Ever since it debuted in 2003, science fiction fans have been clamoring for more about the dark, murky work of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, which resulted in the prequel series CAPRICA and the latest addition to the saga, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: BLOOD & CHROME. BLOOD & CHROME revisits the life of William Adama just as he is leaving the academy and engaging in the seemingly never-ending Cylon battle. In a recent press conference call executive producer David Eick and star Luke Pasqualino talked about the genesis of BLOOD & CHROME, the challenges in bringing it to the digital screen and where the Adama journey goes in this third series in the GALACTICA universe.
Where did the idea for doing another prequel come from?
DAVID: I was asked by the network to think about a concept that would be under the umbrella or the rubric of the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA cannon that would make sense as an online series. And I was on an airplane and I was thinking about the character William Adama and the fact that we had seen him depicted as a very stoic, strong and very uncompromisingly anti-Cylon admiral and commander in BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. And then we’ve seen him as a child being exposed to an alternate, immoral world on the show CAPRICA. I though it might be interesting for an audience to see what that character might’ve been like when he was Lee Adama’s age, the character that portrayed his son in BATTLESTAR when he was the young, crackerjack hot-gun pilot, fresh out of the academy. Where did this hatred of Cylons come from? Why was this man that we will later meet as Edward James Olmos in BATTLESTAR GALACTICA so uniformly and uncompromisingly committed to the utter eradication and disillusion of this race of robot people? Where did that come from? Was it because he was a prisoner of war? Was it because he was involved in some horrible conflict? He wants to incinerate them, but why? And, the more I thought about it, the more I finally came up with an answer that I thought was emotionally driven. That his hatred came from a very personal place. Through that experience, he came to feel that the Cylons were an unforgivable race of creatures that, of course being responsible for our genocide and being responsible for attacking us, needed to be gotten rid of. But beyond that there was something much more deep and personal driving him and that was the sort of nucleus of the genesis of it. And I just proceeded from there.
Luke, have seen the original series and how excited you are to be a part of it?
LUKE: Actually, before I even got sent the pilot I’d always heard of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and the phenomenon it was, but never actually sat down and watched anything. And when I found that I’d been offered the role of Adama in this early 20-year-old period of his life, the furthest thing from my mind was watching anything that Edward James Olmos had done because I think you’re seeing this guy, this William Adama character, at two completely different ages and two completely different stages in his life. I didn’t want anything that Eddie did to influence my interpretation of the material. So, I tried to steer away from watching any of Eddie’s stuff, but I did watch seasons of CAPRICA. Mr. David Eick made that a priority, kind of homework for me really and I loved it. To be part of the BATTLESTAR franchise now and to be welcomed on board as this young William Adama character is truly, truly an honor and I’m very grateful for the opportunity.
How important it was for you to continue this story and to keep telling GALACTICA’s stories?
DAVID: I consider myself terribly fortunate and uniquely blessed to have been given the opportunity to jump into this world and to reinvent and sort of re-imagine as the phrase became this title in this universe. It has been my number one vocation, now entering into a second decade of all things, and remains my very favorite thing to do; that is, to work on and write and create and produce and be on sets and be in cutting rooms, visual effect rooms and casting rooms and all things BATTLESTAR. It’s where I’m happiest and it’s where I think I do my best work, in all humility. It’s something I hope I’ll have a chance to continue to do.
Are we going to learn more about what happened to William Adama between CAPRICA and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA?
