WMD: My interview with Tricia Helfer, better known as No. 6 on BSG, here rendered in my column:
Down-to-earth star committed to work, fans, and cats
From an Alberta farm to a faraway galaxy
Barry Link, Vancouver Courier
Published: Wednesday, December 12, 2007Near the beginning of our interview in a downtown Starbucks last week, Tricia Helfer couldn't stop scratching her leg. "Sorry," she said self-consciously, and followed up with a quick laugh.
Helfer, a part-time Vancouverite best known for playing the steamy robot chick Cylon No. 6 on the critically acclaimed and locally shot Battlestar Galactica, was just a little bit nervous. That's when I decided I liked her.
It's admittedly not hard to like the 33-year-old Helfer. Life has been almost too good to her. An impossibly attractive five-foot, 10-inches, she stumbled as a teenager into a modelling career that took her around the world. Later as an adult, she started a second career as an actress by risking everything in a move to Hollywood and quickly landing a key role on one of the most talked about television shows of the past decade. She's smart as a whip, happily married (to a Los Angeles-based lawyer) and is building a vacation dream home--off the grid, of course, as an example of environmental responsibility--a tractor sprint away from the Alberta family farm where she grew up and to which she maintains close ties. She also rescues and adopts cats.
She's personable, in the forthright way that girls who grow up on farms can be. She's got acting chops that have yet to be fully appreciated. And her nervousness, while reassuring to my own nerves jangling with the reality of talking to a hot actress in a public place, was a sign she took the interview seriously. That marked her as an honest professional, which, combined with her emerging talent, makes her worth watching.
Helfer returned to town last week from her California base to promote the film Walk All Over Me, a Robert Cuffley-directed black comedy in which she plays a Vancouver dominatrix whose tightly bound world is undone by the arrival of a would-be younger protege. BSG fans, who range from traditional science fiction geeks to such decidely non-geek bastions as the New York Times, would say her latest role is a natural progression from her TV character. Played by Helfer with a liquid sultriness and a reservoir of sadism simmering below the surface, Cylon No. 6 is the prototypical S&M domme, alternately seducing and bullying a hapless scientist into betraying humankind. This sense of Helfer has translated into much of the media coverage surrounding the film's release--as if latex was her best and only fit.
But in BSG, Helfer's No. 6 is a conflicted soul who demonstrates surprising moments of remorse, characteristics brought alive by the actress as much as they're suggested by the writers. Helfer accomplishes similar complexity with her role in Cuffley's film. The easy choice, she said, would have been to play up the role's sexuality. "I played Celene," she added, referring to her character who we never see nude or with a client and whose profession is used largely as a plot device and not an opportunity for gratuitousness. At the start of the film, Celene, initially seen in a black wig that's almost in deliberate contrast to the platinum blonde of No. 6, is firmly in control of her work and what she calls her "life plan." By the end of the movie, she's at the mercy of fate and dependant on the resourcefulness of others. Her Cylon cousin is in a galaxy far, far away.
Helfer is proud of Walk All Over Me but agonizes about its traditionally meagre Canadian promotional budget. It's not the first indie film she's appeared in, and by her account, it won't be her last. She's eager to promote Canadian films and thinks it's a shame Canadians don't support more of their rarely observed indigenous cinema.
Helfer is also refreshingly invested in her BSG mainstay. Far from delivering William Shatner's infamous "Get a life" line from Saturday Night Live, she enjoys meeting fans of the show. Their intelligence impresses her. They, in turn, would be impressed by the intelligence and passion with which she discusses the series. She loves to talk it up, analyzing which season was strong or weak or revealing how members of the cast hold detailed discussions of some of the show's science fiction concepts.
Helfer's future after BSG, which enters its final season next year, is indefinite. She plans to continue acting, and eventually producing, with Cate Blanchett as her role model of a character actor who can take lead roles. The construction of the Alberta vacation home may be turned into an environmentally based reality TV show, and there are talks with agents and directors about other projects.
Whether Helfer's nervous about her future, I couldn't tell. If she is, it's a good sign.
blink@vancourier.com
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