Brad Wright, Robert Carlye, Ming-Na, Brian J. Smith, David Blue, Alaina Huffman, Jamil Walker-Smith, Elyse Levesque and Robert Cooper at Comic Con 2009.

In a special press session after this summer’s Comic Con panel for the show, Brad Wright and Robert Cooper, and cast members Robert Carlyle, Ming-Na, David Blue, Elyse Levesque, Jamil Walker-Smith, Alaina Huffman, and  Brian J. Smith spoke about what we can expect from the show and their characters.

The show’s creators, Robert Cooper and Brad Wright, have obviously worked together for a long time, and during the interview, finished each other’s thoughts (and sentences) for nearly every question, thus they are listed together in their answers..

Question: (Ming-Na) You're the first acknowledged gay character in the Stargate franchise. What are your thoughts on that?

Ming-Na: Really? I didn't know that! Well, you know I was surprised too when, after I took the job, my character was and then it was a great challenge as a actor never having done something like this and wanted to make sure that the character was flushed out and there was a real good back-story to it. Not just some gimmick thing that they wanted to incorporate that there was a real basis for it all of it, who she was and what drives her. It's been such a amazing challenge playing her and I hope she is popular so there will be more gay characters in the future, not just in sci-fi, but in any genre.

Question: I just wanted to get each of your takes on your character

Jamil Walker-Smith : My take on Master Sergeant Ronald Greer is that he is a Marine, he's a soldier and in my country, the United States, there's a war going so there is a great sense of responsibility and to honor that and to pay homage to that by doing the research and showing up and understanding that at the end of day I'm representing something far bigger than myself

Alaina Huffman :I played Lieutenant Johansen  and she along with everyone sort of got thrown literally onto the deck of this Destiny

Jamil Walker-Smith: Literally onto the deck

Alaina Huffman : And she becomes through default the ranking medical officer. I actually really love the vulnerability that she has in the responsibility that she has that I've tersely take to heart were military and were representing the acting duty we can't forget that there we're actually fighting wars for now and it's an overwhelming experience to realize that the that the decisions that people have to make on a daily basis and we just play Hollywood style but we get to go home at night and sleep in our cozy bed and kiss our kids.

Jamil Walker-Smith: and shoot blanks!

Alaina Huffman: Yeah and shoot blanks! We do get to shoot.

Ming-Na: I don't get to shoot! My character is Camille Wray, she's a civilian and even though she works in the IOA, she heads the human resource department. She basically be friends a lot of these people. She feels a real responsibility towards them for their safety and their well-being and just trying to get them back to their loved ones, including herself. So the military definitely gets in the way and she's trying to figure out how to work with them or work without them.

Question: I'm always interested about why actors pick certain roles or go after certain roads so when each of you read the script what about it made each of you think I have to go after that.

Alaina Huffman : I know my experience, I think a lot of times roles pick you. Sometimes you have a say and sometimes you are able to say yes or no and seek out projects, when you’re Robert Carlyle *laughter*, But to me the draw on this was first of all the humongous franchise. I think I was blissfully unaware of that now blissfully aware of it. I love the character and love the character driven aspect of the show. I love the fact that we're really seeing life on the ship and it's shot realistically it's all handheld and oftentimes you don't even know the cameras are on you.

I like the bonds that being made and the enemies, like she was saying, sometimes she feels the military is in the way and we're like no were trying to help you! So it's just really human interaction

Ming-Na: And a lot of misunderstandings. That's what’s so great about the initial pilot, even though my character isn't initially flushed out after talking to Robert Cooper I was really impressed with where he wants to take the character issue is ambitious and strong great deal of warmth and bond military to her character and I love that this huge franchises taking this risk by taking the show in a whole other direction. I was a big BSG fan and I think that they wanted to take it to a more character driven darker view of what happens to these people. I got all excited

Robert Carlye and Alaina Huffman at Comic Con 2009.

Ming-Na: Kissed a lot of women! *laughter* Noo! Noo! *laughter*

Alaina Huffman: We'll come back and you can tell us more about that later!

Question: you know all this is going on the air right?

Alaina Huffman: You can put “she joked”

Question: or did she? *laughter*

Alaina Huffman: You know it's a very military based show and they prepared us very well. We have a military technical adviser; we have weapons training, with technical advising.

Jamil Walker-Smith: Tactical training

Alaina Huffman: And we do have technical advisers on set. I play a medic so I have a medical advisor.  I also have Ming-Na who played a doctor for years... *laughter*

Ming-Na: And I tell her if she wants to do it wrong then follow me.

Jamil Walker-Smith: I usually talk to my cats, you know this is what I got going on, do you think we can do this? Then I call my Mom and she calms me down and I walk in there ready to go.

RobertCooper&BradWright.: Hi I'm Robert Cooper and I'm Brad Wright and together we are RobertCooper&BradWright!