DAVID: I certainly think we had every intention of exploring that interesting conflict between the William Adama who’s committed himself to fighting in a war, whose father we’ve come to know in CAPRICA, might have a very strong opinion against. And in the show that we’re watching now in BLOOD & CHROME, in the pilot we see an off-hand reference to this idea that William’s father was a mob lawyer and that maybe strings were pulled to create certain opportunities for Adama. Those are definitely interesting and complex relationship trends that we want to explore. In fact, we went to great lengths with BLOOD & CHROME to not be cute about too many nods and winks to characters from BATTLESTAR and CAPRICA. At one point, there was a discussion about having young William Adama in the hangar deck maybe bump into some young school teacher who is getting a tour of the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. And she introduced herself as Laura and they sort of move past each other and then I just thought, ‘I don’t want to be that cute.’ I don’t want to be that literal with it, and if we’re going to do stuff like that, we’ll save that kind of thing for later. There are a number of little Easter-egging nods to the BATTLESTAR faithful that anyone watching the DVDs or seeing this online will be able to recognize. But I think one of the things that will be less resistance to is to think about, do we Esai Morales who played William Adama’s father, to reprise his role in some capacity in a future episode? Do we show some of that conflict and strain between father and son and some of the uniquely kind of contradictory impulses that a mob lifestyle and military lifestyle sort of present? That’s all really rich storytelling—topsoil for us—to pursue if we get the chance to go forward.
Will the series feature the Cylons and the history of the Cylons? How big a part of BLOOD & CHROME are the Cylons going to be?
LUKE: I think me and David both have different views on this really, but I think being there in front of the camera, Michael Taylor’s writing and David’s input, has quite a lot to do with the kind of Cylons and the birth of the Cylons. And you actually find things out about the Cylons in these earlier stages. In CAPRICA, we saw the complete birth of the Cylons and to know that they exist. But, to tackle them in a different angle in this Cylon war and for us to tackle those questions like, ‘Are there Cylons involved?’ I think, yes, there definitely is; it’s a big part of BLOOD & CHROME because in any kind of BATTLESTAR show you’ll see Edward James Olmos’ work on CAPRICA, or even BLOOD & CHROME, I don’t think BATTLESTAR would be BATTLESTAR really—correct me if I’m wrong, David—without the kind of the Cylon element in there So, you do see them. I think to see them from a young Adama’s point of view is something completely different. I mentioned yesterday to another woman that to see there’s so many different stories that come together to make a big family. There’s the BATTLESTAR story; there’s the Adama’s story; there’s the Coker storyline. And then there’s definitely the big fourth one—the Cylons. To see their progression in that story throughout BLOOD & CHROME is quite magical really.
DAVID: For sure. Very well put. The only thing I would add is that I think what the viewers of this BLOOD & CHROME story, these ten segments, will discover is that as the Cylons embark on their decision to mimic and surpass human beings, which is a storyline that those who watch BATTLESTAR GALACTICA knows all too well, they didn’t do it overnight. It’s not like they were machines with gears and rivets one day and then have soft skin the next day. They took time to attempt to approximate an evolution. If they’d done their homework, they wouldn’t know the human beings didn’t start out as human beings because they went through a fish stage, an amphibious stage, a bird stage and a reptile stage before finally becoming mammals. Throughout this story, we will see examples of those approximations of evolution. How the Cylons were attempting to push through their evolutionary process in becoming more human-like and the results can be terrifying and unexpected.
We know at some point during the Cylon war that the Cylons teamed up with the Final Five. So will we see them team up with the Final Five or potentially bring back those actors?
DAVID: Well those actors are stuck in a timeline. They’re just in a finite time frame, so I think it might be confusing for the audience if suddenly they were to see Michael Hogan in an episode of the show even with the minutiae of that mythos apparent to the BATTLESTAR faithful, I think it underscores the larger point here which is that we really are making BLOOD & CHROME for a new audience as well as BATTLESTAR faithful. And as adherent and faithful as we are to the mythology into the history of the BATTLESTAR universe, we’re not slavish to it to the point where only the nine people on the message boards are going to get a kick out of it and everyone else is confused.
Could you talk a little bit about some of the more recent innovations that you were able to incorporate into BLOOD & CHROME that maybe didn’t exist when you started out with BATTLESTAR GALACTICA some years ago?
