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Man of Science
As Dr Rodney McKay, actor David Hewlett shows than being a nerd can, in
fact, be cool, not to mention a heck of a lot of fun.
David Hewlett, alias Stargate Atlantis’s Dr Rodney McKay, is looking
around the craft services table in search of a tea bag. The actor is hoping
a hot cup of tea might help ease the effects of a horrible cold that he’s
suffering from. Hewlett might be feeling under the weather, but you would
never know it as he’s his usual gregarious and upbeat self. What about his
alter ego Dr McKay? Unfortunately the much-harried scientist is racing
against the clock to repair a damaged Ancients spaceship in order to save
himself and his colleagues from becoming vaporized by a lava flow. Setting
up a pair of directors chairs outside his trailer, Hewlett sits down to
explain how out Atlantis heroes got themselves into such a predicament.
“This episode we’re shooting, Inferno, deals entirely with a super
volcano on this planet,” notes the actor. “For centuries, the people
there
have been using the energy from the magma as a power source, and it’s
finally irritated this giant volcano into becoming active again. We, of
course, in true Stargate Atlantis fashion arrive a couple of hours
before the place is going to blow up. When the Stargate
on the planet is destroyed by the
lava flow, McKay has to try to figure out another way for them to get off
the planet.
“So there’s an awful lot of frantic button pushing and McKay screaming about
volcanoes. Who knew being an astrophysicist that’s he’d
be a darn good volcanologist as well. Let me tell you, I devoted a lot of time to the
Internet in preparation for this episode. It was like what the hell is a
fumarole and how exactly do you pronounce it,” jokes Hewlett. “I actually
spend crazy amounts of time looking up things on the Internet because of
this show. Thank God for the Internet because I’m too lazy for anything
else. I’m certainly not going to pick up one of those big volumes of the
Britannica encyclopaedia. It wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t such a huge
nerd who has to know about everything.”
At that moment, Hewlett is needed back on the set so Dr McKay can try his
hand yet again at repairing that troublesome spaceship.
The scene is another
of those long and technobabble-laden ones that has become associated with
the character since Hewlett began playing him. “Since the start of the
season, McKay has been right in the thick of things and it’s just been
episode after episode of incredible amounts of dialogue,” he says. “It’s a
weird double-edged sword thing, though. I go home at night and learn all my
lines and I’m having such fun doing it. At the same time I can still come to
work the next day and [jokingly] complain about how much I have to do. How
sweet is that,” laughs Hewlett.
“The reality of it, however, is that I’ve been given so much great material
to sink my teeth into with this role. If I’d written this I couldn’t
have
written myself a better part. I keep saying this and it sounds so cheesy,
but there are always a couple of scenes in every episode where I get to
cackle to myself while rubbing my hands together and thinking ‘Ooh, I cant
wait to do this.’ There’s a fantastic scene in
this season’s The Long
Goodbye where our two leaders Dr Weir [Torri Higginson] and Colonel
Sheppard [Joe Flanigan] have gone ballistic and are shooting at each other
because they’re possessed by alien beings. Meanwhile, me, Mitch Pileggi
[Colonel Steven Caldwell] and Paul McGillion [Dr Carson Beckett] are up in
the Atlantis control room and, in this particular scene, are yelling at each
other and going ‘OK, I’m in charge now! No way, I am! Shut up, you’re like
so not in charge!’ To me that dynamic was just so hysterical
and we had a
ball shooting that scene. It was one of the best days I’ve had on
Atlantis.
“That’s the beauty of an ensemble show, though, in that there’s plenty to go
around. You definitely do get stories that are heavier for
some characters
than others, but there’s always a B-story and other stuff going on that
makes you still feel part of things. I think the
scripts have worked out
beautifully this year and what’s nice is they’ve all thrown us for a loop.
The producers and writers set up the parameters of our characters last year
and we’ve spent season two tearing them apart. That really adds to the whole
sort of turmoil of these people and the friction between them. In the best
TV shows and movies it’s all about characters butting heads and sometimes
not getting along, and one of the strengths of the Stargate universe
has been that prickly dialogue between characters.”
During the winter hiatus from Atlantis, Hewlett is planning to work
on another project that’s close to his heart. “I’ve been doing a great
deal
of writing in an effort to try to find the perfect low budget script because
I’d love to take a shot at directing,” he says. “So over the course of a
year I’ve written three scripts. The first two are a bit too ‘busy’ as far
as having too much to do in them, but my third script
looks to be just
right. It’s a dark comedy that’s basically about three people together in a
house. If schedules and everything work out
I’m hoping to film it here in
Vancouver sometime in January with Paul McGillion and myself playing two of
the leads. So if nothing else,
it should be a lot of fun to shoot,” smiles
the actor.
Serious Heroics
Of everyone on the Atlantis team, the last one you would expect to
see perform amazing feats of physical prowess is Rodney McKay. However,
that’s just what he does after being injected with massive doses of Wraith
enzyme on the Atlantis two-part mid-season adventure The Lost Boys
and The Hive.
“All that Wraith enzyme acting was pretty cool although it’s terrible for
your shoulders,” says Hewlett. “I never had worse shoulder
cramps because I
had to behave all tensed up. Teyla [Rachel Luttrell] and Ronon [Jason Momoa]
and McKay all react differently to the enzyme. Naturally McKay doesn’t have
a good ‘trip’ and he becomes incredibly paranoid. So I enjoyed playing that
and I got to do some stunt work too. Never in a million years when I started
working on this series could I have imagined myself doing anything like
that. Suddenly I’m hanging upside down and in this case beating up guys five
times my size.”
Waterlogged
In the season two Atlantis story Grace Under Pressure the
immediate future looks grim for Dr McKay when he finds himself trapped
in a puddle-jumper at the bottom
of the ocean. Needless to say he’s not the last bit disappointed when his
mind conjures up an image of Colonel Samantha Carter who
might just be able to help him escape.
“I can’t wait for that episode to air,” enthuses Hewlett. “It has some great
banter between Carter [Amanda Tapping] and McKay which began for me and my
character back on Stargate SG-1. It was, of course, a total pleasure
to work again with Amanda. I couldn’t believe how full of energy she was
considering all she had to do work-wise plus taking care of her new baby. To
top it off Amanda was filming both SG-1 and Atlantis at that
point. Even with all that on her plate she still came to the table with so
many ideas.
“The biggest challenge with Grace Under Pressure is that I had an
awful lot to say and no-one to blame except myself if I messed things up,”
jokes the actor. “So there were plenty of monologues I had to do and I’m not
a big fan of those. One of the things I love most about acting is bouncing
ideas off and reacting to other actors and what they do. That said, Martin
Gero wrote this script and his dialogue rolls off the tongue nicely. In this
episode there’s even some funny stuff as well. The same is true of Brad
Wrights writing. He’s like the king of comedy but its comedy that comes out
of the situation and not just comedy for the sake of it. Funny things happen
all the time in horrible situations, especially to McKay.”
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