Sitting With Six: Maximum PC's One-on-One with Battlestar Galactica's Tricia Helfer

Anyone can talk about  "visual computing," the big catchphrase of this year's Nvision conference.  But few walk the walk as well as Battlestar Galactica's Tricia Helfer.  She took part in Monday's keynote address alongside Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, sharing how virtualization and computer effects have expanded her acting boundaries and methodology.

But there's always more to Six than what you see at face value.  So Maximum PC sat down with Tricia to grill her (as nicely as one chats with someone who gave Starbuck the business) about the kind of technology that really makes her tick, and how she's managed her spaceborne success-turned-geek icon. Even after all that, she still wouldn't drop us any details on the Battlestar series finale--our favorite Cylon truly has a heart of steel.

So, Tricia, what are you doing at Nvision?

What am I doing?  I think I’m giving perspective to the audience of what it’s like working with some of the technology that they’re developing.  A lot of the people out there are developing it, but they don’t necessarily know what it’s like to work on the other side of it and the difficulties, the pros and the cons, that kind of thing.  Maybe it’ll help them in the long run.  Maybe it’ll help them develop a little bit—"well maybe we should try this!  Maybe we should try that!"

What are your expectations for Nvision?  Do you think of this as your typical geeky convention?

No, this is completely different.  Conventions, science fiction conventions, are more just—for me, they’re more laid-back. You’re talking basically about Battlestar Galactica and answering questions about the plot lines, and the story lines, and everything like this.  Being here at Nvision is a complete honor, because I’m coming on after Jeff Han.   As I was discovering yesterday, what he’s doing is unbelievable.  And to be on stage with [Nvidia CEO] Jen-Hsun Huang—it’s an amazing group of people to be on stage with.  So it’s an honor.  I’m a complete tech idiot, so it’s very interesting for me to kind of hear what’s going on out there and be a part of it.

Since you’ve admitted to being a technophobe, what’s your guilty geeky pleasure?

(laughs) I, honestly, am probably one of the worst people… I have four iPods, because NBC keeps giving them for Christmas gifts and stuff.  I still don’t even know how to, like…  I never take them anywhere because they’re not full of anything.  And my friend keeps sending me downloaded music and I don’t know how to actually get it from the e-mail onto my computer or onto my iPod.  I can’t sync my Blackberry to my Mac.  If something goes wrong, I literally yell at my husband to fix it for me, I call a computer tech, or I call my sister who manages my Web site.

One of these days, I’m hoping all these people out there make it easy enough for computer idiots like me that can just plug it in and everything works!

How have you managed the transition between people who see you as Tricia the actress versus Tricia the Cylon?

I started acting a year before I got Battlestar, so Battlestar is definitely one of the things that I’m known for in the acting world the most.  But I think now it’s a little bit different because in the very beginning I found it was very funny because people, when they met me, if they were fans of Battlestar, they were very intimidated by me.

Number Six, she’s a very strong character—physically, and emotionally, and mentally and everything—and I would find people scared to come up to talk to me at the first couple of conventions that I did.  After awhile, the fans—after you’ve met at a few conventions and they realize you not actually the baby-killing whatever—sometimes it’s hard to differentiate between the actor and what they see on screen.  So it just takes a couple of conventions and word starts to get out that she’s actually a nice person and so forth.  And now, at conventions, people are a lot more open to talking to me and getting a picture with me and all that kind of thing.

Does the science fiction convention tour ever get overwhelming?

I try and go for the happy medium.  I like to do a few because I do like to get out there and meet the fans, show them the respect—these conventions, they come to see people.   Not just the actors, but also all the illustrators, everybody involved in the sci-fi world.  But I don’t do it for a moneymaking thing.  I don’t want to do as many as I can.  I also want to work toward other jobs, and I also don’t want to get known just too much in the sci-fi world.  Now with Battlestar ending, my next couple of jobs are outside of the sci-fi realm because Battlestar has been known for such amazing writing.  For me to step back into sci-fi, which I will, I want it to be of a quality—the same type of a quality.  And so I’ve turned down a lot of roles that are in the sci-fi genre that I just don’t feel match up. 

It’s also, I don’t want to get known just in one genre because then I think it’s limiting for your career longevity in the long run.

But you have dabbled in the geekier roles—the Command and Conquer game…

Well, you know, a lot of the other things that I’ve done too.  In hiatius, I did an independent movie with Leelee Sobieski called Walk All Over Me that had nothing to do with the Sci-Fi genre…

Canada’s Next Top Model?

Canada’s Next Top Model, I hosted and produced.  I just did one year, I didn’t want to do more.  That was taking me back too much into the modeling realm. I was fighting to get out of being a model-turned-actress and fighting to be taken seriously.  And I was just starting to be taken seriously as an actor and then it was like—bang!—it went right back there.  The show’s great, and they do really well, but it just wasn’t for me. 

Instead I did the film Walk All Over Me, and that went to the Toronto Film Festival, The Weinstein Company bought it.  It’s out in the states right now on DVD.  And because of that, one of the casting directors from Fox Networks saw me at the Toronto Film Festival in that film and she liked me, and they put me under a holding deal, and now I’m doing a pilot for them—a show for them.

It’s just—you have to choose your priorities.  It’s a business.  You have to mold your career to where you want to go.

On the next page: saying goodbye to Battlestar Galactica

Now that you’ve finished filming the fourth and last Battlestar season, what’s been the hardest thing to say goodbye to?

I’d say from a personal level, the hardest thing to say bye to is just the people that you’ve gotten to know.  We had a really wonderful, and I think fairly rare experience in TV shows of having a crew and a cast that just so enjoyed working together—got a real family environment and everything.  So to say bye to these people that you’ve spent four seasons but five years filming with is hard.

