 
GW: One of the things that Brad [Wright] said -- I got on the horn with Brad, it must have been Thursday, and did a phone interview. And the way he explained this decision was [to say]: We really wanted to have Atlantis go out on a high while there was enough life left in it that it would support movies. Because he is really committed to the movie format.
DH: It just makes sense on so many levels. SG-1 has proven that that's a model that can work. And I think movies are exciting. It's a really exciting process to come in, and you know you are there for a month or two months (or whatever it ends up being), and you can really focus on it. And then you can sort of let it go.
The "light at the end of the tunnel" while you are shooting is really important. And sometimes with episodic, and certainly with the frantic pace that we shoot Atlantis at -- I mean, we're literally shooting two or three episodes a day, sometimes. Obviously not the whole episodes, but scenes from three different episodes at the same time. And for a character like McKay, that is pretty daunting. It's like, "Whoa, wait a sec! What power is failing now?"
As demanding as many episodes are, in episodic television the actors must quickly switch gears and move on to the next. From "Sunday" | |
GW: Yeah, I think you're definitely the hardest working actor in Vancouver!
DH: [Laughter] Well, you know, I think I've found my niche! And my niche unfortunately involved a lot of dialogue.
We had RDA on set the other day, which was sort of a neat, full circle thing. He was just visiting (unfortunately). And I went up to him and said, "You know, I'll never forget sitting on the plane with you, and there I was wading through this massive amount of dialogue with my highlighting pen marking my lines. And I looked over and there you were with your damned two sheets of faxed paper, marking ..." -- I think he made two marks on the page. One of them was to cross out a line and the other one was to mark it!
And he just sort of turned to me and said, "You know, if you get them wrong they don't give them to you any more."
GW: [Laughter] Yeah, it's because you keep doing them so well!
DH: I think if I were to be acting more like RDA and making those cool little one-liners, as opposed to making these massive, huge, long monologues work instead ... I think I deserve everything I get.
But it was neat. And I tell ya, there's something about having RDA say, "I'm sorry that you won't be coming back next year" that kind of makes it worthwhile. I don't know why, but of everybody who said anything to me about it, I felt like he knew more than anyone what it was like to have to walk away from a character like that.
GW: Wow, that's great.
DH: Yeah.
GW: With Stargate Universe starting up, do you think that maybe Atlantis has suffered from a bit of "Middle Child Syndrome?" Is it the Deep Space Nine of Stargate?
DH: [Laughter] Do I have to worry about the middle child thing? Because now that we have the children thing, I have to worry about "If we have another one, is it going to have that syndrome?"
No. Atlantis came in, and personally, if I was on SG-1 and Atlantis showed up I would not be that thrilled. In the same way where if you have a second kid, and the second kid is taking all the attention. I think it would have been much stranger for the SG-1 people. And was always very conscious of the fact, and I tried to make it very clear, how beholden we were to them for establishing this stuff and these characters.
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David believes that it would have been awkward to shoot the final season of Atlantis while the new TV series was also in production. From "Quarantine" |
I think Atlantis came into its own, and I think it got the attention that it deserved. I don't feel that ... You know what I think honestly would have been harder for people? And purely in an ego way -- I think it would have been more difficult for us to be doing Atlantis Season Six while they were also shooting a new show. Because that's just got to be weird. That's got to be really strange. Because obviously the attention is going to be on the new show and what they do with it.
The thing about Stargate -- and I apply this to all of them -- it's sort of a "rabbit" and a "hare" sort of thing. It's just been delivering these consistently good science fiction with a heart and with humor. And I think that's not always the sexiest thing that month. But we've seen so many other sci-fi shows come and go that have been highly acclaimed and highly watched ... and then they disappear again. I think there is something to be said for the hard work. Stargate is a perfect example of consistent, good work, you know?
GW: Just keeping it up, day in and day out for going on 12, 13 years now.
DH: That's it. And not trying to be ... I think there is a danger in trying to be new for the sake of new. Science fiction is not a "new" genre, you know what I mean? It is strangely very old fashioned in some ways. It deals with the future, but its heart is always about the people that it is dealing with. It's always about how those changes in the world relate to the people in it. And I think that that's something Stargate has always been incredibly good at delivering.
GW: Yeah.
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