Banana Living
Grace Park Does Double Roles on Battlestar Galactica
By Tim Clodfelter
2004

Actress Grace Park is doing double duty on her new TV series, Battlestar Galactica - but she isn't getting double pay. "I think I should talk to someone about that," she said with a laugh.

In the series, Park plays Sharon "Boomer" Valerii, a feisty fighter pilot on an enormous starship called the Galactica. She and her fellow pilots protect the remnants of humankind from attack by evil robots known as Cylons. The Cylons were created by humans to act as their servants but rebelled, obliterating most of humanity in the process. The Galactica leads a ragtag fleet of survivors as they evade the Cylons and search for a new home.

Boomer doesn't realize that she is actually a Cylon "sleeper agent," an exact replica of a human being who has been planted in human society with no knowledge of her true purpose - a saboteur when the Cylons need her. If that weren't a complex enough twist, Park is also playing a duplicate of Boomer in a second storyline back on Caprica, one of the human colony worlds wiped out by the initial Cylon attack.

"It's so exciting," Park said of her dual role. "It's giving me hoops to jump through and rivers to go up. I think I'd like to have had a few more years of acting under my belt.... It's very difficult and challenging." She recalls one of her costars, veteran actor Edward James Olmos, telling her, "You've got the hardest role on the show."

Park said she found the Boomer on Caprica particularly fun to play.
"She gets to do all the action," she said. "The other one gets to be all conflicted and miserable, which is probably more like I actually am."

Park was born in Los Angeles and moved to Canada when she was a child. After earning a degree in psychology at the University of British Columbia, she became a model and actress. She was one of the stars of the popular teen drama Edgemont and has appeared in episodes of such shows as The Outer Limits, Dark Angel and The Immortal.

Because of her studies, she tends to psychoanalyze the characters she plays. "After you've studied a certain subject so much, it becomes part of how you perceive the world," she said. "It's inherent in the way I think."

Battlestar Galactica started as a TV series in 1978 and was remade last year as a four-hour miniseries by the Sci Fi Channel. It became one of the highest-rated miniseries on cable TV in the 2003-04 TV season. The weekly series picks up a few days after the events of the miniseries, as the human refugees fight fatigue and struggle to keep one step ahead of the Cylons.

Some fans of the 1978 version of Galactica complained about extensive changes in the new version of the show, including changes of gender for many characters. "The original was quite male-heavy," Park said. "The females were the disco queens in the back, looking hot with their hair and nails and all." In the original series, Boomer was a man and was played by Herb Jefferson Jr. Park met him last year at ComicCon, a science-fiction and comic-book convention in San Diego. "He was sitting at a table doing autograph signings," she said. "He had no idea who I was at first, but he gave me a big old hug. He was super nice."