Battlestar Galactica - SFX Magazine - Mark Sheppard Interview Part 2

At SFX Magazine:

(Please follow the link for the complete interview.)



Tuesday March 17, 2009

Interview with Mark Sheppard Part 2

The ever-cool Mark Sheppard wrote a foreword for the latest SFX Collection, dedicated to Battlestar Galactica, and we also interviewed him at length about playing the popular character of lawyer Romo Lampkin. He chatted with us about his many roles in other cult shows too, and there just wasn't enough space to do justice to everything he said, so last week and below we've printed some extra material from our conversation.

A brief excerpt:

SFX: You've worked with Katee Sackhoff on both Battlestar and Bionic Woman. Did you both enjoy Bionic Woman as much? How disappointed were you that it didn't continue?

Sheppard: "Nobody set out to make a show that was half-arsed. I feel bad for the show; I feel bad for David Eick and everybody else. It just became this awful political wrangle, kept adjusting and squeezing. It turned into Knight Rider, basically. But we started out with something so dark and interesting. We were dead by the writers' strike. We got killed at that point."

"You know, we did some stuff on Bionic Woman together that will never be seen. There's an episode where she's all messed up in a motel… and I'm there, which doesn't make any sense whatsoever! Because two-thirds of it (the darkest, scariest parts of it; Battlestar-grade material) weren't used. It had some depth and some weight."

"There's something magical about watching Katee Sackhoff. She has a thing about her. It's effortless when she acts. She's one of the most compelling things to watch. And you see it in the Bionic Woman pilot - that fight, the Blade Runner-ish fight? You're like, 'Oooh!' Two hot women on a roof in the rain, beating the shit out of each other! [Laughs] She's truly fantastic. So it was just unfortunate. I feel really bad for Michelle Ryan too - one of the nicest girls in the world. She's very good, and hopefully she'll not have bad taste in her mouth about America. That girl's picture was on every bus stop, every building in America at one point!"