Amanda Tapping, the star and an executive producer of SCI FI Channel’s upcoming supernatural series Sanctuary, told SCI FI Wire that she welcomes the opportunity to play a character at odds with her previous role on Stargate SG-1–as well as to produce and direct again.
“It’s very scary,” Tapping said of taking on the role of the raven-haired, 157-year-old English monster hunter Dr. Helen Magnus. “No, it’s actually been really great. It’s been a good thing for me. And as much as she’s very dissimilar from [her SG-1 character of Col.] Sam Carter, there’s a lot of similarities. I think for some reason I’ve been blessed in my career to play very strong, very smart women. I don’t do bimbo well, which maybe is a fault of mine, but I don’t. So there you have it. So Magnus was the perfect over-the-top, sexy, unapologetic, proud and loud woman that I never got to play in Sam Carter.”
Sanctuary, which began life as an online series, centers on Magnus, who tracks the mysterious creatures that live among us, abnormal offshoots of evolution in the fringes of society. She harbors the benign ones in a Sanctuary and protects the world from the dangerous ones. She is joined in this quest by her fearless daughter, Ashley (Emilie Ullerup); quirky tech whiz Henry; and a new recruit, Will (Robin Dunne), a brilliant psychiatrist/profiler with a knack for finding the strange and unusual.
Tapping also gets an executive-producer credit on Sanctuary, which was created by former SG-1 writer Damian Kindler. “It’s like a whole new stratosphere of stress,” Tapping said in an interview at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour in Beverly Hills, Calif., on July 20. She added: “I have been involved from the very beginning in getting the money for the show, which I’m really proud of.
That’s a whole new business aspect for me, that it seems I’m pretty damn good at, which I was, you know. You never know. But being involved from the very conceptual start, talking with them, putting the cast together, putting the crew together, involved in the nitty-gritty, it’s stressful. I would have to say the worst part of being an executive producer is I’m concerned about the budget. Honestly.”
On the plus side, being a producer means that Tapping can allow herself to direct on occasion, something she dipped her toe into on SG-1. “Yeah, I’ve actually directed one Sanctuary [episode] already,” she said.
For her role, Tapping has lost the bobbed blond do of Sam Carter and gained a head of long, curly black hair. “The only hard thing, honestly, has been that my daughter, who is 3, is blond with blue eyes, and we always looked alike, and I had to come home and not look like her,” Tapping said. “And she was awesome. She said, ‘Mommy, I liking your dark hair.’ And now she wants to dye her hair dark. She wants to look like Mommy.”
Sanctuary, which is also executive-produced by Martin Wood and Sam Egan, is shooting 13 episodes; it debuts on SCI FI in the fall.
News article courtesy of Sci Fi Wire