Catching Up With Amanda Tapping

Amanda Tapping directing Primeval: New World. Photo by Bettina Strauss and copyright of Omni Pictures/SPACE Channel.

Known by her many fans as the Queen of Sci-Fi, actress Amanda Tapping spent 15 years of her career portraying two unforgettable and iconic female TV characters – Colonel Samantha Carter in Stargate SG-1 (as well as Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe) and Dr. Helen Magnus in Sanctuary. This year, however, some of her work has been much more down-to-Earth, but equally as challenging and fulfilling. One of these roles was in the recently aired Lifetime network made-for-TV movie Taken Back: Finding Haley, in which her character of Susan has a secret to hide when it comes to her teenage daughter.

“Susan had a little girl who died at the age of three, after which she lost her mind and abducted another little girl to raise her as her own,” says Tapping. “So it’s the story of two mothers – Moira Kelly plays the mother of the abducted child who never stops looking for her, while my character is now raising that missing child and has never stopped protecting her. Not surprisingly, Susan is always living in fear that her daughter will find out the truth.

“So she’s ‘crazy,’ and I got to do this The Shining-type of moment where I’m banging down the bathroom door,” notes the actress with a smile. “It was fantastic because this was a type of character I had never played before. She’s out of control and so tightly wound that she doesn’t see the humor in herself. To play someone who’s vibrating at that type of frequency is scary as hell but also fantastic and really fun. Moria Kelly did an amazing job, and Nicole Oliver, who’s an actress I had known from Toronto, is in the movie, too. We’ve been friends for 25 years but had sort of lost touch, and this project brought us back together again, which was wonderful.

Amanda Tapping flanked by her Taken Back: Finding Haley co-stars David Cubbitt and Moria Kelly. Photo copyright of Lifetime.

“Prior to Taken Back, I did a film called Random Acts of Romance, which was co-written and directed by a local [Vancouver] filmmaker, Katrin Bowen. It’s her second feature, and in it I play a woman married to a younger man who was her student in college. They fell in love and had an affair, which resulted in my character getting fired. Now she works in a bank and is miserable.

“This is a story about relationships that are at their end and what that looks like. My character is with Zak Santiago, and they’re at the end of their marriage. Laura Bertram and Robert Maloney play a couple in a marriage where neither of whom is particularly happy but they just don’t realize how unhappy they are. Then there’s Ted Whittall, whose character of Richard is a lothario who also cannot see how lonely and unhappy he is. Sonja Bennett is in the movie as well and plays this crazy stalker.

“So it’s a collection of these really disparate, interesting and incredibly sad characters and how their lives are intertwined. It’s hilarious and poignant all at once. I had such a blast making this movie because it’s a comedy, and I’d never really done much comedy before. There are love scenes where I’m bouncing around, and I have a very strict no-nudity clause, so I think – and hope – it made it even funnier by the fact that I never took my clothes off,” jokes Tapping. “My character of Diane is, again, very different from those I’ve played before. She’s someone who is slightly on the edge of being out of control and drinks a bit too much and then totally loses control.”

Amanda Tapping and Zak Santiago in Random Acts of Romance.

Tapping happily returned to her Sci-Fi roots for the third big screen project she recently worked on, the comedy Space Milkshake, which also stars her former Sanctuary co-star Robin Dunne along with Billy Boyd (Lord of the Rings trilogy) and Kristen Kreuk (Smallville).

“Our characters live on this sanitation station in orbit around the Earth, so it’s not even like a really cool spaceship. We called it the ‘poo’ barge,” says the actress with a laugh. “They’re in charge of all the garbage in space. Even a tiny screw floating through space could cause massive damage to the hull of an incoming space ship, so it’s their job to clean up all the stuff that’s floating in space around Earth, and they’re miserable.