And also, the writing I think was so cutting-edge and just so good that you start reading some other scripts and you’re like (groans) Lord.  Granted, I’m lucky to be filming two other shows that have really good writing, so I’ve gotten lucky in that respect, but just, generally, it’s the people I’m going to miss.  But we’re doing a little surprise.  We’re doing a little movie.

Bringing the franchise forward even more?

It’s kind of a one-off to finish up a few—I can’t give details about it obviously—but we’re about to start shooting that.

Is it tough to break away from such an iconic role in Battlestar?  No matter what, don’t you think you’ll always be seen as, “oh, that’s actress that played Six?”

I think there are two things that are on my side with that.  One is that the show’s been critically acclaimed, so other people in the business—other producers, directors, writers, and so forth—a lot of them are fans of the show for the integrity of the show.  So you get a lot more weight.  They give you a lot more credit for maybe having more acting chops than actors in science fiction generally get.

Secondly too, because most of my characters—it’s different with the fourth season because I have a character or two that looks like me with this hair—but the iconic Six has a blond wig, so I don’t look anything like her in my own life and when I go in to audition for other roles and that sort of thing.

It gives a good separation.  And you’re playing a character, so it makes you much more of a character actor in that realm.  Six was a character.  I was being a character.  And then when they meet me, they’re like, “oh, okay, you can look like other things.”

If you could have played a different character or style on Battlestar, who would you want to be?

That’s the thing. I would have wanted to have been somebody like a Starbuck, a fighter character.  I’m a tomboy at heart.  I know I don’t look like it, but I grew up on a farm.  I grew up driving tractors and all that kind of thing. I drive a sports car, I drive motorbikes.  I’m a tomboy. 

The grass is always greener—all the girls in the flight suits were always saying, “I want to wear some of Tricia’s pretty dresses!” and I’m like, “I want to try her flight suit and drive a Viper, so shut up!”  And we’d always bicker back and forth.

In the finale, I actually do get to shoot guns.  I was very happy because after the first season, with the stunt fight with Starbuck and one of the Sixes, they realized that I’m good at stunts.  And so they’d periodically put stunts in.  I love stunts.  I so badly want to do an action—you know, run around with, even though I’m not a big gun advocate, I’d love to do a movie where I run around with guns.

Since you mentioned it, who’s your favorite person to punch on Battlestar?

(laughs) Katee Sackhoff and I had a really good time with our stunt fight that we did.  That was probably my favorite just because it was so elaborate.  We had to train for it for a month beforehand and it took us a day and a half to film just because it was such a long fight.  But I didn’t actually connect with her.  Luckily, I’ve gotten pretty good with it.  I’ve never actually hurt anyone.  But I think punching Michael Hogan was pretty fun.  It’s already aired, so I can say—punching him, and of course it turns into sex…

A common theme with Battlestar…

Yeah, exactly.  And I’m punching him and [the directors] are like, “but punch with love!”  And I’m like, “how can you punch, full-on, with love?”  And I get this kind of (groan) look and they’re like, “but love in your eyes!”  And I’m like (takes deep breath).

Do you see Battlestar lasting as a franchise in the years to come, or do you think it’ll just be one of those sci-fi shows that’s ingrained in the vernacular, but faded away?

It’s a show that, unlike the Star Treks—which I’m not really very well versed in the Star Treks.  I don’t know all the storylines, I’ve seen some obviously.  A lot more can be done: there are funny-headed creatures, there are all these different species and things like that.  With Battlestar, it’s humans and robots.  And it’s a much more kind of poignant look at our society today than pure fantasy, and so my personal opinion is that it’s better to keep it shorter and sweeter and stronger than to just keep going on, and on, and on…

With more franchises, and books, and movies, and video games…

Exactly.  And then I think it starts to lose some of its oomph.  You start repeating things and granted, the world that we live in right now is giving us good fodder to keep the political allegory going on, but at the same time, I just feel like—I felt our first and second season were really great.  I felt our third season faltered a bit because it was like, you don’t want to give away too much because you don’t know how long you’re going, but yet, you want to give away some.  And it was sort of that season of, “okay, how much do we give away?”  And that’s when they decided to make the fourth season the final season.

I think Ron Moore and David Eick, I know they decided that themselves, and they said, “no, we want to wrap the story up the way we want to tell the story.  And we don’t want to just keep going to see as many…”  I think at that point it just gets more about money instead of creativity, and let’s see how many episodes we can actually finally get, and how many seasons we can get.  But the creativity falls by the wayside, and then finally the network goes, “okay you have two episodes to wrap everything up.”

And that’s not fair to the fans who have invested themselves in these storylines, and you’ve been teasing them all along the way with snippets.   So I like the idea of having an entire season for them to wrap up the storylines, and even in the entire season there’s a lot.  There’s a lot packed into every episode.  The last ten, eleven episodes—I think the last episode ran long, so I think there’s going to be eleven instead of ten—I think they’re phenomenal.  But they’re full.  They’re full of revelations.

There was a big push about this as being the last season, and it is, it definitely ends with an ending.  So I don’t want fans to worry: oh, well now they’re doing this BSG movie, trying to continue on… it’s just a filler-in.  Without giving things away, it’s just filling in a few plot holes that you couldn’t really get to in the season, or maybe a few questions that are kind of brought up towards the end of the season that you didn’t really have time to focus on.  So it’s just a little thing for the die-hard fans.  A nice little wrapping-up at the very end of the entire series, and I think it’ll be well-received and fun.