Mab and Bill got the chance to be in on a press call for SyFy original series Blood & Chrome, which airs on the network Sunday 2-10-13 at 8pm pst, and talk to two of the stars.  Luke Pasqualino plays a young cadet Pilot William Adama, and Ben Cotton who plays Raptor ECO Coker Fasjovik.  Pasqualino is actually English, and there is something really awesome about hearing him say “Ba-ill-star” as opposed to “Ba-tt-lestar”.

(And I will say, only one of these questions came from  me personally. Several of the reporters in on the call were asking either the same question, or questions easily answered by doing a bit of research into the actors).

Question:  How do you guys feel about this release model for this show, about it being online first, then on TV.  As an actor, do you feel it helped exposure being online first?

Ben:  I think it’s great!  I had never heard of it being done this way before.

Luke:  I think being able to watch it online first is brilliant, especially for us over here in England where there is no SyFy over in the UK, for people to be able to watch it online first is fantastic.

Q:  How did you both become involved in blood and chrome and where you fans of BSG before being cast in the show?

B:  I uh, went to an audition.  Had a couple of callbacks, then went down to LA to screen test it, and thats where I met Luke. Together in the room with a group of execs and producers.  That’s the short version.

L:  I sort of fell into it from the opposite way, I didn’t audition from America, I was sent the script and I wasn’t a fan of Battlestar before. But I was familiar with the franchise and how big it was, I knew how well received it was though.  And when I was sent the script, I loved it. I got myself over to the states, and it was brilliant.  I got a call from Jonas Pate who directed it, and a couple of weeks after that I got flown out to LA and like Ben said, that’s where we met.

Q:  Luke, did you have any contact with Eddie Olmos?

L: I was given an email address, and we were kind of sending emails back and forth, but none of it was really about the work, in terms of material or performances.  It was more about what’s expected.  I didn’t want anything that Eddie did to influence my interpretation of the material because it was two very different stages of his life, so I tried to steer away from watching any of his stuff, but I did watch seasons of Caprica.  Mr. David Eick made that a priority.  It was homework for me, and I loved it.  To be part of the Battlestar franchise now, and to be welcomed on board as this young William Adama character, it’s truly an honor, and I’m very grateful for the opportunity.

Q:  Is this, both of you,  your first experience working with primarily green screen?

B:  (laughs) The hardest part was the helmet. It’s hard to breathe in those things.  The green screen was, strange, but I didn’t find it to be too hard of a challenge   I mean there were these little markers you could pick to make your imaginary spaceship, but after watching some of the dailies, I realized I wasn’t taking in the environment as much as I would if i was actually in a Cylon facility, but once I figured that out, I didn’t find it too challenging at all.  You get used to using your imagination.

L:  I was a little bit, daunted by the entire thing.  When I first came onto the set and I saw this huge sound studio full of green, I thought I was in some kind of field somewhere.  The hardest difficulties, acting-wise, is to judge those points where things are supposed to be.  That’s tough.  I think the hardest part for me personally was where the stuff was supposed to be inside our spaceship.  Or you know, when things are supposed to be flying over our heads and we don’t have anything to place it but this ball on the end of a stick. With a virtual environment like what Gary Hudson and the rest of the special effects team created on BSG, you can take it anywhere.  There’s not such thing as a location anymore.  Everyday of our shoot was in one studio, by doing that, that’s how you achieve what you want.

B:  Yeah, at times, it was a little bit like a black box theater type of situation, where you just have to use your imagination.

Q: How did you both as actors, develop the relationship with each other?  Was that on the page or was that something both of you kind of worked out as you did the scenes together?

L:  I think a lot of it was on the page, and a lot of it comes from rehearsals, and we worked very closely with Jonas which was a great team effort to take these characters from the page and put those relationships together. For me it came from me and Ben, because we were close friends.  If I needed to shout at him, I could shout at him, if I needed to laugh at him, I could laugh at him. I could have screamed in his face.  It all really came from the confidence of working together, and Jonas gave us a lot of free range to take it wherever we wanted.

