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Chris  Jancelewicz

2008

Grace Park plays Boomer/Sharon/Athena/Model Number 8 on Battlestar Galactica. The Canadian actress' first major role was on the drama Edgemont; from there, she moved on to butt-kicking as a human cyborg. We sat down to talk about the upcoming final season of the hit sci-fi show, and what lies in store for Sharon.

I've only seen the first two episodes of Season 4 - but wow. You're not in them much, but I assume you're around in a big way later on.

Oh yeah.

You're involved in so many storylines that have to be closed up.

We're not closing them up. We're just going to create more.

More questions, as is the classic 'BSG' style?

More questions, more unravelling, and so by the end people are going to say, "You have to come back." And we're going to be on forever!

Are you serious, or are you joking?

I don't know, I'm not going to tell you.

Are any ends tied up?

Um, well, a few people die, so in that way, a few ends get tied up pretty fast.

Are they major characters?

There are varying degrees of major characters. In some people's hearts, everybody is a major character, so it's tough to tell.

So you started off as this meek little pilot, and have grown into a butt-kicking Cylon before our eyes. How has playing Sharon changed for you?

I feel like Sharon stands up for herself reluctantly. Unless she's defending somebody or something, like Hera or Helo, then it's intentional. The biggest challenge for me was knowing that she was a Cylon before anyone else did, and at the very beginning, absolutely no one is in the Cylon camp.

Everybody's with the humans. But especially coming out as the villain in the wake of 9/11, that was, hands-down, the most challenging. Stepping in the shoes of the enemy, it opened my eyes to what it's like to be part of an oppressed race. Well, not that I was oppressed personally, but as part of my heritage, being Korean, they were occupied by the Japanese for a while. I could glean from that what I could.

A lot of things have happened to Sharon over the course of 'BSG', more than almost every other character.

Especially in the first and second seasons, when it was like the drama of the week. She has a baby, she gets raped, she attempts suicide, she tries to kill Adama. Traumatic events happened to her all the time. You want to ask yourself, "How does this person not fall apart?" And then it's like, "Oh yeah, she's a robot."

She's practically trying to break herself apart; I mean, she smashes her head against a window. She's just pushed to such extremes. I remember that episode in particular, I totally didn't want to do that [head-smashing]. Luckily Tahmoh [Penikett, who plays Helo] was so still and grounded, with watery eyes, he totally helped make the scene.

How many episodes for Season 4 do you still need to film?

We have 9 left, the writer's strike affected it.

How is the atmosphere on set?

Well, it was pretty bad there for a while. We weren't sure about the future. It's funny, though, we started thinking things like, "Will I ever see that garbage pail again?" There was this mobile that hung above Hera's crib, which was made up of Vipers and Raiders, and the strike was coming up. All this talk was circulating - like the show's cancelled, it's never coming back - and even Eddie [Olmos] was saying it. When he said it, it felt so much more real.

I got kind of depressed, and even went to talk to the props guy and asked where it was. He was like, "I hope you took it, because it's disappeared." Stuff started missing from around the set. Seriously, when the strike hit, it was like doomsday.

How does one go about accomplishing the stone-faced Cylon? How do you get in that zone?

This is me in normal life. Just kidding, no. I just fall back on my robotic heritage. Growing up as a Korean kid, you grow up following rules, and become this little robot. (laughs) OK, I'm just making that up. I don't know how I do it, but thanks for letting me know.

Model Number 8 (Sharon) carries her memories with her. If she's reincarnated into a new body, she should technically have memories of Boomer's from way back when, right?

It doesn't really work like that. Let me fill you in, since it can be really confusing. We didn't even know this stuff at the beginning. Essentially, one model can share memories. It's almost like a computer. You can choose when to upload, you can choose when to download. So, if one model doesn't want to necessarily get something, she won't.

So it's sort of like selective memory.

Yes, that's what I thought, but I discovered more recently that when they die and get reborn, their stuff gets uploaded into the system. I'm not sure how much control they have over that, I don't even know if they know. Because Athena tells Helo, "Don't worry," even though she knows so many Galactica military secrets when Helo kills her, so she can go get Hera [from the mother ship]. As this season progresses, you'll find out that maybe she couldn't hide everything that she wanted to. I don't know if she knows that, or did she lie about it to get her baby back? I don't even know!

I get headaches sometimes, trying to figure out this show, especially at the beginning. I was like, why is there more than one Boomer? Conceptually, it was tough to get your mind around it.

There's something out there called What the Frak. Basically, it's this really short clip, and it's a woman talking, and she sums up everything up until the third season. It's so funny, but technically it's not correct, since they keep calling all the Number 8's Boomer. And then they say Good Sharon and Bad Sharon, and that just gets even more confusing. And the Bad Sharon is now Good Sharon, so...

There's that confusion thing. But getting back to memory, could Athena technically still have feelings for Chief [Tyrol]?

She could access some of Boomer's memories, but she didn't choose to upload too many of them. She knows, because she viscerally and mentally knows these memories. There's a strange connection between herself and the Chief, but it's not an intense, sensual longing. Which I'm sure is what he would want me to say. He gets so mad at me, "I said that you were a good kisser and you said that I wasn't!" I'm like, "OK, dude, you need to settle down."

Is Cylon love the same as human love?

I don't know. What is love? That's already a huge question. But I think that since the Cylon models were based strictly on the human models, they tried to make the humanoid versions so human, that some of them are even more human than human. Like, they're often overwhelmed by emotions that they can't control, which is quite human. You've already seen the hybrid baby. If they can do that...she created that within herself, and it wasn't spliced together in some lab like they do with the GMOs...in that way, I think there's enough similarity to call it love.

