If you're a fan of the Stargate franchise, you've got an inside man in David Blue. The actor doesn't just play Eli on Stargate Universe -- he's also a sci-fi junkie who'd watched every episode of previous Stargate incarnations before he was cast in the part. It's that kind of insider knowledge that leads Blue to say with confidence that the latter half of Universe's season one (which began airing last week after a hiatus) is its best yet.
Now shooting the second season, Blue took some time out to dish on the fanbase he's accrued with past roles (including a stint as Marc's boyfriend on Ugly Betty), whether he reads sci-fi blogs, and a bit of news he read on Movieline that led him to opine on how exactly Universe's Robert Carlyle resembles Alan Rickman.
We were just talking about that new Syfy comedy about washed-up genre stars. Do you know Michael Rosenbaum?
He's a good friend of a writer friend of mine, but I've watched Smallville from the beginning. In addition, on Stargate, half of us have seen Galaxy Quest and the other half hadn't, so we sat down with some bottles of wine and made them watch it and said, "This is your future."
Have you already begun to feel that Galaxy Quest effect?
Not so much the feeling like we're irrelevant, but I'll say two things. One is that every day on set when we have a new piece of technology that we're dealing with, you'd better believe I'm trying to figure out how it works because God forbid if an alien invents a station patterned after how I operated it, I need to know! [Laughs] Two, I've sat around a few times playing with Carlyle saying, "OK, you're Alan Rickman. Louis [Ferreira], you're Tim Allen." We go through everything.
Who would you be?
I think I'm the little kid. I don't know how I feel about that.
When Stargate Universe premiered last year, there was a lot of hope from Syfy that it would fill the niche left by the outgoing Battlestar Galactica. Is there less of that pressure now?
I think personally, I found it to be more pressure than most people would, not only because I'd seen Stargate before, but more than that, I love Battlestar Galactica. I've met a lot of the cast from that. I guess we have to look at it from the perspective that we really like [Stargate Universe] and that's what we have to set our minds to, and not worry so much that we have to prove ourselves. You can't knock yourself out looking at numbers and questioning the response. I think we've gotten to a good place, especially in season two up here, where we're just trying to make the best shows we can and trusting the audience to like them. I'm pretty confident in the first two episodes of [Season 1.5], and I think you'll see a jump in the ratings just because they're great episodes. I enjoyed watching them. I'm just saying...it's like, "Oh yeah, and I'm in this!"
You shot the first season continuously, even though it was split up into halves by Syfy. Is the second half much different than the first?
To boil it down, I think the second half of the season is much more exciting. It's like a rollercoaster and there's just more crazy stuff going on. I think it's a great hodgepodge because new fans of the show are gonna love where it's going, and old fans are gonna flip out over some of the stuff you see in the first three episodes.
How does Eli change?
From the beginning, I think it's been like a western for Eli. There are the guys in the white hats and the guys in the black hats, good guys and bad guys, and yay, he looks at the world that way. Through some events in the first few episodes, he starts to realize that he can't really count on everyone the way he thought he could, and he starts coming into his own. It's more about who he wants to trust instead of who he should trust. It's funny, with the characters in general, we shot so much of this show before it had premiered, so when people said, "This character hasn't evolved as much as I thought," we all laughed. We were so far into the back half of the season that some of the characters they were talking about had become our favorites. In the second half I was working so many less days than I was used to because all these other characters start coming to the fore.
There were some blogs like io9 that said that the female characters didn't have enough to do.
That's what we were talking about, mainly. Ming-Na is a brilliant actress, and they wouldn't cast her if they didn't have stuff for her to do. You'll see from very early on that she becomes an important part of things. Maybe because I knew where it was going, but from the beginning, T.J. had been one of my favorite characters, and I think that's a testament to how amazing Alaina [Huffman] is as an actor. Unfortunately, with ensemble dramas, these things happen...take Lost, for example, where you're gonna have three episodes with Jin, and then you'll have two that are about Ben, and one about Shepherd. I think there are definitely parts of the latter half of [Stargate] where you'll start to see the focus shift a little. The actresses are amazing, and the women wouldn't still be here if the characters weren't interesting. I hate to say, "Be patient," but I've seen the last ten episodes. I can say right now that some of my favorite moments are with them.
Do the producers let you know ahead of time when your workload is going to lighten up?
The one thing that's not like Lost is that when Matthew Fox isn't in some episodes, he'll get, like, the month off. That never happens for us, since we're in each episode at least a little bit. We're always in the mix. I'm a workaholic, so I don't mind it.
So you're currently shooting the second season. How much do you know about what's to come?
I know the general arc of at least the beginning of season two, but I don't know how it'll fit into each script. It's almost comical, when we're shooting and we get scripts. All of sudden the actors disappear and you can't find them, and it's because we're all sitting in corners or on parking lot curbs with out iPhones and computers, reading the scripts between takes. We just love to know where things are going.
You're a fan yourself. What is it like to have fans of your own now?
We live in a completely different time than I think has ever existed in American entertainment. If I was a big fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation or Quantum Leap, if I wanted to get an autograph or talk to an actor, it involved writing a letter and mailing it. That doesn't exist anymore. I'm on Twitter, and that's an instantaneous way for fans to talk to you. While it's very fast and cool, it's also dangerous, and I think halfway through the season people [on the show] realized that. As great as it is that there are so many people out there and so many websites, it's really easy to make a website, and you could find a whole blog about how horrible your character is and how you're ruining the world. It gets to be kind of hard to differentiate these things.
The one good thing about our shooting schedule is that the writers have an idea and then we shoot it. I know that people are going to look at things in the second half of our season and be like, "Oh, they listened to us. Ha ha, we changed it." If that's what they want to feel, that's great, but the truth is that most of these episodes were shot or in production before any opinions came out.
Fess up: have you ever gone and looked at a blog right after an episode airs, to gauge the reaction?
I try not to, but with Twitter, it makes it harder. As much as people try to be friendly, they don't realize what they're doing sometimes -- they'll be like, "Did you see this article?" and there's a link. And I'll be on set in between takes, and I'll think, "Oh, let me see this link," and it's like this scathing, horrific thing that says bad things about me. [Laughs] You can't avoid it these days. I don't try to find it anymore, but I'll be honest, I did during the first few months of the show because I was curious and overthinking. You never know...I find people who come up to me who say, "Oh my God, this is my favorite show on television and you're my favorite character," and it's humbling, and then I turn around and there's someone saying, "You should retire from acting because you're ruining television." You kind of have to trust that you're doing the best work you can and that the scripts are so good that they'll continue making people tune in.
It's such a strange thing. The people from Glee are on Twitter. I love Lost, and the creators are on Twitter. There are time where I almost have to avoid Twitter because it spoils things for me, because I watch shows on a DVR, not live. It's becoming almost hard to go on the internet in general.
You've appeared on some shows with some very ardent fans, from Ugly Betty to Moonlight to Veronica Mars. Do you ever meet, like, some gay sci-fi fans who also loved culty, canceled dramas and have a shrine to you?
I wish that were true. I've always loved and joked from the beginning that my fanbase is so incredibly diverse. The moment that someone approaches me, I tend to know what they're a fan of before they even speak. If they're under a certain age, it's Suite Life of Zack and Cody, if they have a certain demeanor, I know it's probably Ugly Betty or Stargate. It's fascinating to me, and actually I've joked for a while now that my life will be complete when I meet somebody who's a fan of all of them. God bless Robert Carlyle for playing a character like Rush or Hugh Laurie for playing a character like House where people love him because they hate him. I've been very lucky in that I play characters that people identify with.