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By Shaun Daily and Kenn Gold

 Jamie Bamber, who plays Lee “Apollo” Adama on SCI FI’s Battlestar Galactica. visited TV Talk with ShauOMac to discuss the show, and the direction that the plot will be taking in this fourth and final season.

Shaun> It’s an honor to have you on.

Jamie> It’s my pleasure. 

Shaun> You’re on with myself, and Kenn who runs a magazine called MediaBlvd.  We’re going to double team you a little if you don’t mind. 

Jamie> Yeah, I’m familiar with it, that’s great.

Kenn> Yeah, we got to come on set last summer and talk to you at the press tour.

Jamie> You’ve been, or you’re going to go.

Kenn> Yeah, last summer.

Jamie> I remember.  I didn’t know if you meant you’d been, or you were going to go again.

Kenn> Hopefully we will.

Jamie>  It’s pretty hard these days.  They’ve got all sorts of exclusions, and no human being with a pulse is allowed with in a certain distance of anything to do with the show anymore.

Kenn> That’s one of the things I was going to ask is if you could tell us about that.  We’ve been hearing rumors that security was really tight for some of the major reveals coming up and that security with the scripts was really tight.  Can you tell us about how they are doing some of the things different? 

Jamie> Yeah, in the old days, we used to get emailed scripts for example.  And we could bring family and friends to the set and sort of host sleep arounds.  They don’t email scripts to us anymore.  They just give us hard copies, and not too many of those.  And we can’t bring anyone.  Suddenly they get all paranoid about it just because it’s the final season, which I don’t understand.  If you really wanted to find out you could just walk on to that sound stage.  Nobody’s going to stop you.  But they’ve been getting kind of antsy about the big reveals. 

Shaun> A lot of people are asking for spoilers and I know you can’t get into it, but maybe one little thing.  Will we see Lee in a Viper before the end of the fourth season?

Jamie> I don’t think so.  I have yet to read the final two scripts.  But he has not returned to a viper since that very first show in season four when herself appears from the dead, suddenly to his left.  So no, I have not been in a viper, I have not been in a viper suit as yet, and I’ve yet to read a story that would send me that way.  Though I’d be quite favorable to doing it for one last hurrah. 

Shaun> How do you feel about the evolution of the character?  When we first say you and him in the miniseries, he was kind of an S.O.B. with a chip on his shoulder.  The character has progressed so much.  I think it’s probably the character that has evolved the most in the four years the show has been on the air. 

Jamie> I don’t know, some of these characters have evolved so much, they’ve turned into robots.  There isn’t that sort of dull short arc amongst any of the characters.  It depends on which one you’re thinking about at any one moment, as to which one’s gone the furthest.  But yeah, like all of them, he has grown up.  His is a story, as I think everyone’s is, about identity and discovery and who you are in the face of tremendous adversity and these amazing events do force you into positions that you would never be in.  It’s sort of life and death times a 100 and Lee’s been through that just as much as anybody, and had a few career choices.   He’s unique in that he’s sort of stuck in this family.  No body else is really in a family way at the beginning of the mini-series.  He’s with his dad and forced into a relationship with his dad, that he’s kind of estranged and distanced himself from.  And that’s why he walks on, and he’s very teen aged and kind of angsty and rebellious in the begging.  And he gradually realizes there are more important things going on than his kind of personal issues with his father.  But I think every character has had to change an awful lot.  It doesn’t matter who you think about. 

Shaun> That’s true.  The actions’s fine on Galactica, but the dramatic scenes you have where you’re going after Adama, or those scenes in the end of last season in the courtroom.  I don’t know how you do it, man.  These scenes are incredible.  Where do you get the passion?

Jamie> That’s very kind of you.  We all take it seriously.  Every character has a very rich back story by this point.  And just the context of Galactica, if you imagine what it would be like to be stuck inside of some tin can floating around with no real hope of ever sitting on a beach again, or doing anything fun again.  It’s a pressure cooker environment and you kind of take it to heart everyday when you walk on those sets.  You realize this is the last four walls that these people will ever get to live in, and the sort of toll that must take on you day in and day out.  Your frame of reference is so limited and the issues within that become heightened, and any kinds of fireworks that go off between people kind of tend to ricochet around for weeks after the argument happened.  You can’t put anything to bed, and that’s kind of what we try to bring to the show.  It’s grim after the apocalypse man!

Shaun> It is!  Once the show’s over, are you going to look for another series?  Are you going to look for some comedies?  Are you done with the serious types of shows for awhile, like Galactica? 

Jamie> I’m not through with anything.  In a funny way, Galactica’s kind of spoiled us because we’re really challenged week in and week out.  I think it’s rare on a TV show.  In the past, TV shows were largely procedural, you did the same thing every week and you kind of redefined the character every week, and it ended the same way every week.  TV’s going to a different direction, and starting to do stuff that it alone is well placed to do.  In the 19^th century, Charles Dickens would have been writing serialized novels in the most popular publications, and every week you’d get a new installment.  And that’s what TV has started to do is tell these big, big sprawling stories where the creators don’t know how it’s going to finish.  And I’ve loved every second of that on Galactica, so I’d jump at the chance to be involved in something like that.  I mean, I’d want to change what I do within the framework.  I wouldn’t want to play Lee Adama again, or characters like that again.  It’s important to change it up.  But I don’t have one particular type of job that I’m hunting for right now. I’m reading comedies, I’m reading movies.  I’m reading stuff in England and stuff here and I’m trying to find a match where I want to do something, and they want me to do it.  That’s the hardest thing as an actor to get that sort of relationship.  There are a lot of us there looking for the work, and there’s a lot of bad work that I don’t want to do.  You have to find the right stuff, and we’ve been blessed with this Galactica thing and no one saw it coming really. 