Questions: You're taking the show in a different direction, different from the other Stargate shows and coming out with darker ideas. What was the reason to do that this time?

RobertCooper&BradWright.: We've been saying to ourselves and to our cast that we aren't deliberately going darker; we are deliberately going more realistic. The difference between SG1 and Atlantis and SGU is they were the best and the brightest up against these gigantic English-speaking aliens who are trying to kill humanity. We're not doing that this time around. The villains are among us. We're the heroes and the villains ourselves and that alone makes for an enormous change in how we pertain to the series. We want the show to reflect our lives, the things we experienced that we are close to as human beings and use science fiction to tell that in a fun way. But life is not about death and destruction and negativity we hope to balance in there a sense of humor a sense of hope and exploration and adventure and all things that I think in many ways fans were hoping to get out of Stargate and out of a new series having said that there are elements to show that are in our estimations more realistic people are not always shiny happy and getting along and we are doing the things that we didn't seem to do in the other series. You know sex is a big part of people's lives in a single a little odd that we were totally ignoring that. It fits in this show. It doesn't seem out of place in this show. It seemed out of place whenever we have our characters in SG1 or Atlantis buttheads because they were on the same team and it was kind of a brother and sister type team out to get the bad guys.

Jamil Walker-Smith and Ming-Na at Comic Con 2009.

RobertCopper&BradWright: Ultimately you're going to be faced with those comparisons because as the last sort of space opera that was on sci-fi and it did have that style of slightly documentary filmmaking. I think there are so is slightly different and if you watch the show you will start to see the difference in it. For me I was always a huge fan of Firefly and it’s closer to the tone that we were trying to do. This show is a western the same as that one is, a frontier show. We're on a runaway train - these people are struggling for survival same as the pioneers did and it's funny. You couldn't call Battlestar Galactica, for all this wonderful qualities, funny. There isn't a lot of humor in it, understandably so, and we have a sense of humor in our show. A.) We can't help ourselves and B.) There’s characters who are naturally funny it.

I was also a huge fan of the Shield and Friday Night Lights, shows that used a style of filmmaking that hopefully brings an audience to a place where they feel like what they're watching is really happening. And to use that style of a science fiction show will hopefully maybe bring some audiences who that say “Sci-fi is not for me” or “I don't watch that type of thing” Bring them to the place where they can actually watch and enjoy the show and say “These are just characters that I like that happen to be on a spaceship”

 It's also in terms of visual effects, it's possible to incorporate very difficult visual effects with space and spaceships and putting them with people. It was almost impossible to 5 6 7 years ago because just the nature of how you have your visual fx. Now “Yeah we can do that” and “Yeah we can move the camera that way” So we can incorporate it shoots style into the science fiction show that we couldn't have done 10 years ago but rather than do it in a way it's that say Michael Bay would where he does  let's do everything and blow up the world at the same time just because he can, our approach is more like Cloverfield where we say make the character's story, the prominent story, the foreground, and the effects world that are causing that character story to unfold the background feel like the texture is making all of this work.

Question: What about these characters’ stories made you go…this needs to be set in the Stargate universe instead of a whole new show.

RobertCopper&BradWright: Well, to be perfectly blunt MGM wanted us to do another Stargate show and we had pitched it as a movie, as often happens to us, and they said “or a series!” and the fact is had great legs, it's the concept that we often said this that a lot of new television shows starts out great because they are a high concept show that could end after the pilot really because the pilot is the whole story or it's a great pitch. We have learned how to take a show, after many years, how to create possibilities for stories. To create situates to tell a story for a long time.

The Stargate itself is such a great storytelling device that you can do like the Star Trek Enterprise and you can repopulate it and still have a device that allows you to go in many ways, and it's a cliché, but the possibilities are infinite. It's a doorway. It's the perfect icon for the beginning of the story.

Brian J. Smith, Elyse Levesque and David Blue at Comic Con 2009.

Question: In the panel you said that there are going to be major things happening right away. Can you tell us any of those things?

RobertCopper&BradWright: Yeah, one thing that for example is the ship is a runaway train and every time it senses a Stargate it stops and automatically dials the gate and a ticking clock emerges in the Gateroom and you have a certain amount of time to go to that planet, explored, get what you need potentially and get back on the ship and if you don't you get left behind. The ship does not go back, there's no way for it to turn around and there's no way for us to control it so in way it gives you a great 24 like dynamic for the episode where you have 6 hours to get what we need and get back. And people get left behind and it might not be people you expect.

Question: so do they go through the Gate because it could potentially be the way back to Earth? Or do they just still feel the need to go through the Stargate?

RobertCopper&BradWright: they feel the need to go through the Stargate because they have no food or water or air on the Destiny. There may be clues to help them getting back to Earth, but they don't have enough power to dial the gate. So they don't know what they are going to find, but right at the moment it's like “What am I going to eat?”