DAVID: It’s not that the technology didn’t exist, but it has always been cost-prohibitive and remains cost-prohibitive, frankly, if you watch a lot of the expensive digital effect shows on broadcast networks that have five, eight, ten times our budget. I don’t know these people personally. I’m not intimately involved in their process, but I have to imagine that bureaucracy and certain traditions of who visual effects are produced for television remain entrenched in old thinking because I look at shots that I know cost a lot more and took many more – much more resources on Fox or NBC than shots that we’re doing for Syfy or Machinima. I know ours are better and I just know that we’re doing better work and that there’s a more tactical, immersive reality to our 3-D work. For the most part, the short answer is if you can find the artist, if you can build from within a uniform apparatus as, I say an army, that is accountable to production that does not have any overhead, that does not have any amortization necessary other than your show, then you’re not going to a visual effects house, you’re not going to ILM, you’re not going to some company or some house, but you’re just building it in house. So you have a rag-tag fleet within your rag-tag fleet of visual effect experts and artists and professionals. If you have the time and the wherewithal to put together that kind of squad, you can do amazing things for an amazingly low number. What you have to circumvent in modern television making is a bureaucracy that is attending to most major studios and networks which demand that you use these visual effect houses because they’re trusted, because the spews aren’t worried about shots not beings delivered on time or shots not being up to snuff. But it is that bureaucracy that costs so much more money and then, in my opinion, delivers so much inferior work. If you can find an environment as we were fortunate enough to find during the earliest days of BATTLESTAR where, despite some pressure and some resistance, we were able to win that fight to not be forced to go to a visual house outside, to dump out shots off on, and instead to create them in-house where we had total control of them. We were able to deliver better work as the technology advanced as it did in between BATTLESTAR and BLOOD & CHROME. We were able to build fewer sets and create more digitally. That’s the upside, like BLOOD & CHROME; it also lent an aesthetic distinction. It’s not just that we accomplished it differently, it’s that it looks and feels different from BATTLESTAR and that makes BLOOD & CHROME feel new and unique and different for a new audience.
Luke, how did you retain your emotional core of your performance when you’re surrounded by so many technical challenges?
LUKE: When I first came onto set and I saw this huge sound studio just full of green, I thought I was in some kind of field somewhere. But really, just trying; the hardest difficulties acting-wise are when we’re doing scenes within our raptor where Jonas, our director, will be saying, ‘Okay there’s going to be a bomb lying over top of you now,’ or, ‘Something’s going to hit the screen now.’ It is in trying to judge those points, which are tough. But I really, if I’m honest, didn’t find it difficult as you might think to get the emotions and the messages across just because the cast I was privileged to work with. Ben Cotton, who played Coker, was absolutely fantastic. He and I together, we overcame it. We had a chat; we had a minor conference ourselves and we sat down and realized how we needed to work how we overcome this green-screen difficulty. And having people like David and Michael and Jonas all on board and involved together, pulling together the green screen was such a small factor of it. I think to try and pull yourself out of the fact that you’re actually working on a green screen and focus as much as you can on the material, the heart of the writing, just became so much more important that we didn’t even think about the green screen in the surroundings that we had. I didn’t realize how lucky we were to be doing this all on green screen. It’s taking slightly longer to air, but we had this opportunity to take this journey anywhere we wanted because we could literally put any kind of backdrop we wanted into this kind of Syfy, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA world. We could take it anywhere we wanted to. So, it had its pros, it had its cons, but I think everything was overcame and we executed what we had to do and what was most important as well.
Can you guys talk a bit about the development of the Adam and Cocker characters as this web series progresses?
