Battlestar Galactica - Toronto Star: Grace Park's done being a dirty girl

At the Toronto Star (Toronto, ON, Canada):

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SERIAL VIXEN

Television

Grace Park's done being a dirty girl

No more blood and guts for Battlestar Galactica star as she moves to The Border

Nov 08, 2008 04:30 AM

ROB SALEM
TV CRITIC

Grace Park is thrilled to be back on Earth ... and not the other way around.

"It is nice for a change to not be covered with dirt," laughs the stunning Vancouver actor, who spent much of the last five years on Battlestar Galactica knee-deep in more than her share of mud, blood and crud.

Make that way more than her share, having been revealed early on as a covert alien android infiltrator – indeed, several covert alien android infiltrators, mass-produced with hidden agendas and often not even aware of themselves ...

You won't necessarily understand any of that last paragraph. Suffice it to say that this is science fiction. And Park, as Lt. Sharon "Boomer" Valerii, has endured enough extreme trauma and drama to last several lifetimes.

"Crying, dying, losing babies, rebirthing in goo, all that stuff," she recalls with a slight shudder. "I mean, it was fun ... "

But so are makeup and heels. Park is in Toronto now, looking coiffed and kempt and in control as the latest addition to the ensemble cast of the Gemini-nominated immigration enforcement drama The Border (her first episode airs Monday night on CBC).



... Vancouver has long been action-central for imported American genre shows. Park made episodic appearances on almost all of them: The Immortal, The Outer Limits, Dark Angel, Andromeda, The Dead Zone, Stargate SG-1 [Proving Ground], Jake 2.0 ...

... But life – terrestrial and otherwise – goes on. "Battlestar overlapped with The Cleaner, and then Cleaner just barely overlapped with The Border, and then Border overlapped with Battlestar again ... so we just did this big circle.

"Going back, finally, I kind of didn't want to get back into all that heavy, dramatic, dark, raw stuff again. I had already realized how much of a departure it's been, to go to these comparatively much lighter shows."

Lighter, and a lot less dirty.