Questions: David Blue and Brian J Smith, you both use your Twitters to connect to fans and I'm sure you have encountered the fans who don't like the direction the show is going. How do you feel about that?

David Blue: Any preconceptions that people have will be easily discarded once people have seen the show. And that's kind of the attitude that we had going in and had an idea about what the show would be like and even at the reading of the pilot every single one of us from Robert Carlyle on down went “Oh My God this is amazing” and I think that will transcript.

Brian J Smith: It's hard for us because we've been working on the show and are so please with what's going on and are creatively fulfilled and challenge and then you hear some people going “It's going to be horrible!”

Elyse Levesque: You never know because it's near and dear to you and we all care for each other so much and you're all in this together and all you can think “Is it just me that thinks this is going to be actually good?”

David Blue: There's a certain amount that any actor has to step back and try not to see it too much with the press and with specifically the Internet and Twitter it's hard not to run across things positive or negative I think for the most part we are there for each other. Remind each other “oh I just read this..” “Hey! Look at the monitor. Feel better now?” 

Elyse Levesque: At the end of the day everybody has an opinion everybody's a critic and we just have to let that not affect our work keep doing what we're doing.

Question: What can you tell us about your characters?

Brian J Smith: Matthew Scott is this young guy and he's one of those guys who went to Officer Candidate school and got a commission and he has been assigned to what he probably thinks is a pretty uneventful security job on this remote base through the Stargate program and suddenly find himself second command as one of the few surviving officers on the ship. He is impossibly far from home and kind of parallel to that there is this backstory, that I don't want to too much of that away, but it is really really interesting and I will say that he has experienced a incredible amount of loss that motives him to keep the people on the ship safe.

Elyse Levesque: Cleo Armstrong is a lot like you and me. On the ship she represents the every man and every woman in a very strange situation and she is the daughter and the aid of United States Senator. Very bright young girl and she went to Harvard Law and majored in Political Science.  That being said, her life hasn't been all debt parties. She has a few demons in her closet and she lived most of her life in her father's shadow, but she very close to him and very much admires him for the man he is. When we first meet her she looking to making a change in her life. She hasn't necessarily been the most focused of young women and has enjoyed the perks of being the daughter of a senator.  She is looking to do something meaningful by giving back and potentially following her father's footsteps. When people are faced with any kind of extreme situation that true character is revealed and I think it's a surprise. I think she is underestimated and understates herself.

David Blue:  Eli Wallace is a fish out of water. I hate it, but it's like he is one of the fans of the show, because the truth is I am a fan of the show. I am not Eli, I will put that out there right now, but he is very much a person up for the challenge a person with a lot of potential. He is incredibly smart. He dropped out of college not because he couldn't handle it but because he would get bored. And like any geek's dream is kind of thrown into the situation, get's a knock on the door literally and they say we need your help, which is every geek's fantasy. He's brought into the program sort of thrown into the situation that people have been experiencing for a while and the next thing he knows ends up at the wrong place at the wrong time and has to find his place amongst the crew not just making solid connections, but also as a member contributing something and through the eyes of the heart of the show, like Chloe, is able to kind of show the audience who they are looking at.

Question: Did you guys have any idea what you were getting into as far as like you are now associated with these characters for the rest of your life as far as the fans are concerned.

Elyse Levesque: I have no idea but it was made pretty clear the first time I met Brad and Robert. They set me down and they said this is like the 10 Commandments of Stargate and kind of laid it out for us which sort of put it into perspective, but it really wasn't until stuff started getting out there and there started to be a web presence and the teasers were shown and I started to hit just how big the franchise really is.

David Blue: I'm lucky that Claudia Black is actually a friend of mine So when I was even offered this I went to her and I said “What should I expect?” so I kind of got a briefing that a lot of people didn't, but even then I think that when you are like at a panel and you look out and you're surprised at just how welcomed you are and you're always surprised at how may people care before they're even meet you.

Question: You've probably been asked this before, but you're a movie star and now you're doing television what was the reason that you took on this particular role?

Robert Carlyle: I've genuinely never made a  deliberate differences between the genres like that and I have done quite a few television cases for CBS a few years `human trafficking in American TV and I've done a few television shows back home, particularly in the early part of my career.

Question: Just reading the description of your character and having seen the bits in the trailer it seems like your character doesn't necessarily have other people's best interests at heart. He seems to be more about the adventure and the exploration. Can you talk a bit about that?

Robert Carlyle: Yeah, I think that's right. Rush is so well written. He has a line about the greater good and therefore this person here can be sacrificed. And others would say “That's ridiculous!” “Well, do you want to go home or not?”. That's the way he is. He's very very tactical like that. He doesn't have any time for sentiment. He would be quite happy up there on his own if he could run it on his own. He would put them on the airlock and pop them into space if he didn't need them.

Stargate Universe premiers on October 2^nd at 9/8 central on The Syfy Channel