We welcome the return of Stunt Coordinator Dan Shea to share more memories from his time on Stargate SG-1 and take your Questions LIVE — and if we’re lucky, he may just bring Siler’s wrench!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Splash Screen
00:27 – Opening Credits
00:58 – Welcome and Episode Outline
02:12 – Catching up with Dan’s Current Projects
07:40 – The Risks of Different Stunts
13:33 – Preparing for Stunts from the Script Stage
24:05 – Ronnie Robinson & Peter DeLuise
26:43 – Air Rams and Squibs
31:17 – Injuries
32:28 – Jaffa Costumes and Stunts
36:23 – Stunt-Heavy Episodes
38:27 – Working on the film “Paycheck
42:49 – Preparing and Coordinating Stunts
49:41 – Stunt Issues and Prosthetics
55:55 – The Wrench and Gatecon 2022
58:46 – Dan’s Daughters Doing Stunt Work
1:02:04 – Stunt Training
1:08:09 – Sci-Fi Stunts VS Other Genres
1:09:05 – Cast Stunt Doubles
1:10:12 – How the Wrench Got Started
1:14:30 – Rewatching Stunt Work
1:20:07 – Wrapping up with Dan
1:21:32 – Post Interview Housekeeping
1:23:10 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read
Hello everyone, welcome to episode 215 of Dial the Gate, the Stargate Oral History Project. My name is David Read, I appreciate you joining me on a Friday. Dan Shea, Sergeant Siler and stunt coordinator for Stargate SG-1 is joining us for this episode. We are gonna share some more stories from the set and talk about what he’s doing now, maybe he’s brought a certain wrench along, we’re gonna have to wait and see. Before we get started, if you enjoy Stargate and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, click that like button. It makes a difference and will help the show continue to grow. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend and if you want to be notified about future episodes, click the Subscribe icon. Giving the bell icon a click will notify you the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last minute guests changes. Clips from this live stream will be released over the course of the next few weeks on the Dial the Gate and Gateworld.net YouTube channels. As this is a live show my moderators, Antony and Sommer, are standing by in the YouTube chat where we basically have a party every episode and you can submit questions to Dan. The moderators will get the questions over to me and I’ll get them over to him. In the meantime, he’s all mine. Mr. Dan Shea, stunt coordinator extraordinaire, Sergeant Siler, welcome back to Dial the Gate, sir. How the heck are you doing these days?

Dan Shea
I’m doing quite lovely young David, thanks for asking. You forgot to mention Richard Dean Anderson’s handsome stunt double.

David Read
That’s absolutely right, Richard Dean Anderson’s stunt double.

Dan Shea
I think he did that on purpose because Rick always knows that I’m a threat. I always wondered why he had like three hit series and I had none. Is he that much more handsome than me? I don’t think so personally.

David Read
I don’t think so either.

Dan Shea
But, that’s the way that goes. We always had a problem. Now my baby finger, whenever I held on to a P90 when I was doubling for him on Stargate, he would say “keep that pinky on your right hand down,” because I always had it up. He said, “it looks stupid.” Now I broke my finger on a show called Animal Control, a comedy on Fox. Now the thing sticks out all the time and now when I’m on my computer, I hate being on the computer anyways and that stupid finger always drags along and touches stuff on the keyboard. I’m kind of a non-digital dope to begin with and then once things start getting weird because of that baby finger, then I get in a little bit of trouble.

David Read
You would never know. The bumps and bruises that you had to put up with over the years was absolutely wild. Anyone who is willing to go through that punishment for posterity, for entertainment.

Dan Shea
And money. What about the money? Don’t forget the l’argent.

David Read
Absolutely. One of my favorite lines of the entire show is yours in 200, do you remember the line?

Dan Shea
Why does it always happen to me? Was that 200?

David Read
That was 200.

Dan Shea
When I got ratcheted into the wall.

David Read
That’s it. Exactly.

Dan Shea
Yeah. And it happens to me because I’m kind of like a stunt guy. That was the subtext.

David Read
Road to Christmas with Martin Wood you’re working on right now?