DAVID: As I was saying before, the decision to root Adama’s hatred and for the Cylons coming from an emotion place versus just a war scar place was very interesting to me at the beginning. But what trumped that or what maybe was a way of accentuating that through this story, and this is where you guys have to be careful with spoilers, Adama will come to learn through a betrayal that he experiences, he learns that a more reliable and deeper and trustworthy relationship is with his partner Coker. Through this experience, the audience of BATTLESTAR might project that’s why Adama, Edward James Olmos’ character on BATTLESTAR, has this relationship with Colonel Tigh, a relationship that seems to run deeper and be more impervious than even Adama’s relationship with his own sons or any woman. Where did that come from? Why is that kind of relationship viewed by Adama as the more impervious to external factors, the one that he can rely on the most? And so it became very interesting to me to explore how what we would call a bromance usurps the romance and that bromance is, in our case, between Adama and Coker. And even though Coker is not Tigh, we might see the echo chamber effect of those ties that we’ll later find William Adama to the man Colonel Tigh in some later event. But this story is in part to explain why Adama views that kind of male comradeship with such unyielding importance and depth.
How far of a story arc did you have initially planned for the series?
DAVID: There was an entire 10-episode arc planned out because this was originally developed as an online project. And I’m so happy to have such a great and comprehensive cross-section of the press today because I feel like there’s a certain record to set straight which was a little bit frustrating to me a few months ago when I saw the headlines that the BLOOD & CHROME project had somehow been rejected or was a failed pilot or wasn’t going to make it on the air. It was never intended to be a traditional pilot, so to speak, such that Syfy not picking it up in a traditional manner to an episodic series was some kind of a rejection or failure. It was always developed at least from my point of view as a project for an online environment. And there’s something that we would develop and structurally, narratively build as a ten-part sort of a series. Kind of like the Raiders of the Lost Ark style, adapted to the 1930’s style movie serials where you have ten minutes of story and a cliffhanger followed by ten minutes of story and the cliffhanger. And then after ten of these episodes, it would all kind of resolve itself in a pre-act structure as a whole movie. And so when I set out to develop this, my thinking was to design a mission, so to speak. Of course, once the characters and the overall idea had been approved by the network, a mission that could be, as missions often are, in the military sense divided into ten smaller missions. And that’s really what we wound up with and what the audience is going to see. I think where the confusion in is that for a moment the network after seeing the script said, “Gee, we don’t want to rule out the possibility of just advocating the online venture altogether and throwing this up as a pilot for a traditional series to Syfy.” And there were discussions about that, but for a variety of reasons I think not the least of which was because there was a genuine feeling that we had really designed something altogether of groundbreaking from a visual effects standpoint to stick with the original plan and its future may be online, may be on air, maybe DVD in terms of subsequent future episodes or stories—who knows? But it was never any kind of rejection or failure that this didn’t wind up as another Syfy pilot. That was always designed to be something much more unique and special than that and I’m thrilled that it’s finally reached its distribution and it’s going to be seen by the people it was intended for.
Do you have another one planned after this series concludes?
DAVID: Well, yes, in fact, as an exercise, which is not uncommon with these things we, myself, Michael Taylor, David Weddle and Bradley Thompson got together and with Jonas Pate, our director, hatched a next mission. Sort of what the next leg of this character study would involve and should we be fortunate to go forward. There was absolutely the kind of very organic kind of evolution of where we leave the characters at the end of this story and what we would pursue as our next tale. And I’m very hopeful and optimistic that we’ll be doing that soon.
Can you talk about kind of the differences in producing a show for web series compared to television? Obviously, you have to, from a production standpoint, do things differently.
DAVID: We did nothing differently because it was geared for online versus broadcast. Absolutely nothing was decided or complicated or managed to accommodate that difference. The only choices that were made aesthetically, creatively, and narratively that were different from BATTLESTAR were purely driven by a desire to reinvent once again this franchise and this title for a new audience. So, if we were doing this for broadcast or we’re doing this as a future film or we we’re doing this for any other reason, or for any other outlet, we would have elected the site and exact methodology that we employed for this online exhibition as we did. It was not driven at all by a change in environment. It was only driven by our desire to do something unique and that would feel familiar and evocative of the original BATTLESTAR. I should say the first remake of BATTLESTAR for our audience and yet would feel at the same time new and accessible and fresh for a new audience. And there are a number of ways in which we shifted and changed our approach to production to accommodate that agenda, but it was in no way driven by now we’re doing it for online versus on air.
