SFX Magazine | #110 November 2003

Interview by Paul Simpson

Andromeda's manic engineer talks about the joys of writing... and feeling like a bullshitter!

HE'S BETTER KNOWN FOR PLAYING THE cocky, energetic and irrepressibly cheerful engineer Seamus Harper on Andromeda, but now Gordon Michael Woolvett has a new feather in his already-bulging cap. Like many other actors before him, he's taken up a pen and scribbled an episode of his very own for the series... and he's dead proud of it, too. "Vault Of The Heavens" is one of the last episodes of the third season, but it wasn't the first time that Woolvett had come up with an idea for the show.

"I pitched one in the first season, and I wrote one on spec at the start of the third season," he explains. "That one, 'Time In A Bubble', may get made next year. They couldn't do it this year because there were already a number of alternate reality episodes." The script for "Vault Of The Heavens" had to service a number of points, as well as tell Woolvett's story. "It changed a lot," he admits. "If you were to see my original draft, at least 40% ended up changing. That's part of television. It originally took place on Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter, and there was a cloud of icy particles that triggered Jovian Auras - brilliant auras in the magnetosphere. It eventually changed from Europa, though." There were other considerations, too, that didn't involve locations. "Certain things are unpractical, and every department has their limitations. They have to interpret their part of the story as they can within the budget, and when :t comes together, there are repercussions from every change. You have to pick up the ball every day and make the ends of the story meet. There are also major storyline things coming up that have to do with our drama through-line [that's a fancy way of saying "plot arc" - SFX], which of course I have no business deciding, writing or creating. I had to write a bit of that, and that ended up getting rewritten because the producers had to determine where we were going to go. For over half my script, my hands were tied behind my back."

As an actor, Woolvett found it a bizarre experience to be saying words that he'd actually written himself, as opposed to someone else's. "The crazy thing about acting for me is that when the camera is rolling, nine times out of ten I actually believe what's going on while I'm doing it," he says, grinning. "That's why actors tend to fix the dialogue a bit, because if you come across a hole that doesn't make sense logically, you're suddenly flushed out of what you're doing. You aren't able to believe it. But this time, regardless of whether or not it made sense, I was finding it difficult to get away from the fact that I made it up. It suddenly felt like I was just standing there bullshitting. None of it was true. I knew it was fake - because I had dreamed it up!" Woolvett admits that he's not the sort of actor who spends hours poring over his script before going on set, learning every last word by heart. Just the opposite, in fact... "They're going to get mad at me for saying this, but most of the time I don't read the script until the night before we shoot the episode," he admits. "I read one night before, and then I go over my scenes the morning we shoot them. By the time we step onto the floor, I've got it down. That way it comes out as naturally as possible. Good dialogue isn't hard to remember. If it's written the way the character would speak and react, then the scene will flow naturally from the first word and go on logically to its conclusion." The actor sees Seamus Harper as one of the few unchanging constants on Andromeda, a series renowned for taking a variety of approaches during its three-year run. "I see Andromeda from Harper's point of view," he says, unsurprisingly. "I don't think Harper has really changed much from the beginning. It's still me doing it. In the second season, we got more into the darker side of him, which was fun, and then in the third year we went back more to the Harper we met in the first season. We're not delving into that darkness; as much. "With the changes behind the scenes with the writing staff and at the executive producer level, you're naturally going to have new ideas, and a new feeling. I don't think that's for the worse: it's good to have a show change and evolve. In the end, we try to make the material the best it can be."

The hardest part of playing Harper for Woolvett is when the material doesn't flow as logically as he expects. "I'm a real headstrong guy, and I try to play against that," he points out. "I know where I want to go with the character, and I know how he'll react. When I get a script, and the writer sees it differently - perhaps because it's necessary for the story - or because he wants the character to grow in a new direction, as an actor it goes against my instincts. Either I can call our head writer, Bob Engels, and ask him to rewrite the material, or you do what I've been trying to do, which is to say, 'Alright, how can I come up with a set of conditions in my mind that make this the logical course of action for my character? What are these new instincts I wasn't aware of?' "That makes you grow as an actor, because then you walk into a scene and react in a way that you wouldn't have done by default. You therefore grow." SFX

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