Lost in Space cast, who were having a reunion, so that was cool."

And with Andromeda's success in the syndicated and international markets, it seems likely that the series will last well beyond the current season. That's just fine with Gordon Michael Woolvett, who hopes he can continue to be a part of it . "I like to be practical, so until they call me and make it official, I'm not planning on it. But it would be nice, absolutely. As much as an experience on TV can be, Andromeda is amazing. I'm loving it. It's a syndicated show, it's not network, and I think it's doing pretty damn good for not being a network show."