B:  I found there was a real freedom on the set, to just sort of let it go and play with each other. It felt like yes, we COULD shout and yell at each other, you could laugh and do all those things Jonas let us make it up now and then to just keep it rolling and let us go at each other a little bit.  So it was really fun to work with an actor who’ll hand it back to you when you give it to them and it just keeps going.  So we were really lucky, and it was cool.

Q:  Luke, how was it to step into Edward James Olmos and the other actor’s shoes?

L:  It was more fun than I could probably describe in a phone call.  I had such a great time making it, and I was never really phased by the bar that Eddie had set.  I just went in with my own interpretation of the material, and get in there and really push those limits as far as they could go.

(it was at this point the connection to the UK and Luke got dropped)

Q:  Well then.  Um….so Ben!  Is this show one that people who haven’t watched Caprica and BSG could pick up on?

B:  I think you could jump in on it, I mean it intros the Adama character, and if you weren’t aware of this world before, I think you’d get a pretty good picture of this person.  I mean with this show, you’d have to start with Caprica, then this, then BSG.  I feel like this is a contained story, and pick up on who they are, what the world is and what is going on.

Q:  Since you can’t always trust wiki, Ben just to check, were you really the ‘terrified man’ in BSG: Razor?  And how was that different than Blood & Chrome?

B:  (laugh) yes, yes I was!  Well for Razor, I was there for a day.  I think I was in and out by lunch.  For B & C, we shot for 15 days, and I think we rehearsed for three weeks before that.

Q:  How was it to work with half of the Pate brothers?

L:  For me, i absolutely loved it.  From the moment i met him during the screen test til the day we finished the show.  He was a big BSG fan himself, and he was so passionate about doing this, directing this show.  He made us feel nothing but entirely relaxed.  It really helped us with our performances.

B:  At one point I thought, “You know, he’s allowing us a lot of nuances.”  Jonas allowed us to find it, and do alot of the work, and it was a little bit beyond just the words and that helped create chemistry between the characters.

Q:  Do you feel this show will possibly bring back BSG?  Is it something your hopeful for?

B:  Um, well heh, I’m out of that loop.

L:  I think hopeful is the best word to use.  It’s entirely out of our hands now, to see how well it’s recieved when it airs.  I mean we are very hopeful. I think we’d both love to continue working on the show.  All we can do now is sit with our fingers crossed and hope for the best.

Q:  Where there any particular episodes of BSG you watched to prepare yourself for this project?

B:  I started to watch, but then I stopped because I wanted to focus on what I was doing.  And my character wasn’t in any of the other series, so I didn’t have to know that world terribly well beyond what was in our scripts.  So I opted to pick my battles with that.  But from the time that I was there shooting, it really wasn’t Battlestar anymore, kind of had to pick my focus.

L:  Well for me being a Battlestar Virgin, the first thing David Eick did was throw seasons 1 and 2 of Caprica at me (at this point i start laughing, because there is no season 2, it’s like hearing someone way into Firefly say “man i can’t wait to see what happens in season 2!”) so I could see the start of everything. It’s where you can see the birth of everything in that world, really.

(and this is when I got in MY question)

Mab:  So Ben, I have to ask.  Do you think Coker is a Cylon?

B:  (laughs) I um, uh, no. I personally don’t think he is.

L: (laughing in the background)  I do!  I think he is!

B:  You do?

L:  Yes.

Mab:  He just totally had the right personality to be one.

B:  He did didn’t he?  You’re right, he was pretty grumpy.  You know…you may be right, I think you’re right, maybe he *is* a Cylon.

Mab:  And Luke, I have to say, your American accent is very well done for the series.  It’s kind of amusing how many of the actors from BSG to Caprica to Blood and Chrome all have been not American or not Canadian, and have had to do the accent.

L:  Oh thank you, thank you very much.  I have to give credit to Ben, on that as well.  Because I made it quite clear to him before we started shooting that if I said something wrong, he needed to tell me straight away. It got worked out well with my costar/dialect coach.

B:  (laughs)  Dialect coach, yeah.

Mab:  Oh good, well I hope you got a percentage for that, Ben!

(Both laugh)

And thankfully, I managed to get in before the window for the call ended, and I was the last question asked, ending the entire thing on a laugh, which is how I like to roll.

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