What was the most challenging in general since you started developing it?
DAVID: Just to stay on track with your original question, what we decided to do differently to make it fresh and accessible and evocative, but not duplicative of the last BATTLESTAR was to make this a green screen composite universe. You literally had a green screen stage with a massive lighting configuration that was something you’d see at a Rolling Stones rock show that could accommodate a variety of different looks and environments and then using a painstakingly built creative army put together by Gary Hutzel and Mike Gibson, our visual effects guys from the earliest in the BATTLESTAR days. We were able to achieve a look and a level of 3-D immersive compositing detail that I think you would compare much more easily to what you see in cutting edge feature films than to anything you would see on television. And I include, by the way, shows that have ten times the budget that we had. And then the reason we were able to achieve that, and I’m not bragging, I’m just giving a reasonable assessment of what’s different, is that where you spent the last ten years since the first BATTLESTAR mini-series that we did in ’03: building brick by brick this assembly of artists and experts and engineers and geniuses who have nothing but love for the product. We don’t use a visual effects house; we don’t go outside the boundaries of our own four wall, in-house unit and we sort of handcraft these shots. And so, by doing that and by combining that expertise and those artists with old fashioned sort of ancient in camera filmmaking techniques, which because of Jonas Pate and our Director of Photography Lukas Ettlin, we have the craftsman with the know-how to employ. We were able to create digital environments that are completely arresting, totally real and tactile and immersive and yet never require us to leave that green screen stage. And when I say old-fashioned techniques, I mean diffusion, darkness, shadow, snowstorms, and things that Eisenstein would’ve done 100 years ago. That doesn’t cost anything except your ingenuity. I think because of those factors, we’ve been able to create something that feels completely different from the BATTLESTAR that people may have seen three and four years ago, but that nevertheless retains a certain echo of what we had done so the fans still feel like they’re immersed in that same universe.
How difficult was it to recapture that aesthetic we’re all familiar with from the last BATTLESTAR GALACTICA series?
DAVID: We were fortunate to have many of the same crew people involved in BLOOD & CHROME who were involved in BATTLESTAR. So the Bubo’s and the dog tags and the helmets and all the things that seem to be the BATTLESTAR show, had come to recognize and to associate with our design aesthetic. We were able to bring back and to recreate and, in some cases, to buy back from the fans who had bought it at the auction at the end of the BATTLESTAR. I think in one case we had to go to some fan who had acquired parts of the rafter so that we could use it to recreate the rafter on the set. So, there were some rather unexpected ways in which some of those items came back into play for BLOOD & CHROME. But, it wasn’t really difficult at all. I think the bigger challenge was finding a way to then, while armed with those familiar kind of reminders of BATTLESTAR, introduce an aesthetic that would feel different and new and not necessarily a reminder of the old show. And that was where Jonas Pate and Lukas Ettlin and guys who were newcomers to this franchise became so invaluable.
Can you explain the absence of Ronald D. Moore? What’s the story there?
DAVID: No story, honestly. You’d have to ask Ron that question. I believe he got caught up in another deal or was wrapped up in another deal when this idea was hatched. He was at Sony. You’d have to ask him. I don’t know all the details, but unfortunately no dramatic or exciting answer to that question. He was just busy doing other stuff and we’ve been able to proceed forward. But I think the great thing about my partnership with Ron is that we were always kind of existing in the same mindset and, as I used to say, finishing each other’s sentences. I feel like there’s a proprietary Ron Moore-ness that coexists with my approach to BATTLESTAR, as I’d like to think there’d be a David Eick-ness accompanies his approach if I was gone. BATTLESTAR was a child we gave birth to together and this new grandchild of it naturally has his genetic imprint on it. I wouldn’t ever claim otherwise, but in terms of his, the factual answer as to why he’s not involved now or won’t be involved in the future is really just a matter of his having other irons in the fire and these deals that we make in show business tend to be exclusive. It’s hard to get to work on other stuff once you sign them.
