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Interview with David Hewlett
By Rhonda Krafchin
Don’t have
a conversation with actor David Hewlett on an empty stomach. You’ll need the
energy. You might even want to warm up with some creative genre-word
association just so you can keep up, because the experience is not unlike
those raucous meetings that take place in the sparkly corners of hotel bars
during four day media conventions. It’s exhausting and exhilarating filled
with riffs and sidebars that dance over the landscape of science fictions
best and worst.
“My mother
says my first television experience was hiding behind the sofa watching Jon
Pertwee’s Dr Who”, recalls Hewlett with affection, “I loved that show, it
was just everything to me. I truly believed that I somehow had to
become Dr Who”. With the quest for Gallifrey in his young mind, Hewlett took
great interest in the sciences all through school and had his parents
dreaming big. Then – in what he calls “a tragic turn of events” – Hewlett
realised that he could never be a Time Lord. But he could pretend to
be one.
Self-effacing, honest, bounding with enthusiasm and possessed of a
lightening-fast tongue, Hewlett takes a conversational stroll and turns it
into an impromptu slip-and-slide. His infectious, throaty laugh makes you
feel like and old friend, eager to jump aboard the party bus. And yet…this
actor portrays one of SF’s most disagreeable, sarcastic and arrogant people.
Dr Rodney McKay of Stargate Atlantis.
“How could
you not love McKay?” queries Hewlett incredulously. “Or how could you not
love to hate McKay? People come up to me and say ‘can you sign this? I hate
you,’ or ‘You’re a bad actor because you didn’t get along with those kids.”
The latter is a reference to the episode ‘Childhoods End’ in which
McKay must contend – not too successfully – with the adorable waifs.
All right, so
the guy may be a curmudgeon, but there are reasons all those fans are asking
for autographs. “I think there’s a bit of him in everybody,” says Hewlett.
“The know-it-all, the McKay part of you, is the part that’s dying to get
your hand up first in class to answer a question. He always has an answer,
not necessarily the right answer, but he always has an answer for
everything. I think we would all
like to have
that ability. I know I would.” Not missing an opportunity to poke fun at
himself, Hewlett adds, “I can handle the obnoxious part on my own, but the
smart…Thank God they have somebody to write for me.”
Making his
debut in the 7th season of Stargate SG-1, McKay first
banged intellects with then-Major Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping) in ’48
Hours’ and whether fans were appalled or curiously intrigued they
wouldn’t soon forget the man who had written of SG-1 favourite Teal’c
as dead and continually dismissed Carter’s technological feats of
heroism. “Samantha doesn’t necessarily bring out the best in McKay,” Hewlett
notes. “Oh yes, McKay definitely misses his old sparring partner and he has
mentioned her repeatedly in the second half of the
season. But don’t think her absence means McKay has gone soft. I’ve a whole
bunch of new [sparring partners] now, you see. In a way, everyone’s
relationship with McKay is that of a failing marriage. It’s just this snappy
back-and-forth. For some reason, people seem to let loose on him – probably
because they think they can.”
Hewlett
attributes McKay’s witty retorts to the writers, particularly Brad Wright
and Robert Cooper, whom he sees more and more in McKay. But the delivery,
the body language, is all Hewlett. “I’ve always spoken very quickly and when
I get nervous I talk even faster,” he says, “I figure if I say it fast
enough people won’t lose interest, I can make 50 jokes in the time that most
people tell one joke, so one of them has to be funny! It’s like a war of
attrition. I’m also the eldest and only son in a family with 5 younger
sisters, who are a million times funnier than I am. I had a very strict
upbringing, so the only way I got away with things was if I did it with
humour. Even then, I generally didn’t. And it’s also an attention thing –
horrible, wretched actors and their endless demands for attention. In high
school you’re either a bully, a jock or a nerd and I somehow tried to jump
between camps by using humour. Its amazing how you can blend in with that”.
It wasn’t
just the funny side of Hewlett that made friends back in his school days.
After performing for several years at an all boy’s high school – mostly in
women’s roles and “staggering around in my mothers heels” – he was asked by
another student if he would act in a home movie. “I’m not sure who was the
bigger nerd,” he recalls of his friend Vincenzo Natali, who went on to
create the cult film Cube, which featured Hewlett. “We started making
these films, year after year. Summer vacations were spent shooting. We had a
blast. The crazy thing is they were actually more professional than jobs I
did later. They were run better and incredibly organized.
