Cult Times Special | #32, November 2004

Interview by Bryan Cairns

Gordon Michael Woolvett has loved his time playing ship's engineer Harper on Andromeda, but he admits, he had certain rash assumptions concerning the show's re-commissioning for a fifth and final season

A FEW MONTHS AGO, things looked pretty grim for a fifth season of Andromeda. Producer Fireworks Entertainment announced it would be closing shop and had already given Mutant X its pink slip. Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda could easily have been next on the chopping block, but Gordon Michael Woolvett, who plays the ship's tool-toting chief engineer Seamus Zelazny Harper, remained calm about the show's fate. "Well, it was very up in the air until the last minute," he recalls. "I personally am always very pragmatic, so I expected it not to go. I've actually been in five series that have never been seen or heard, so I assume it is not going to go until I hear otherwise. I think Andromeda has always been Tribune's biggest money maker. And I'm not knocking Mutant X, it just never did the numbers Andromeda does."

Others weren't as certain. In the two-part finale The Dissonant Interval, it seemed the Andromeda crew, with the exception of Captain Dylan Hunt, had all become casualties of war. At the time, rumours had spread claiming two different endings had been shot but which one would air depended on Andromeda's renewal. "What is true is they wrote it so it could be interpreted different ways," explains Woolvett. "If the show did not continue, all that stuff with Dylan where he walks through and sees himself with the bright light and big door and this woman saying, 'You're home again,' well, Dylan would have said, 'I'm back at...' and I can't tell you where he's back. The information we find out in part two would have been delivered in a voice-over or something. It would just have been interpreted that Dylan was somewhere for good and the rest of us were dead." 

But if that was the series' final bow, Woolvett wasn't satisfied with Harper's implied demise. "Well, as long as I died for a reason," he offers. "If Harper got to die in a blaze of glory, that would be cool. Or if my character turned bad and I had to die to learn the error of my ways, that would be cool too. But if I just became collateral damage, that would be a bummer. It would have been a real bummer if that did end up being the series finale because you like to know so you can work up to it in the last few episodes."

It's all a lot of 'what ifs' though. Andromeda is indeed back to wrap up the cliffhangers, as the fragmented crew tends to its battle wounds, picks up the pieces, and rebuilds the crippled titular warship. "In other seasons we've had minor changes in characters, but in the end we're all the same sort of people," explains Woolvett. "However, this season we have a major change of circumstances and it carries through quite a few episodes. It's neat because it is the same people with a different flavour to the show. My first reaction was it is too drastic, but after a couple of episodes we had so many new stories to tell and more plight. We're much worse off than before."
And what exactly does that mean for Andromeda's resident wisecracker? "Well, he's kind of more Harper," says Woolvett. "Everybody starts out in a much darker place and works towards getting rid of that. You can only get so positive when the circumstances around you are just so continually bleak."

However, all those adventures leave little time for romance. Harper may believe he's a smooth operator when it comes to the ladies but the poor guy hardly ever gets lucky. "I'll tell you what his problem is: Dylan!" exclaims Woolvett. "The nerdy geeky Sci-Fi guy is never going to get anywhere when he keeps hanging out with the quarterback. I do have a female fanbase though. We just did a convention in London, England, and a bunch of fans came out and brought me a pin which they handed out to everyone. They were 'Get Harper Laid' pins. It was very funny."

While Harper may be quick with the quips, Woolvett is equally as dangerous with the ad libs. "It sometimes throws other actors off, but I don't want to say who," he says. "Acting is very different for everybody. I do try and keep it to a minimum, but for some reason I seem unable to rein it in. Sometimes I get ideas and I've always been of the thinking that if you

throw it out there when the film is rolling and it doesn't impede the scene then you may strike gold. The artist in me thinks it would be a shame not to do it. With that being said, especially in Sci-Fi which can be a really hard genre, you have to know the material. You can't just look at it and go off it."

This magazine was published in November 2004, only part of the interview is published with respect to copyright, to read the full interview you will need to obtain the back issue (subject to availability), for more details visit the Visual imagination website