Did Bear McCreary score the entirety of BLOOD & CHROME or are there different composers for different episodes? And will there be a soundtrack available also when the DVD comes out?
DAVID: I don’t know the answer to the soundtrack question. Naturally every episode of BLOOD & CHROME is simply a ten-minute chunk of a larger movie that we made. And so Bear’s score is of course prevalent in all the episodes and I’m hopeful if we continue on we’ll get Bear back even more.
What was the delay in the show actually premiering?
DAVID: Well, once again, this was an unorthodox and unusual distribution approach because this was not a pilot air. This is not a project that was ever designed originally to air on Syfy as its initial presentation or distribution. In those circumstances, when you have a pilot that’s going to premiere as a first episode of the series, we’re all accustomed to billboards on-air and online and we’re all bombarded with a multi-million-dollar advertising budget. This was always intended and designed to be something that would premiere in a much more unusual way, in a different environment, and in a different space. I don’t know what sort of expectations are for an online premiere. I see on Machinima this really impressive looking Halo 4 series that’s on and I have to say I’m quite impressed with their production values, with the writing, with the visual effects. I never heard of it; no one ever told me about it and it’s getting well over a million hits. So I just think it’s a different universe for them. We’re in a much more diversified, much more nuanced viewing landscape now and I just think things are marketed and distributed in different ways depending on what their intended venues are going to be. But as I said earlier I think the delay as it were had to do more with Syfy finding an online partner, a digital partner that made sense for a project and a title like BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. And of course as well all know there are a million of them out there and what outlet is going to be able to carry your brand and make good on your investment becomes a huge decision. We won’t know if the launch is in any way insufficient until we know what the numbers are and what they’re called in this universe. They’re not called ratings; whatever they’re called. We won’t know if the launch was insufficient until we see the results, but, to my way of thinking, or in terms of how I understand the online world, it just doesn’t work in the old-fashioned way. You’re not going to see billboards and a bunch of commercials; it’s all much more, as they call it, viral.
Between BATTLESTAR and CAPRICA what did you learn from an accessible storytelling standpoint that you were playing in BLOOD & CHROME?
DAVID: This was a story that came from a very personal place for me and it was really about exploring the root of what made Adama tick. This would be the Cylons and how that was informed by his love relationships, his understanding of the potential for betrayal despite love and the importance of a male figure in his life who he could depend on even above and beyond his own blood relations. Beyond that, I also felt that there was an obligation if we were going to reintroduce BATTLESTAR into the public that we tell stories that felt accessible. That we had done a tremendously thorough job of defining an elaborate and confluent mythology and that mythology would always stand intact. It would always be the subject of debate and they had an argument about what is Starbuck, all those kinds of questions. But this would be something that would function on a different level and I wasn’t able to write the script because I was obligated to a couple other projects and I had this story that I wanted to tell. And I was so fortunate that I was able to go to BATTLESTAR alumni who had done the kind of stories in BATTLESTAR GALACTICA that evoke exactly what I was hoping BLOOD & CHROME would achieve. Hard hitting, mission oriented, accessible stories that had depth and emotion and would be unusual in that it would extend into darker places and more human places than science fiction normally goes, which is always the hallmark of BATTLESTAR. But it would air more on the side of missions and objectives that bend mythology. And so Michael Taylor and David Weddle and Bradley Thompson were at hand. God bless them. Together we were able to break the story in detail. And then Michael Taylor wrote a gorgeous script that stunned everyone and got this thing green-lit. That’s really the tale of how it all came together, but the emphasis has always been on for fans of BATTLESTAR episodes like Ties That Bind and Act of Contrition and, I’m missing one of the great titles—a Thompson/Weddle episode—but, these were hallmarks of great battles or episodes that if you’ve never seen an episode of the show before were still wonderfully thrilling and engaging. Oh I’m sorry; Hand of God was another big reference point for us which I think was Episode 10 of the first season.