“At age 14
we would devise these detailed call sheets and Vincenzo would think up these
amazing shots and how to make them work. The two of us just hit it off.
We’ve literally worked together ever since [including on Natalis genre films
Cypher and Nothing]. He’s a great guy and another SF nerd. We
were invited to festivals during the Cube years and had so much fun
meeting comic book artists and talking to people who made little films. It’s
astounding the access you suddenly get to that world because of a film like
Cube – and just how proud you can be of it.”
Outside of
Stargate Atlantis, Hewlett has done quite a number of genre B-movies,
including Scanners 2, Boa vs. Python and the cult film Pin.
Calling it “the Bruce Campbell approach to an acting career”, Hewlett says
he finds the good in all his projects and confesses even the horrible ones
are guilty pleasures. “And they get to take you to places. Art, location,
money. I say as long as you’ve got one of them you’re fine”.
Genre work
is not all that Hewlett is about. He has earned Gemini nominations (the
equivalent of an Emmy nod) for the Canadian
series Traders, and
appeared in grade-A television series like ER and Without a Trace.
There’s an art to playing someone as abrasive
as McKay without having
viewers turn of the TV. Hewlett’s co-stars have praised his work and its
attribute to his performance that McKay was brought back after being exiled
to Russia in the SG-1 episode ‘Redemption’.
“The danger
with a character like McKay,” says Hewlett “is turning him into comic
relief. If there’s no edge to the character, if he’s just
there to cause
trouble he’ll become tedious for people and certainly for myself. He’s not a
jerk all the time. That’s one part of his personality. That’s the strength
of the Stargate franchise, the Stargate universe – these
complex characters. It’s the nature of knowing someone [over time]. When you
first meet people its black and white. Your first sense of McKay is ‘Oh,
this is an obnoxious, misogynistic jerk’. But if you get stuck in an
elevator with someone you’re going to see other sides of them. [The
Stargate characters] get to prove themselves, make fools of themselves,
make mistakes and correct them. McKay goes through so much in the show. It’s
not so much that he
softens; you’re just seeing the other sides of him. No one can be that
obnoxious all the time. There’s more than the arrogant astrophysicist in
there.”
To see how
different things might have been without the surly personality of McKay, one
only has to watch Atlantis’ first episode. ‘Rising’ was
originally written with another scientific expert on the team, Benjamin
Ingram, who was in the script until the last week before production. “Ingram
was going to be an African-American, a brilliant scientist,” says Hewlett.
“That was the idea. I don’t know what exactly
changed. There wasn’t much rewriting when I came in to do the pilot, so he’s
a very subdued McKay. It’s like he’s biding his time. He’s
checking things out, seeing what’s going on, definitely McKay on his best
behaviour. Generally, when you’re bouncing
between
galaxies like that, you’re bound to have an off day.”
When McKay
has his A-game going, however, the dialogue sparkles. “The humour comes out
of McKay knowing stuff that other people don’t.” says Hewlett, “or assuming
he knows stuff that other people don’t. But the Atlantis team are all
intelligent people, so that’s always a surprise to McKay. That’s where much
of the banter comes from. It’s this wonderful sort of dysfunctional family.
The other characters are actually
saying McKay lines before McKay can say them. They’re jumping in with things
before I get a chance to utter them, which is great. In the pilot everyone
is banging against each other, not getting along and trying to get through
this thing. As the episodes progress, you see how they learnt to interact.
We’re doing it ourselves as actors too”.
“I think
McKay now sees the Atlantis crew as a bit of a family. He lets down
his guard at moments, but he hasn’t really made friends
with anybody yet.
The closest he got was with Carter talking about his past. There are moments
with other people but you don’t get that same kind of wanting to share. My
sense is that, McKay feels that Carter is an equal and that’s something
McKay is looking for in male and female company. He’s also very uptight.
[McKay has a set idea] of the way things should be: either they’re done his
way or the wrong way. That hobbles his ability to have true friendships. But
its beginning to happen. There’s a begrudging kind of friendship with
Sheppard. Frankly I wouldn’t want McKay to have a friend. What, he’s going
to be nice to them? There’s some dull science fiction!”
