When Stargate Universe began last year, Lt. Matthew Scott was among the military, civilian and scientific personnel to walk through the Icarus Base Stargate and into an unknown future aboard the starship Destiny. Since then, the lieutenant’s mettle has been tested, both personally as well as professionally. Life proves no less complicated in Season Two as Brian J. Smith tells Steven Eramo on the show's Vancouver set...
Can you talk a bit about the episode you are currently working on, ‘Deliverance’?
Peter [Deluise, director] is great because he’s very specific. You walk into rehearsal and right off the bat he knows exactly what he’s looking for. And that’s really helpful because it gives you a solid base to play on. Peter comes up with creative shots as well, and for someone who’s an actor, to have that sort of visual style is exciting.
As for this episode, it’s a big one for my character. Scott has to deal with some commitment issues, which isn’t exactly easy for him. He has a tough time trusting and committing to anything and anybody because of what’s happened in his life, specifically the deaths of his parents as well as the preacher who later raised him. Those commitment problems play a major role in ‘Deliverance’.
What changes have you seen in your character so far in Season Two?
Scott is coming more into his own this season and further growing as a human being. The thing about this show is we’re always trying to find the balance between new situations that are scary and crazy, but at the same time figure out how the characters are maturing and able to handle situations in ways that they wouldn’t have been able to a year ago.
Scott actually gets to kick a little bit of butt this year and fight – not that he especially wants to. I don’t think it’s something that my character relishes, but he finds himself in situations where he’s got to try to put some of this book-learning that he’s got to practical use. He discovers that, hey, he can do this better than he thought!
As a result, Scott is becoming more and more the type of guy that Colonel Young [Louis Ferreira] can lean on and trust to carry his orders out, bring people back safely from missions, and things like that.
You and Louis Ferreira shot a very powerful scene together for the episode ‘Trial and Error’. How did you prep for that?
That was one of those scenes that you basically read and went, “Wow, this is something really special.” The dialogue is fantastic and both characters have very specific actions to play, so in one sense it was quite an easy scene because it was so well written.
That said, Louis and I talked a lot about it, and I actually went to his house one day to read over the scene. We even got up on our feet and tried to imagine how it [physically] played out. It’s great when you’re so turned on by a piece of material that you and your buddy set aside a Saturday to work on it!
A lot of times you study your lines, show up on set and it’s like, “OK, here we go.” On SGU, though, there are always things for the entire cast to do. There’s information that has to get out in scenes, and others where it’s about reacting to CGI aliens. We also get to do stunts and shoot guns. But for us, what’s really interesting are the scenes about relationships, where our characters are trying to come to terms with and change each other.
Speaking of stunts, are there any especially challenging ones that you’ve had to do so far this year?
Again, Scott has had to do some more fighting this season, which actually for me is hard. I’m not at all comfortable in my life with physical violence. I remember at the beginning of last year, me, Bam Bam [stunt supervisor James Bamford] and Jamil Walker Smith [Master Sergeant Ronald Greer] did some knife exercises where you wear all black and try to make marks on the other person with a piece of chalk. Bam Bam kept asking me, “Why don’t you go after him?” because I was always trying to be on the defensive.
That’s just me. Bam Bam always does an excellent job whenever our characters are involved in any type of physical violence. There are some neat fights this season between Scott and another main character who I get to push around and actually punch a few times. And in the season opener, ‘Intervention’, Scott has to ambush one of the bad guys and take him out from behind. That was a blast to do.
What was it like to film the Poirot TV movie Murder on the Orient Express, which you made during the SGU hiatus?
It was fantastic. It was one of those gifts that came completely out of the blue. I was in London for six weeks and worked with an unbelievable cast from Germany, France, the States and the UK.
It was beautifully shot, too. They had a fantastic DoP who did amazing things with light – not just as something you see, but using light to create a metaphor. I remember this one scene where you see my character, Hector McQueen, and the pain, rawness and rage that he’s been carrying for years and years towards this man, who’s now dead. They shot that as a close-up, and between me and the camera there was the flame of a candle – so it was like my character’s soul was on fire as he talked about it... It was a really cool and smart thing to do!
Stargate Universe is currently airing on SyFy in the US and Sky1 in the UK.
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