Luke, how did you approach William Adama to really understand who he is in this time period as compared to what we saw later? Was that easy for you since he was already established?
LUKE: I think, and I mentioned this before, to try and establish William Adama as an early 20-year-old when he’s already been established in his kind of 40s, 50s as Edward James Olmos portrayed him, and to see him now as the kid. Being 22 myself, I know that being this early 20-year-old, especially when you’re going into something new like the flight school that he attended, can be quite a difficult time for a young man. But I think my main goal was to not let anything that Edward James Olmos did influence my interpretation of the material. I wanted to go in there with a fresh head and I didn’t know too much about the franchise before I got the role. So, I did my research and knew Edward James Olmos’ and his character. David Eick gave me some great homework which was to watch both seasons of CAPRICA, which I did, and I thought just to take this on with only the CAPRICA theme in mind was key for me as an actor to try and get across the point. And obviously you know that the producers like Michael Taylor, David, Jonas, my co-star Ben Cotton, all of us playing together on our little team helped us get the message across to bring out the valuable points in the script. So, really it was. Yes, I mean it was tough. I did feel quite pressure doing an American accent. That was a big factor too, but to try and get as much of that out of your head—the technical aspects out of your head—as much as possible and just really trying to kind of connect with the material as much as possible was key for the final product.
Luke, can you talk about how you got the part of William Adama?
LUKE: Well, it was pilot season last year (2011). It must’ve been about February/March that I got the script from my team. Essentially, it was a new pilot for a BATTLESTAR GALACTICA franchise called BLOOD & CHROME and when I got the script I was almost thrown; I was kind of scared. I obviously had no clue about the franchise. I didn’t have any idea what the premise was. I was just completely out of my comfort zone. But as soon as I started reading, five pages in I just didn’t want to put the script down. And Lukas Ettlin is telling us as well that as soon as he read the script, he said you do really have to feel that you can kind of connect to the material. And that was one thing I really did feel. I felt in Adama’s shoes before I even had been offered the role. And then, I flew to L.A. for the test, and to be offered the role by Ben and David two or three days after that experience was fantastic. It was one of those things to me where it was more excitement than anything; the excitement of the opportunity of possibly having a show where I am the lead and I just really wanted this. When I finally got offered the part, I just got so thrilled I finally got to be a part of something. I wanted the responsibility of trying to make this what it was.
DAVID: Well, what Luke may or may not know is that he was the only one who writes the role who did so on tape. He was in the UK and he sent an email with, or his people sent an email with, his audition done on tape without the benefit of our casting people to sort of adjust the reading and who knew what we were looking for or any of that. Usually in the casting session, where you’re bringing actors to network, you’re at a disadvantage if you’re not in the room because people in the room are there and they’re physical and you can inter-relate with them. And then, anyone who’s not, you’re just watching on a screen. And we knew—me, myself, Jonas, and Michael—that we wanted Luke. But, we also knew we were at a disadvantage because he was on tape and everyone else was in the room in person. I have to say, to the credit of the folks at Syfy channel, Mark Stern and his team, we put the tape on after these very qualified and wonderful actors—any one of which would’ve been great—but none of whom were as special and as unique we felt Luke was. Mark looked at the reading; I think Luke was maybe four or five sentences into it and Mark turns around and looked at us and said, ‘Oh my God we found it.’ It was just a huge sigh of relief that went out because we were so concerned that Luke may have been at a disadvantage because he wasn’t in the room. It’s just a testament to how precarious these things are. You never really know how it’s going to go, but we were driving home that night on the phone with Jonas saying, ‘I’m so relieved. I’m so relieved. Whatever happens’—I was joking with Jonas—‘Whatever you do to screw this up, we know we’ve got our Adama.’ 
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: BLOOD & CHROME is currently airing on Machinima’s YouTube channel from November 9 through November 30th. In addition, sometime early 2013, Syfy will air the entire 2-hour movie event and the entire BLOOD & CHROME series will also be available on Blu-ray DVD as of February 19, 2013.