McKay does
have his moments of compassion though, such as when Lieutenant Ford (Rainbow
Sun Francks) and Teyla (Rachel Luttrell) were left behind after a Wraith
attack (‘Suspicion’). Though those occasions are few and far between,
the snarky remarks and his working relationships are nowhere near as fiery
as that with Carter. And Hewlett suspects that McKay and Dr Elizabeth Weir (Torri
Higginson), the commander of Atlantis, have a past.
“I
definitely got that sense in the beginning,” he says, “She picked him to
come on this mission, so they had obviously worked together before. There’s
some history there. I think he gets away with stuff – stuff that he wouldn’t
get away with if they didn’t [know each other]. I don’t mean they have a
romantic past. Also, McKay treats Weir differently than other women. There’s
a respect, and that’s exactly the same with Carter. I don’t think McKay
expects people not to [see through his bull]. If he’s called on something
and he’s wrong its like
‘OK, there you go. You’re right and I’m wrong…But
I’m right about this’”.
Hewlett
insists that is character is still the same love him hate him curmudgeon
from Stargate SG-1. Scathing, sharp commentary
aside, McKay
is human and with all that journeying to unknown places, meeting of monsters
and wrong thinking humans, there’s a
side of McKay
that can be scared to death.
“He’s like
anybody,” Hewlett declares. “There are moments of cowardice and moments he
jumps into hero mode. You’ll laugh at this analogy, but he’s a bit like Neo
in The Matrix. Neo is this nerd who suddenly discovers that he has to save
the universe. Well, McKay,
in a way sees himself like that. He’s the chosen
scientist who’s going to have to fix all this stuff. It’s his time in the
sun.” And there are moments when McKay shines – like when he walks into a
deadly black alien cloud to save Atlantis – and many occasions where
he
has worked
under duress or threat to successfully solve some technological problem.
“The fun of
playing a character like McKay,” says Hewlett, “is choosing when to let his
guard down. Even if it’s just for a sentence, a word or a scene. That’s what
makes characters complex. We may be on a quest to save the galaxy, but it’s
only because we screwed it up in the first place. That makes the show very
interesting and somewhat topical. The world as it is right now – there’s so
much conflict and so many conflicting views. Atlantis is a little
microcosm of our world, so if we actually did have the ability to travel to
other galaxies, wouldn’t we bring that strife and pettiness to other places
as well?”
“McKay has
no diplomatic skills whatsoever and to bring that to other planets is rather
amusing and also a great source of tension for everybody else. God forbid
McKay says the wrong thing to the wrong people as he has done. I mean, McKay
teaches people how to make atomic bombs [in Underground] just so he
can tell everybody he knows how. That fish-out-of-water element always works
well, especially in SF. McKay should be behind a computer or at a University
preaching this stuff rather than out there doing it. It’s almost a
reluctant-hero thing. That’s an interesting idea for [the writers] to
explore and certainly for me.”
Dramatic
episodes, character stories and two-part action-adventure arcs are all
Hewlett favourites. And he loves the steady stream of McKay-isms, written
with an intelligence that comes through in the humour and makes the role fun
to play. “Doctor Who was the same way,” he points out. “He always had
those great snappy comebacks. He was always a little grumpy; certainly Jon
Pertwee was. [William Hartnell’s Doctor] was a crotchety old man, in the
best possible way. I’ve always felt that Stargate has the same
appeal. It’s about the characters, but there’s this great ability of being
able to step through, in our case, the Stargate, and, in Dr Who’s
case, the TARDIS, and get to other
worlds and explore different things.
“There’s a
whole world of science fiction that, when you’re not a fan, you’re just
completely unaware of,” Hewlett adds. “I’m lucky enough to have both
embraced and been embraced by SF. It’s still my favourite genre. I’m a
shameless fan.”
And so it
goes, with Hewlett waxing nostalgic and proud to be the face of a new and
nerdy kind of hero, Rodney McKay. For a guy who wasn’t even supposed to be
going to the Pegasus Galaxy – let alone on every Atlantis
away-mission – McKay has certainly been getting a whole lot of
gate-travel time and David Hewlett thinks he knows why. “My hunch is that Dr
Weir probably is very happy to be rid of him. I wouldn’t want to be stuck in
that damn control room with McKay going ‘I told you so’ the entire time!”
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