Michael Trucco, who played Samuel Anders in SCI FI’s Battlestar Galactica, told SCI FI Wire a bit about the upcoming DVD movie The Plan and added that he wouldn’t be surprised if his character turned up in the forthcoming prequel series Caprica.
“I mean, because it’s possible, right?” Trucco said in an exclusive interview Thursday in Pasadena, Calif. “The Cylons, once we saw them in Battlestar, we realized, ‘Oh, they’ve been around for a long time.’ So it’s certainly possible, and it would be kind of cool.”
Caprica takes place more than 50 years before the beginning of Battlestar Galactica and examines the origins of both characters and storylines later explored in the acclaimed series.
Trucco said that there are no plans to revive his character or reintroduce him on the show, but that he would be interested to see how they marry the mythologies of the two series. “I don’t know if they would ever do it, like, as just a cameo,” he speculated. “Like maybe a walk-by in the background-‘Wait, wasn’t that … ?’ But, no, no discussions. Nothing has been discussed in terms of if we want to bring some of the Cylons from Battlestar back into Caprica. But who knows? The show still has yet to be aired and take off, and if they decide that’s a storyline then we’ll do it.”
Trucco spoke exclusively to SCI FI Wire at the site of an ongoing charity auction in which paraphernalia and props from Battlestar Galactica are on sale. The following is an edited version of that interview. The two-hour pilot of Caprica is now available on DVD and the Web; Caprica kicks off on SCI FI next year. Battlestar Galactica: The Plan is due in November.
Are events such as the Battlestar auctions sort of a stopgap for the show, since it seems to live on with Caprica and The Plan, the upcoming DVD movie?
Trucco: It does sort of hammer it home that it’s over. The alternative [with the props] would have been to store them, which is costly: It’s time-consuming, it’s space-consuming and financially consuming. I think [executive producer] Ron [Moore] was pretty adamant about not resurrecting the series, one of those “We’re going off the air. No, we’re not! We’re coming back. Oh, no we’re not!” He didn’t want to play like that, so he said this was the end of the show. So as far as I know, this is the end of the show. That’s not to say they couldn’t revive it; I think they could. From a fan standpoint, I think they could, and it would be viable. We’re done with this version as it is. Caprica will take on as, a prequel, the themes of Battlestar Galactica, and I think it’s going to do a great job. I saw the pilot, and I thought it was fascinating.
How would you describe The Plan? Is the film a coda for the series?
Trucco: Whereas Caprica is a true prequel, 50 years before the beginning of Battlestar Galactica, The Plan is less a coda: It doesn’t extend the story beyond what we saw in the finale. It actually picks up the story between season one and season two. It’s actually prequel to the entrance of Anders, my character, and Cavil, Dean Stockwell’s character. The movie is told from that perspective.
But the thrust of it is what happened before season two, when suddenly on this planet, Caprica, Starbuck finds this guy Anders and his band of resistance fighters, former teammates of the Caprica Buccaneers. Then, later in the season, we find this mysterious Brother Cavil, and this movie is going to answer questions [about] the moments before that, where we came from and how we came to get integrated into the story. It’s going to weave its way in through storylines that we’ve already seen, [and] it’s going to make you want to go back and go, “Oh! I want to watch that episode in season two again. Wait, Cavil was standing there the whole time?” We’re going to use footage from stuff that’s already been shot, but then they’ll integrate it with a shot that will tie in [the fact] that Cavil was just around the corner hiding behind a tree in the forest, long before we even met him.
See the rest over at SCIFI Wire
