Actor Marco Sanchez.
In today's Sci-Fi Blast From The Past, Marco Sanchez talks about his tour of duty as Sensor Chief Miguel Ortiz onboard seaQuest DSV.
Mention the name Steven Spielberg and people immediately conjure up images from such blockbuster motion pictures as Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. This award-winning writer, director and producer has also brought his movie magic to the small screen as the executive producer of several imaginative programs including NBC’s seaQuest DSV. Set in the early twenty-first century the series follows the underwater adventures of the seaQuest Deep Submergence Vehicle and its crew of scientists and naval personnel. As Sensor Chief Miguel Ortiz actor Marco Sanchez spent two seasons battling a variety of human and alien antagonists beneath the Earth’s oceans. This role marked Sanchez’s first time as a regular on a television series.
“I didn’t know any of the buzz behind the show when I was auditioning for it,” recalls Sanchez. “I had no idea it was a Steven Spielberg project or that they were casting Roy Scheider in the role of Captain Bridger. Of course, it began to dawn on me when I pulled into the parking lot at Amblin [Spielberg’s production company],” he chuckles. “I first read for director Irvin Kershner and that audition was put on tape. They called me back for a second read-through and next came the network session at NBC, which was by far the most gruelling. That’s actually where I met Ted Raimi [Lieutenant (j.g.) Tim O’Neill] for the first time. He was in the audition room cracking jokes with everyone. I did my piece and later that day I found out I got the job.”
Miguel Ortiz is an inquisitive individual with an aptitude for mathematics and a knack for solving problems. Like most young cadets he is initially shy and hesitant about offering his opinion, but as he continues to gain more experience Ortiz develops a greater confidence in himself and his abilities.
“In the first season the show was still trying to find itself and the same could be said of my character. Initially, I portrayed Ortiz as the competent rookie and he was used primarily as a tool for getting out exposition and technobabble so that the audience would understand what was happening.
“By the time the second season rolled around there was a bit more character development and we began to see more of his personality, especially his dry sense of humour, which I have. The audience also got to see that I had legs,” jokes Sanchez. “In that first year we were basically just talking heads, but during his second tour of duty Ortiz was allowed to come out from behind his console. So I had much more to do during our second year.”
In the show’s pilot episode To Be Or Not To Be, Captain Bridger and his crew respond to a distress call from an underwater colony, only to be attacked by a renegade submarine whose captain wants to destroy seaQuest. Sanchez recalls feeling a bit intimidated by the whole production process. “When I found out who was involved with the programI felt a little out of my element. I was terrified,” says the actor. “My first scene was with Roy Scheider; I can’t tell you how nervous I was because I’ve always been a big admirer of his. I was twenty-two and had just graduated from the UCLA [University of California at Los Angeles] School of Theater, Film and Television, so this was a big deal. The one thing that made me feel more comfortable was the cast that they had assembled. Ted Raimi and I have been best friends ever since and the same is true of Don Franklin [Commander Jonathan Ford] and me. So the tension of that first day was alleviated by joking around behind the scenes with Ted and Don and everyone else.
“I think one of the most difficult things about working on seaQuestwas the fact that we all had to move to Orlando [Florida]. My whole life is in Los Angeles, everybody I know and love is out here, so that was hard. The kind of show that it was, too, was a bit frustrating at times because it was very confining. Wearing a uniform every day and being behind those consoles sometimes made it feel as if we were working in a cave,” notes Sanchez. “It was always the most tense, though, when we had to shoot in the actual sub set. It was a complicated set to maneuver in because it had a ceiling, so we always knew that it would be a very long and slow-moving day when we had scenes in there.”
With such a large cast it was often a challenge for the show’s writers to evenly distribute the dialogue. There were one or two episodes, however, that Sanchez feels gave his character the chance to shine. “I really liked the episode we did with one of our first season writers David Kemper called Bad Water. It’s about a French sightseeing sub that gets stuck in a sinkhole with all these children aboard. We go in to rescue them but then we’re stranded above water where there’s a hurricane brewing. I think it’s a very well constructed story in terms of how it builds conflict upon conflict. I really had a great time filming that one.
