Exclusive Interview: BATTLESTAR GALACTICA Star Jamie Bamber

By: Amrie Cunningham [My Take on TV]

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA is back, and not surprisingly, better than ever. What better way to count down the minutes to the final season premiere than by spending some time learning a bit more about everyone’s favorite Viper-pilot-turned-courtroom-lawyer, Lee Adama [aka Jamie Bamber]? Jamie and I talked last week about what he hopes to see for his character, what he hopes fans take away from the show, and what he really thinks about the whole “Starbuck/Apollo/will-they/can-they/should-they-really” relationship.

BATTLESTAR is hands down one of my favorite shows on television and I’m so excited that it’s coming back tonight.
Jamie Bamber: Yeah, we all are. It’s something that’s become very precious to us, and we want to see it finished in the right way.

What attracted you to the role of Lee when the series first started.
I think his entrance into the show. The way the character arrived, as a stranger aboard this Battlestar, not wanting to be there, being forced into this sort of retirement of his dad that he doesn’t get on with. It being completely about, you know, family relationships and something that we can all relate to. And then the end of the world happening and him being stranded in this world that he didn’t really want to be in. I thought that was the most fantastic premise for a character opening. This is not his life; this is not the people he’s surrounded by, all these military guys. He was probably, in my mind, about to quit the military, and here he is stranded. With the one man he didn’t want to see forever. It was just a great set up for a character, and an unusual one. In the original series, he was the out and out hero. And in this one, he is that, but he’s also less than perfect. He was very adolescent in the original, and I think I brought an adolescence to it that made it even more the case. It was that. It was purely that. And the fact, I knew I was meant to be playing Apollo, and yet I couldn’t find the character Apollo, he was called Lee Adama and it was that, we’re trying something new, and we’re trying to get away from the curse of these names, you know, Apollo, Starbuck. The way that Ron has made the world plausible, is what struck me.

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