“Billy Boyd plays my boyfriend, and he’s so funny. He can read the phone book and make you laugh. We have this dynamic where our two characters love each other, but they’re also sick of one another because they’re stuck together on this ship. I can’t go into too much detail about the story, but something comes onto the ship that’s foreign and shouldn’t be there. It morphs into this monster, which turns out to be somebody from my character Valentina’s past. This particular character is voiced by George Takei [Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu], so the Sci-Fi pedigree on this movie is great. As for Valentina, she’s a frustrated, smart astronaut, for lack of a better term, but doesn’t look like an astronaut. She wears leggings and fluffy sweaters. These people are the dregs of society who have basically been thrown onto this sanitation ship and been told, ‘Take care of this.’”

Amanda Tapping in Space Milkshake.

Along with her work in front of the camera, the actress also spent some time earlier this year directing episodes of the upcoming Sci-Fi series Primeval: New World, a spin-off of the popular UK Primeval. “Originally I was supposed to do episodes four, seven and ten,” recalls Tapping, “but at the time I was just about to finish a movie and would have then had to begin prep for episode four of New World the next day. I also wanted to take a little time off to spend with my family, so I spoke with Martin Wood [New World executive producer/director and former Sanctuary executive producer/director] first and then [director] Andy Mikita and asked if he’d be willing to switch episodes with me, which he was.

“So I ended up directing episodes six, eight and ten, which was harder in some ways, but easier in other ways because the filming was compact. I got into the groove fairly quickly and found the show’s cast as well as crew to be a fantastic group of people. I was fortunate, too, in that there are some really nice character beats in the episodes I worked on. I had beautiful stuff to do with Miranda Frigon [Ange Finch] and Geoff Gustafson [Ken Leeds], and I only got to work on one episode with Crystal Lowe [Toby Nance] and Danny Rahim [Mac Rendell], but they’re just lovely, too.

“I wanted Dylan Weir [Sara Canning] to be kind of sexy in the first episode I did. She’s supposed to go out on a date, but then the date is cancelled, so I wanted to show a side of Dylan we’d never seen before. Then in my second episode, Evan Cross [Niall Matter] has a bit of a traumatic experience, and I was really excited about that because I like Niall as an actor and he is never afraid to be vulnerable. I think that’s the sexiest, most compelling part of a hero. We always said that on Stargate as well as Sanctuary. You can’t just play the chiseled jarhead all the time because it’s boring as hell, and Niall totally gets that. So it was easy for me to say, for example, ‘I need more vulnerability,’ and then, boom, tears came down his face.”

Behind-the-scenes with Niall Matter and Amanda Tapping on the set of Primeval: New World. Photo by Bettina Strauss and copyright of Omni Pictures/SPACE Channel.

While her time playing Sanctuary’s globetrotting, Abnormal championing heroine Dr. Helen Magnus may have ended, Tapping will never forget the journey she took as part of the show’s creative force. “I think what I enjoyed most was the learning curve, and the fact that every day was a different challenge,” she muses. “I learnt to become a producer – and I think a good producer – as well as directed more than I ever had, and trying to be number one on a series of really amazing and talented actors while at the same time being aware that I was sort of setting the tone and wanting to make sure that everyone was happy.

“So I felt a huge sense of responsibility, but I kind of relished that responsibility at the same time. I’m so proud of what we were able to pull together, and I will miss that the most. I’ll miss that dynamic and the lack of hierarchy, if you will. I mean, everyone had a position, and at the end of the day whatever came down, landed on Martin Wood’s, Damian Kindler’s [series creator/executive producer] and my shoulders first, but I never felt like I was any more important than anyone else. I said before in a behind-the-scenes interview that I think the hierarchy of the film industry is what brings it down and makes it less human than it needs to be. That’s something we never had that on Sanctuary, and I’m super-proud of that.”

Steve Eramo

As noted above, all Primeval: New World photos by Bettina Strauss and copyright of Omni Pictures/SPACE Channel; Taken Back: Finding Haley photo copyright of Lifetime; all other photos retain their original copyrights, so please no unauthorized copying or duplicating of any kind. Thanks!