Elizabeth Weir gave her life to the Atlantis expedition, in more ways than one – and even more than one time. In the first-season episode “Before I Sleep,” the team discovered an aged Dr. Weir in stasis, and heard her tell the story of another timeline when the expedition was wiped out, and Elizabeth found herself 10,000 years in the past.
Actress Torri Higginson sat down with “Dial the Gate” host David Read for a very special conversation about her time on the show. This clip is an exclusive sneak preview from that conversation, recorded in person back in 2018 and now seeing the light of day for the very first time. Here she talks about the old-age makeup process, transforming into an elderly version of her character, and also the perils of filming the mid-season two-parter in the wind and rain of a simulated hurricane.
“It took about 4 to 6 hours to get the makeup on,” she said. “Todd Masters, who designed the whole prosthetics — it’s extraordinary what he does, just extraordinary. I went to see him before [filming]. First he does a face mask of me. He took all these photographs of me, and then he ages it. And when I first saw myself with my finished product I saw my grandmother. … It was remarkable. You saw the Higginson-Morgan face. He aged it beautifully.”
Watch this clip for a sneak preview from the full conversation, which will stream in full this weekend:
Written by Carl Binder and directed by Andy Mikita, “Before I Sleep” gave fans our first up-close look at the Ancients in their heyday when Elizabeth traveled into the past, to a time when the Ancients still occupied the city of Atlantis. No surprise that it ended up being one of fans’ favorite episodes from the show’s first season.
After the Ancients evacuate the city this version of Weir stayed behind, maintaining the power systems so that her team would survive when they arrived in 2004.
Higginson revealed how the long days of filming had her playing both roles back-to back. “We would do the old Weir first,” she said — “I’d get there super early, they’d do the prosthetics, [and] we’d shoot old Weir first. … And then at lunch we would take all the makeup off and we would do young Weir. Then after being so tired, and having all these prosthetics ripped off your face, I looked so awful! I actually don’t even need the prosthetics now!”
Higginson also expressed gratitude that the show’s producers hired an actor to work with her as her photo double, to study Higginson’s performance both as old and young Weir. (Holly Elissa is listed for this part on IMDb, but went uncredited on screen.) “We would rehearse the scene [and] she would take both parts, so she would see me, how I would do it on both sides. So she would really try to mimic what I was doing in when I was responding to her. She was really lovely.”
“Before I Sleep” wasn’t just a great opportunity for the actor to take center stage on the freshman show, but also for Atlantis to offer the audience a reflection on human mortality. “It was an amazing episode,” Higginson said. “I spend a lot of my life — and I have since I was very young — thinking about mortality. I think the more we think and talk about death the more we appreciate life, and the more present we are.”
The original interview was conducted in October 2018 for the second season of Dialing Home, the interview series that appeared on MGM’s official online platform Stargate Command. Despite releasing a trailer for Season Two those interviews were never published, as the studio changed its strategy and ended up closing the site in 2019.
Now nearly six years later, Dialing Home‘s former host David Read will release the full conversation with Higginson on his successor channel, “Dial the Gate,” which is in its fourth season on YouTube.
Don’t miss this special lost interview with Torri Higginson this Saturday, July 27, beginning at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on “Dial the Gate!” While you are there subscribe to GateWorld on YouTube for more Stargate goodness every week.