“He was angry,” says Edward James Olmos, of his former Battlestar Galactica costar Michael Hogan when the latter discovered along with the audience that his character Colonel Saul Tigh was one of the final five Cylons the whole time.
This was among the behind the scenes stories Olmos and Mary McDonnell (President Laura Roslin on the series) remarked on at the Battlestar Galactica Retrospective panel at New York Comic Con in Thursday.
“He walked out of the reading. He stood up and said bullshit.” Olmos recalls.
“You can’t help but feel betrayed for awhile,” McDonnell says. The audience, she says, doesn’t realize “how personally we need to take the work…so the idea that who he was playing for all these years” wasn’t who he thought he was came as a shock.
“You could see it in his face,” Olmos continued, “when all five of them are in the hanger bay for the first time, you can see it in his face.”
Hogan knew what the audience knew, that Tigh was a veteran of the previous Cylon War and that he hated Cylons, making him an unlikely choice to be a Cylon Manchurian candidate hiding among the fleet.
McDonnell, on the other hand, says she hoped she’d be revealed as a Cylon: “I thought, if I’m a Cylon, I’ll get all these new clothes. Why am I always in this suit” while all the Cylon women get all the nice costumes?
Olmos and McDonnell also applauded the bold vision of Galactica’s controversial final episode. “I loved the ending,” says McDonnell. “It took me years to come to appreciate it. But I think Ron Moore is a genius, flat out.”
“Ron was brilliant in making you think,” Olmos says of the ending.
Olmos wrapped up the panel by urging the audience to keep Michael Hogan in their prayers and to visit his gofundme to help out their costar, who has been suffering from serious medical issues. Olmos followed by leading the audience in repeating William Adama’s signature chant: “SO SAY WE ALL!”
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