Shaun> I’m a Jericho fan, I’m the one that started the nuts campaign that brought the show back. The one person that people wanted to see come on to Jericho to go toe to toe with Skeet Ulrich was you.

Jamie> Oh really, I have to say, bring it on any time.  I’m not familiar with the show, but I know there’s a passionate following out there.  TV has gotten into a particularly lush time right now.  If you think about these shows that are coming on the air, the new shows like Fringe and The Mentalist and this new season, there’s an ambition there that is maybe a bit lacking in the movie world right now.  So I’m not a snob about TV, but I’d love to change it up and do some movies.  But it’s not the way it once where TV is the poor relation.  I don’t think that’s true anymore.

Kenn> How do you feel about the relationship on the show between your character, and Edward James Olmos, with the back and forth relationship that changes every episode almost?

Jamie> Yeah, I want to be frank.  It changes every episode, but it’s kind of cyclical as well.  They get close then they piss each other off, then they push each other apart again.  And when I start thinking about all the relationships, and Lee is very much defined by his relationship because he’s stuck in a family drama between Lee, Starbuck, and his perceived uncle, Tigh, these are all sort of his family.  And were his family from before the Galactica, and before the mini-series.  So the relationships with families are always repetitive.  If you think about how you relate to your parents it’s all kind of happened before, and it will all kind of happen again to coin a phrase from the show.  So I’m sort of the glad the shows coming to an end where it is because I do feel like my character has bounded around those people in every variation possible, short of finding a lovely casino planet to go and play roulette on and to run away and find new people, I think he’s done everything he can do.  So how do I feel about it? I’ve loved every second of working with Eddie.  I’ve learned a ton.  The guys just a tremendous human being, and a tremendous actor, and we really enjoyed working together.  But I think with these two characters, there’s nothing more for them to say to each other.  They kind accept as who they are, and they kind of love each other for it, and they’re different and they’re doing different things.  But there’s respect and a true trust I think now.  No more to really say about it.  I think the big questions about the show are how does it end?  What’s the resolution of the Cylon/human, will they/ won’t they love story that we’ve been witnessing in a Moonlighting kind of way for five years.

Kenn> I think everybody on this call thinks the show is just incredible, and you read all the critic reviews about a great and wonderful show Battlestar is.  Why do you think it never really caught on and developed a bigger viewer base?

Jamie> Two things, it’s on the SCI FI Channel, and it’s called Battlestar Galactica.  I think we were sort of hamstrung.  There was always these feeling, “We’re not a network, we’re always going to be perceived as science fiction which is always going to turn some people off.  And anybody who has given the show a shot has really appreciated it.  Whether they like it or not, they can see the quality.  But there are still the vast majority of people out there who have never watched it, even though they hear great things about it.  They’re just not inclined to do so, so I think we’ve done as well as we could do.  We broke expectations on SCI FI, and I don’t think we had a right to really expect anything more. 

Shaun> Jamie, what do you think of the character getting involved with the government now?  Some people have said they see the potential for turning Lee into a sort of Obama type character now who speaks to the greater good of government, whereas Roslyn’s trying to steer things in her way before she dies.

Jamie> Well, it was something that I felt very excited by, and have remained very excited by during the show. It was always a difficult thing, and I had my reservations, because any show called Battlestar Galactica is going to be fundamentally about the military side of this post apocalyptic world.  And to step from the military side into the civic side of the story was always going to be a different energy.  And I always sort of new it was going to be more marginal then the character’s been in the past when he’s been right at the core of what goes on on the Galactica.  So I had reservations, but I was very excited about what we were going to try to do differently on the show.  It’s not been the heart of the show apart from an election sequence and Roslyn sort of sharing her responsibilities with Adama.  We’ve never really seen the debates; we’ve never really seen the idea of how the quorum really functions.  We’ve never seen the people’s representatives at work, and how that actually functions.  So I was pretty well excited about the possibility of doing that.  And I agree, right now in America there is a sense in which the democratic process is more interesting than it’s ever been before because a breath of fresh air is flowing, through the primary season and people see potential for change and that’s always exciting.  I don’t think we’ve deliberately gone to use Lee in that sort of vein, but that is definitely the way the character sees himself.  When I embarked on this journey, I had all sorts of different ideas about what would Lee practically hope to achieve by this.  Is it just some vain, glorious stretching of a different muscle to demonstrate his prowess in a different area, or is he really trying to serve and make a difference.  I was very keen that it would be the latter and not the former.  Although, there is something a bit vainglorious about Lee and his stances and his idealism.  He can be a bit preachy sometimes and that’s part of what makes the character interesting.  He does enjoy being right.   I think like politicians generally do.  But it’s not a direct Barack thing.  We started on this road before Barack became the big headline news that he’s become.  We started back last time at this year.