Stargate SG-1's Colonel Jack O'Neill (Richard Dean Anderson). Photo copyright of MGM.
In today's Sci-Fi Blast From The Past, Richard Dean Anderson talks about taking the plunge into the world of Stargate SG-1 and being cast as Colonel Jack O'Neill in the TV series.
Although he has played everything from a sexy soap opera surgeon to a crazed abusive husband, Stargate SG-1 marks Richard Dean Anderson’s entrée into the world of science fiction. “My credo is, ‘I’ll try anything once,’ well, virtually, so I would have been a hypocrite if I had said, ‘Nah, just forget about it,” says Anderson. “It was high time that I gave sci-fi a shot and this show provided me with the perfect opportunity.
“I’m having a lot of fun with the dialogue and the whole [science fiction] concept and especially with my portrayal of O’Neill. I’ve been given a wide range to run with as far as polishing my character and bringing my sensibilities, sense of humour and relative intelligence to the part. An actor couldn’t ask for any more freedom than I have on this show,” he notes. “Also, as one of the executive producers I’m obligated to the franchise, so that kind of keeps me in cheque. In fact, and I’ve said this before, if you want to keep an actor in line make him a producer and he won’t rush off to race cars and jump out of airplanes on the weekends. It’s called responsibility! Everything is going great, and even though we’re filming our third year right now we’re still, I’d say, in the earliest stages of developing story lines and characters.”
Stargate SG-1 is based on a 1994 feature film of the same name that starred Kurt Russell as Jack O’Neill. John Symes, President of MGM Worldwide Television Group, acquired all rights to the movie and sold it as a series deal to Showtime, initially for a two-year run which eventually became four years. It was Symes who approached Anderson about playing the lead.
“John and I had worked together on MacGyver when he was over at Paramount Studios. He hired Jonathan Glassner and Brad Wright [the show’s executive producers and writers] to develop the program and called me and said, ‘I want you to do this [Stargate]. Do your homework, as I know you will, and overanalyze it, as I’m sure you will,’ which I did,” laughs the actor. “I watched the movie a few times and saw it had the phenomenal potential to be a great series as it contained all the elements necessary to sustain interest over a long period of time. We were going to be limited only by our imaginations but, thankfully, we have very creative and prolific writers on our staff.
“However, before I accepted the part I had to make it clear to everyone that there was no way that I could portray Jack O’Neill as Kurt Russell had. Kurt did an outstanding job and he should have all the credit for the character’s birth, but for me to take over the reins I had to turn the part into something that would be more fun than I think it was for Kurt. There was a certain wryness to O’Neill that I knew would be interesting to explore and a sarcastic edge as well as an irreverence for authority and, especially, for the bad guys.
“At first, my performance may have come across a little too flip for some people, so I fine-tuned things and now everyone seems OK with what I’m doing,” continues Anderson. “O’Neill’s sense of humour is often subtle while other times it is over-the-top, and essentially that’s what you get when you deal with me. It’s either a quiet throwaway or an overt, almost poke-in-the-ribs moment, and I felt it was important that I inject some levity into O’Neill’s personality. Hopefully, even during the subtlest of times, the audience will notice the slight twinkle in my eye that I’m trying to let come through.”
Steve Eramo
As noted above, photo copyright of MGM Television, so please no unauthorized copying or duplicating of any kind. Thanks!
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