Bamber Says Third Season 'Listening Scene' Is His Favorite
By: Scott Nance
Source: syfyportal.comSPOILERS: Adama Reveals "Troubling Secret" In Coming Episode
(July 10 2006) - The following contains MINOR spoilers for the third season of "Battlestar Galactica."Jamie Bamber just finished shooting a scene of a forthcoming third season episode of "Battlestar Galactica" that is his favorite of the entire series so far, the actor told attendees of last weekend’s Shore Leave science fiction convention in Maryland.
"It wasn’t a scene in which I do very much or say very much. It was a listening scene and it was a scene with Eddie Olmos where he has a troubling secret that he chooses to tell me -- get off his chest that reveals that he’s been carrying the biggest shame …" Bamber said.
In the SciFi Channel series, Bamber plays Commander Lee "Apollo" Adama, while Olmos portrays his father, Admiral Bill Adama.
"He had done something in the past and he calls himself to blame for the problems everyone’s suffering and he doesn’t think he can go on. And he chooses to tell me, his son," Bamber said.
"It just leads to where I feel every emotion, from anger at him for sort of exploding his own paternal entity by becoming a broken man in front of me because I think every son needs a dad to be a dad and not just another bloke. And yet there’s also tremendous pride" at being the one Adama confides in, he said.
"It was very complicated and very powerful," he added.
The scene is to be part of the seventh episode of the third season.
Also, Bamber, a native of London, said playing Apollo with an American accent wasn't required, but that he was "keen" to do it in part because it helped make playing Olmos's son more believable.
"When Eddie was cast, I had a bit of a heart attack because I couldn't work out how a sort of a London/Irish-born kind of a blue-eyed, blond-haired kid could play Eddie's son,” Bamber said, joking that to create a family resemblance he would have to "carve chunks out of my face."
"I know that's really bad and I shouldn’t have said that," Bamber added to much laughter. “Anyway, when Eddie was cast we had to do something to make us father and son. He puts on blue contact lenses and I dye my hair dark … so that’s the deal."
Bamber described how he felt as Richard Hatch joined the cast of the new "Battlestar Galactica" as terrorist/politician Tom Zarek, decades after Hatch himself originated the role of Apollo in the classic 1978 series.
"I never felt intimidated. I felt apprehensive," Bamber admitted. "As soon as I got the role, there was this sort of frenzy of Internet activity that Richard Hatch was out there, sort of naysaying everything about what we were doing. Everything I had heard about him told me that we was desperately against [the new series] and hellbent on our destruction. That’s what I had been told.
"And then he showed up on-set and he was the warmest, most generous, most sort of open person -- one of the most open people I've ever met, really disarming," he added.
Hatch has become "very much part of our little troupe," Bamber said.
"I don’t even think of him as Apollo anymore, really," he added. "I think of him as a friend who works with us and he plays this character Zarek which is getting more interesting by the episode."