'I don't think of myself as being an actor anymore.' On episode 371 of the YVR Screen Scene podcast, published on 21 September, Amanda Tapping sits down with her friend, the journalist Sabrina Furminger, for over an hour and a half. They cover her Leo Award, the end of the new Stargate, remote auditions and the mental health book she has just finished with fans.
A Leo for a theatre of horrors
Tapping had wrapped season three of Murder in a Small Town in June. She directs and produces the show in Gibsons, on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast. You can only reach it by ferry, but it is not an island, a point locals care about so much that you can get a 'Not an island' sticker. The whole crew lives there, four months for most and six for her, with karaoke nights and bonfires on the beach. Many of the extras are local.
Her Leo Award for Best Direction in a Dramatic Series honours 'Masterpiece', a season two episode about an art-loving serial killer played by Noah Reid. The script set the finale in a quarry. She suggested a warehouse instead: this man loves opera and is building his own Dante's Inferno, so he needed a stage. With production designer Justin Ludwig, she set up risers, paintings and, facing the stage like an audience, the barrels holding his victims. She tells all this with a big smile, because it is make-believe.
Convinced she would lose, she had no speech ready and forgot to thank people. She values the Leos, because the West is often overlooked by awards based in the East.
'I had to make a choice'
Asked what she does for a living, she now says she is a director. She admits to missing acting sometimes, but she made the choice after Stargate and a recurring part on Supernatural. 'I know that this industry is hard on women, especially, and especially in North America,' she says. She is close to 80 episodes as a director.
She has grown more confident, a word she was once afraid to say, and that confidence makes her more open to ideas from every department. She learned the trade on the job: Stargate, then Sanctuary, which she treats as her PhD. That series, made before the streaming era, earned her no money. Salaries were deferred, and she and her partners lost their shirts.
The blooper and the lost reboot
A Stargate SG-1 outtake has gone viral again. On the set of 'Solitudes', in a refrigerated stage, she improvised a rant at Richard Dean Anderson, calling him 'Mr. McUseless' before crying: 'Dear God, I'm stuck on a glacier with MacGyver!' They barely knew each other then. 'I may have just lost my job,' she thought. By lunch he still hadn't spoken to her. What pleases her most is that young viewers are finding the show.
The new Stargate that Amazon ordered from Martin Gero was dropped in June. Sam Carter was not coming back, but Tapping was thrilled for him, and the show was setting up in England. According to Variety, Amazon feared it would not reach beyond the fans. She calls that reasoning 'foolish and insulting' to an audience that has stayed for almost thirty years.
Screaming into a void
Her real anger is kept for self-tape auditions, which have stayed the norm since Covid. 'It makes me so angry,' she says: actors must manage lighting, framing and a reader without knowing whether anyone will watch. She mentions a post by her Sanctuary co-star Emilie Ullerup, a mosaic of 40 auditions. Some of her closest friendships began in audition hallways in Toronto, and she mourns that community. Self-tapes, in her view, serve neither actors nor productions.
A book written by fans
Embracing Mental Health as a Fandom grew out of online workshops during the pandemic, run with The Companion. She was thinking of the people lockdown had left isolated. She is clear that she is neither a doctor nor a therapist. The sessions grew until they filled whole Saturdays, and a book built on fans' stories followed. When she recorded the episode, it was being bound.
Reading those stories, she felt like a hypocrite for holding back, and she ended up being more open. Asking for help has never come easily to her. During a hard time, Sabrina Furminger and Nicole Oliver turned up at Granville Island to tell her that friends ask for help. Her conclusion now is that it is good to let out what is inside.
She wears a tiny harmonica round her neck, which she and her director of photography used to mark the end of a scene. She bought 200 for the crew. When season three wrapped, at three in the morning in Gibsons harbour, a lot of them came out.
Listen to episode 371 of YVR Screen Scene
© Photo: Objectif Festival (Paris Manga, 2022)