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James Callis on Gaius Baltar's end

James Callis on Gaius Baltar's end

The actor on the final season of Battlestar Galactica.

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At Comic Con, we caught James Callis after he joined the Battlestar Galactica panel hosted by Kevin Smith. Getting into the fanboy mentality, he helped us speculate on the final run of BSG shows. Of course, he'd already shot them but he wasn't spoiling anything.

Crave Online: When you're looking at scripts for what will be the final season, are you concerned with what's going to happen or just the show to show job?

James Callis:
We're always concerned on that level. You're always concerned for your character. You should be. But in recently reading the last scripts, you don't really have any concerns. You're just so excited because the material is so fantastic. I mean, we were wowed. We're in it. You guys, when you see it, it takes it to a whole different place, a whole different level.

Crave Online:
Does that ever get in the way of the work, since you have to play it without obsessing over what's going to happen next?

James Callis:
Well, I play everything in the moment and I suppose actually everybody does pretty much. You can't be concerned about all the other stuff. It's like right now, the stuff you're doing right now. Then I'll be concerned about the stuff that I'm doing right then. No, no real concerns. By this stage in the day as well, so many of us, we've fleshed out our characters. We are the people. We walk on set being in their mindsets. The only concern is that you live up to expectation and that you're able to deliver on an emotional level where the script is pushing you.

Crave Online: Are you conscious of there being an expectation?

James Callis: To be honest, no. For me personally, no. Not that I'm not concerned about the audience because I think about that in the way that we make a scene and the way that we're displaying certain emotions, or whose face are we going to go to next when we're telling the story. But on a wider scale, I know that you guys are going to love it, actually because I love it. No, even something like Comic Con is an unusual thing for me to do as an actor because I believe that my job as an actor is being on set. When somebody says action, I act. When they say cut, that's my job. I've done it. For those moments of concentration, that is it. So being here, what's the word? Certainly extramurial. It's an unusual facet of science fiction and this job but I was also on another level, we tell you so many things and we're like what's the scoop and what's the thing? Actually, I think on a bigger level, the less we say, the more mystery there is. When you watch a face, you look at a face and you don't put any emotion on it or anything, you yourselves as viewers, as any human being, are looking at that face and working out your own reaction as to what it means. You'd be so surprised, you show somebody a face which we call neutral mask which is showing no emotion whatsoever, half the audience will go, "He's about to go hysterical laughing." And the other half will be like, "He looks terribly sad." There's a certain element, a huge element of audience participation with any medium like this, with any mirror. I'm going a long way around to say the less said the better.

Crave Online:
That said, what can you say about your final character arc?

James Callis:
Hmm, what can I tell you about? He grows up. That's about it.

Crave Online: Really grows up or just lets everybody think he's grown up?

James Callis:
Well, you can decide.

Crave Online:
How hard has it been to play that journey when you don't know what's going to happen next?

James Callis:
You're given an arc long beforehand and most of us know what's going on five or six scripts in advance. It would be very worrying if we didn't. If you only worked on one and you were doing lots of stuff in this episode and you're blindfolded to find out what you're going to do next, that would be tough as hell because then there'd be lots of arguments. You make up things on the moment on the day and there are repercussions to the things that you do. Then somebody's written something like, "Hey, next week, guess what? You go off and kill mice." You're like, "What? I haven't even prepared. I didn't even know." So it's really important that you get a through line and that keeps you honest. Although, with these guys, David and Ron, they don't want to tell you all that much. They're wise as well. They don't want you getting the whole thing. Part of the excitement is laying a kind of cable. It's like how much are they going to give you? Enough rope to hang ourselves with essentially.
 

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