“There’s another episode where we go to Brazil, The Good Death. I had fun doing that one because it gave us the opportunity to get out of the submarine and run around. I’m working undercover and trying to rescue our people, so I got to ditch the uniform and use my legs,” he laughs. “I also have a lot to do in a second season episode called Watergate. Unfortunately, it’s one of the weirder stories we did in which seaQuest meets Poseidon, otherwise knows as Neptune, the god of the sea. I vividly remember this particular story but for all the wrong reasons,” chuckles the actor.
Besides seaQuest DSV’s talented regular cast including Roy Scheider, Ted Raimi, Don Franklin, Stephanie Beacham (Doctor Kristin Westphalen) and brothers Peter and Michael DeLuise (Dagwood and Tony Piccolo, respectively), Sanchez also worked with several other well-known actors who guest-starred on the series. In the episode Abalon, Charlton Heston plays a scientist who creates a community of water-breathing humans which Commander Ford stumbles upon.
“What impressed me the most about Charlton Heston was the fact that he walked on to the set and said hello to everyone. It’s easy for some actors to lose perspective and to think too much of themselves. If anyone has a right to do that it’s Charlton Heston but he was a consummate professional throughout the shoot and I’ll never forget the example that he set.”
In the episode Hide & Seek, William Shatner (Star Trek’s Captain James T. Kirk) plays a dictator who needs seaQuest’s advanced technology to treat his autistic son. Although he never had the chance to speak with Shatner, Sanchez did enjoy at least being on the set with him. “He was very reserved and just came in and did his thing. I’m a big fan of his as well and I wish I could have had the chance to chat with him, but there was always a crowd of people around him so I thought it best to leave him alone. He was extremely polite and we enjoyed having him. I remember once while they were setting up a shot Ted Raimi and I looked at each other and said, ‘We’re on the bridge with William Shatner! This is fantastic!’ So we got to vicariously live out some sort of Star Trek fantasy.”
One famous figure connected with the series that the actor never met is Steven Spielberg. When filming began on seaQuest DSV the director was away in Poland working on Schindler’s List and also doing final edits on Jurassic Park via satellite to America. “I’ve heard him [Spielberg] say in interviews that he wishes he had started seaQuest a year later when he would have had time to be more hands-on. I regret that I didn’t have a chance to meet him and get to know him because I’ve enjoyed so many of his films. I can only assume that he saw the audition tapes and that he approved me,” Sanchez laughs.
The second season of seaQuest DSV ends with a cliffhanger adventure entitled Splashdown in which seaQuest is captured by aliens and transported to Hyperion, a planet covered completely by water. Once there the crew is drawn into a civil war between the Hyperions and the KrayTaks. The submarine suffers heavy damage and some of its crew is lost. When the series returned for its third and final year it had been renamed seaQuest 2032. Ten years had passed and seaQuest mysteriously reappears on Earth but minus some of its personnel, including Ortiz.
“As I said before the show was trying to find itself from the very beginning. Consequently, we went through more than one or two producers and every time somebody new came in they would want to revamp the series. So there would be this camp fighting for this and this camp fighting for that. We honestly didn’t know what was going to happen at the end of the second season, that’s why we had that open-ended finale where everything blows up.
“There were all kinds of discussions as to what we’d be doing in the third season but, of course, we saw the outcome. I had a feeling that Miguel had met his end, though. I don’t want to say anything bad about the series but I have to admit that after this it took me a while to regain my enthusiasm for acting and that’s only happened within the last two years.
“I have fond memories, for the most part, of seaQuest and absolutely no regrets,” continues Sanchez. “I learned a lot from watching Roy, especially the economics of how he does things. It was also interesting to see the mechanics of a big-budget television show and what it takes for something to actually find its way to the screen. I think the best thing, though, that I came away with from the show is the group of friends I met there. I see Michael, Peter, Don Ted, Ed Kerr [Lieutenant James Brody] almost on a daily basis. So when I talk about what I learned from working on the show it has to do more with the personal and business end of things than it does with the actual craft of acting.”
Steve Eramo
I loved seaQuest, it was at times a fantastic show and I only wish that they'd never done any of that alien or supernatural crap which in itself is fine but didn't work within the show.
Good to hear from Marco though, and I'm glad that he enjoyed his time on the show.
Posted by: Neth-dugan | 11/07/2011 at 06:09 PM