But did it start out that way? I thought Sharon manipulated Helo into having sex on Caprica, in order to conceive the baby. She screwed him over, basically.

She was totally lying to him. And then she got screwed. And then loved. How do you know a guy wrote that, huh? "Well, she had a little taste of this, and then she fell madly in love." OK, seriously, even though she was lying at the outset, she did fall in love with him.

Is it more intense, though, than human love?

Well, I think it varies with each model. It's different.

What about a Cylon's love for her child? It's interesting how it transcends species, or humanity. You're technically a robot, yet you're willing to die for this child.

Yeah, and she has a lot of these emotional patterns that humans have. They were put into her when these models were conceived. That's all very much a part of her, just like any human being. She has an intense love for her child, but the funny thing is she...she doesn't have another model for her to follow within the Cylons, so she's the first to have this. She's setting the precedent. And also being separated from her child - I think it's for two years - that created such a schism during what would be the attachment phase.

She's maternal in a different kind of way than she would have been before. She's probably also maternal in a different way than if, say, Number 6 became pregnant, or if Laura Roslin was the mother. It reflects that even amongst robots, personalities and parenting styles can vary. Sharon seems to have more incentive to be protective, though, than other characters. She's had so much taken away from her, and her position between the humans and Cylons makes her feel especially vulnerable. She definitely has a fierce protective side. She's a mama bear about everything she loves - Hera, Helo, and even Adama.

I was just going to say, she often went to seek advice from Adama, is he like a father figure to her? Does he fully trust her?

Throughout the years, and especially when more than half of the fleet was camped down on New Caprica, he became very close with her. She was in the brig on Galactica while Adama was up there, basically alone. Even his best buddy, Tigh, was down on Caprica. He lost a lot of the people that he was close to - even his son was over on the Pegasus - so he would go over to the brig and talk with her. He probably goes to speak with her about military strategy from a Cylon point of view.

She's a sensitive person, a sensitive robot...that sounds so funny...so she could see that he was troubled. They would talk, get closer, so yeah, they developed an interesting father-daughter relationship, especially since she looks exactly like Boomer, and she and Adama had a relationship already.

That child that they cast to play Hera is the perfect casting job. It seriously looks like it could be your child.

Yeah, she's been switched out. There's several traumatic reasons. Well, you saw her crying. Those were real tears. She was not happy.

The rape scene in Season 2 was really raw. How did you feel when you read the script beforehand? Were you like, "Oh, no"?

It's very clear that penetration doesn't happen. It's apparent that it gets stopped before it gets really ugly. Everyone at BSG loves to push the envelope, so I was right into it. Tricia [Helfer] was also doing that piece for Gina, so we were in this space where we recognized that this was something that was very important that happens on some level, from harassment to rape. This kind of thing happens to 1 in 3 women in the world.

It's interesting, because on BSG, we can shoot each other in the head and throw each other out of an airlock, but something that happens much more often on Earth across all cultures, there was such an uproar about it. There's a longer version of the attempted rape out on the DVD, and it's very disturbing. Even though you can't see necessarily very much, you know what's implied. It was really difficult for a lot of people to see that, and there was a lot of in-fighting in the studio to get that shortened up.

It's amazing. The show addresses so many issues, but once again, as soon as a woman's body is involved, there's a furor over it. For example, the Starbuck-Cylon farming incident.

And you know what the weird thing is? We never talk about that again. It's like Starbuck, though, she wouldn't say anything about it. She wouldn't go for help about that right way, until it got unbearable. But it's important that BSG addresses these types of things. Sci-fi needs to get a little serious.

I think it was a very important scene and I'm glad we shot it. Me and Tricia were quite upset when Gina died, because I felt that Gina represented a lot of these abused women or people. It would have been amazing to watch her slowly come to grips with what happened, and find her own way of healing. That would have been a beautiful arch. But then, when they killed her, any part of anybody who felt abused or neglected, it sort of extinguished. It's sort of like: this is how we treat people like that on TV.

If it was up to you, what would be the ideal ending for Sharon?

In two pieces, one for Athena, one for Boomer. For Athena, I would love to see her really stand on her own two feet and feel the full nature of the power she was given. Sort of like a silent empowerment, not behind the scenes, and not in outrage, but to be OK with the fact that she is a Cylon amongst humans. I think, in the storylines coming up, that will happen, because we know four of the final 5. There are more Cylons than we thought, and everyone's been presented with this fact that it's not like us against them, so much as we're all within each other, and it's even me against me, or you against you, it's all just in-fighting. It would be great if she could be an inspiration for herself and for everyone around her.

For Boomer, on one level it's like, do we want her to stay dark and conflicted forever? I think that portrays a reality in society. There are people who just die like that. It would be wonderful if she could just come around. But how do we want to end Battlestar? With a happy ending that worked? That would be unexpected.

Or end it the way Battlestar always ends it. With more questions and open ends.

Who knows?

Which fellow cast member have you learned the most from? How and why?

I have to say two people. I'm going to fuse Mary [McDonnell] and Eddie together. To me, they represent two, very grounded, warm, generous veterans in our industry. They have embraced each one of us, and created a supportive environment. Each person's role is valued on and off-screen, and the advice they give us all is invaluable.

They don't sit up on their high horses; sure their trailers are gigantic, and you get lost in them just by flushing the toilet, but they don't lord over us at all. And then my second person is Tahmoh Penikett. He's fun, he's such a gentleman. He's really warm, well-read, an interesting mix in one person.