SciFi Magazine February 2006 (Ommited Questions)
Source: Official BSG Site

Jamie Bamber
Capt. Lee "Apollo" Adama

Q: Is there going to be an Apollo/paramedic Ishay romance?

Bamber: Not on screen….

Q: You’ve been getting a lot of flak by people who say that Apollo is too whiny, but I think that yet another "self-confident action-hero male lead" would have been boring and unoriginal. Your thoughts on this? Do you see Apollo getting noticeably more confident as the show goes on?

Bamber: I have been keen from the start not to think of this character as a hero or a lead in a TV show but as a flawed young man of great potential in extraordinarily trying circumstances. So yes, maybe he does whine, but I think we definitely see him grow through our story, from an almost adolescent rebelling against everything his father and his father’s military stand for, into an individual who manages establish his own sense of self in a world where meaning is hard to find. But he is a thinker, and thinkers are always challenged, so even in the latter half of Season Two, when he has attained a degree of self-assuredness, his mettle can still be rattled to the point of destruction. I would hope all this makes him more identifiable to an audience and more interesting to watch than a more predictable heroic type.

Q: When did you find out that Lee is a reservist (who apparently wants to run a bar or something eventually), and what did you think about that? Did it change your take on him at all and if so in what way?

Bamber: That whole idea of the bar thing and Lee as a disillusioned officer questioning the relevance of the military in a modern peacetime world was actually mine; just a little backstory to help with a character through-line. It seemed to fit with the whole scenario of Galactica‘s decommissioning in the miniseries.

The military is being down-sized; it is a relic of former times. Similarly, Lee is rejecting the old-fashioned ways his father espoused, which he has been brought up to follow unquestioningly and which cost him his parents’ marriage and his brother’s life. He therefore rejects the military rigidity that has, in his eyes, so scarred his family. My little idea was that after the decommissioning ceremony he was going to hand in his resignation and open a small bar or something on Caprica. It then makes what happens to him subsequently that much more of a challenge, to forget the past, to use his training and serve to the best of his ability; like many sons, despite his every intention, he finds his father when he looks in the mirror. As yet none of this backstory is actually pinned down in the writing however … so Ron Moore might go a different direction! Although I have just read a draft of this year’s finale where Lee refers to setting up a bar on a planet and hanging up his uniform.

Q: How do you juggle life as a working actor, husband and father of three small children? How do you keep from losing your mind? What is it like working with your wife again? Do you or her become upset when either of you have *cough* intimate scenes?

Bamber: My life is definitely a juggling act, but most of the balls are caught by my wife, Kerry. My mind is saved by that fact and that I love this part and this show, and by the occasional round of golf. So hard as it is, especially that Kerry is now successfully embarked on a recording career in Europe, there is so much enjoyment in all of it that I cannot believe our good fortune.

We have it all right now — stimulating work lives and the most amazing little family too. We are blessed!

Working with Kerry was lovely. It is so hard for an actress after having kids to get back to work, especially in a foreign country, so it gave me a huge thrill to see her on set, throwing herself back in and loving it. I am also grateful to our producers for giving her that opportunity.

Intimate scenes? Always difficult, but you get used to them. They are not real, after all!

Q: Lee Adama has been thrust into situations he is probably not ready for but has to do for the survival of the fleet. In tense situations, Lee tends to "chant." In "Hand of God" — "Lee don’t do this, don’t do this" and "keep it together Lee, keep it together." In "Valley of Darkness" — "headshot, reload, headshot." Are these reactions scripted or is it a nuance that you have brought to your character?

Bamber: Yeah, well-spotted. In the Viper footage, much of what happens is actually improvised. Once the director and visual-effects wiz, Gary Hutzel have detailed the bones of the three-dimensional story that the character is to go through in the cockpit, the rest is really up to the actor to really bring to life. It is all green-screen and the other ships and explosions are put in later, so it is pretty challenging to make the whole thing "life or death" and real. We are given scripted lines but they never cover the whole truth of the situation and the scripted scenes tend to be choppy and fragmented to increase the energy of the action. So we just fill them out a bit. Sometimes our stuff stays in, sometimes not.

In "Hand of God" and other tense Viper sequences, I simply found myself muttering to myself and it felt very real. When people are in trouble and scared we need something to hang on to, to concentrate on and that is what Lee does. Apparently athletes do the same; they visualize and resort to little routines to calm the mind. Lee goes a little further and tells himself not to do things. He’s just terrified.

Once I found this in these moments, yes, it became a little character quirk which I still use. In "Valley of Darkness" the writers obviously picked up on that and they did write the "headshot, reload, headshot" beat, although I chose to repeat it as a mantra. … So I guess, once again, it’s an instance of write/actor cross-fertilization.

Q: Taking a break from Season One and the, I now assume, encouragement you gave your wife to take a role in Season Two shows a great deal of family values on your part. Without prying too deeply into your private life, can you tell us about what the transition to your current stardom was like for you and your family? (Prior to, and through Band of Brothers, and including [Battlestar Galactica]

Bamber: It is the biggest change that happens to a young guy to go from the single life where every decision you make is basically about you and for you to having a family where suddenly your little ones and your wife come first. We have undergone some pretty big changes.

When I auditioned for Galactica I was unmarried and childless. So during the life of the show my life has changed utterly! I feel very fortunate that so many elements, professional and personal, have come together over the last few years. Whatever happens Galactica will always represent the most eventful years of my life!

Moving all five of us to Canada, finding a place to live, finding good childcare is a major undertaking. I am so lucky that my wife, Kerry, has totally thrown herself into our new life in Vancouver, and the kids love it here. But it is pretty tough, missing family and friends in London and missing out on other opportunities at home, especially for Kerry who, for a while, has had to put her career on hold for me to work on Galactica. We actually had a long conversation before I took the role [about] whether we were prepared for so many changes. I am very grateful for how it has all turned out.

As for the stardom thing, my life hasn’t changed at all. I don’t feel famous and don’t think I am.

Q: Over the course of the series, there has been some backstory established between Starbuck and Apollo. My question to you is, are there any plans to flesh this out in detail? It would be fascinating to see where these two began and how they developed their friendship/repressed sexual-tension thing.

Bamber: As far as I know, there is nothing slated to deal with the Apollo/Starbuck backstory specifically, but I know the writers are thinking about backstories, so it’s possible. This season Lee gets a little of his backstory addressed, but it has nothing to do with Kara. … I remember before the miniseries, part of the rehearsal process with Michael Rymer involved Katee and I exploring our characters’ history, and that work definitely fuelled the tension on screen, but we never set it in stone.