Dan Shea
Yeah, it’s a hallmark show here, it’s a little love story thing. We’re just kind of pedaling away on it, it’s kind of going to be kind of fun, there’s not a whole lot of action on it. There’s some actor action where you have to sort of babysit the actors and keep them safe and a little bit of driving and going through an obstacle course. They’re on mechanical reindeer so that should be fun, people flying all over the place. So yeah, we’re kind of working on that. I’m waiting for a couple of shows to come back for season two. So Help Me Todd on CBS is doing quite well so we’re waiting for season two of that. As I mentioned, Animal Control on Fox, is hilarious in my opinion and we’re waiting for that one to come back. On that show we had a 15 foot Python wrapped around a stunt man’s neck. The idea was it was supposed to be Terry Metcalf from the Seahawks and he had a pet snake and it accidentally wrapped around his neck. We couldn’t get him so we got to a local stunt guy, former professional football player. Three or four of the stunt guys, Gaston Morrison, you might be familiar with him, he doubled Dule Hill, the lead on Psych. He’s pretty well known and he did some Stargates. Him and a couple of other guys wouldn’t even audition for it because they didn’t want a 15 foot Boa constrictor wrapped around their neck if you can believe that. We actually had the actor do it and “oh no, he’s a stunt actor” and it worked out, it was pretty funny. First of all, we were petrified by the snake and an hour and a half into it we all wanted to get a picture. We wanted tp get that Britney Spears shot, not wrapped around our neck but just kind of round our shoulders. It was fun. Actually the lead on the show took the snake down to L.A. and he was on Jimmy Kimmel. He had it wrapped around his neck as a kind of promo for the show.

David Read
How do you get a snake to do that without killing someone?

Dan Shea
Well, we have two snake wrangler, they are just slightly off camera, they’re within arm’s length. Amazingly the snake doesn’t really do anything. You would think “what if all of a sudden he starts to tighten up on you?” That would be their instinct, isn’t that what they want to do?

David Read
Right, to eat.

Dan Shea
Wrap around your neck and then they kind of suffocate you and all sudden the head comes around and starts working over your head. Before you know it it’s the most horrific death one could ever imagine as you become just a big blump in the belly of a snake. That would be a horrific way to go. I don’t want to get too weird here but it harkens back to this news thing that I heard about. A family that lived above, this isn’t funny, stop smirkng. A family lived above a pet shop and in this pet shop there’s a huge Boa constrictor that went up through the rafters, through the air duct into a baby room. I’ll just leave it at that.

David Read
I think I remember the story.

Dan Shea
Nasty business.

David Read
How often do you come across something on the page that gives your team or the people that you’re going to get involved with, to achieve what’s on the page, pause?

Dan Shea
Every minute of every day, every second. Carl Weathers, Apollo Creed, he did a show called Street Justice years ago. He’s just like a stud, 6’2, 215, totally athletic and on Street Justice he told all of us “I get my stunt double…” turns out it was Johnny Ulmer who doubled Chris Judge on Stargate, “to do everything.” He said “even if I’m jumping off an apple box, I can break my ankle.” Tons of things can go wrong at any time so that’s why you want stunt people doing it who are sort of in that neighborhood and have the skill set and the emotional preparedness to handle all things that could go wrong. If something does go wrong, we don’t want stunt people to get hurt, but if they do get hurt then we can just get another one.

David Read
And continue working.

Dan Shea
Yeah, you cannot replace the actor because their face is on camera. That’s one of the reasons why we need stunt people.

David Read
Can I get technical for a second?

Dan Shea
Please do.

David Read
Can you tell us about the special insurance that’s involved for them? I’m curious.

Dan Shea
We have our union, we have the SAG union, we have the UBCP union and I don’t think we have any special insurance. We are insured through the union but I don’t think it’s some magical stunt thing because you are a stunt guy. I think the show is covered anyway.

David Read
I see, so it’s underneath the overall umbrella of the production.

Dan Shea
The umbrella of the show. Yeah. We don’t have special stunt guy life insurance. Well, you couldn’t get it. “What do you want insurance for?” “Oh, I’m a stunt guy. I’m gonna set myself on fire tomorrow” and they’ll be like “yeah, no, sorry. You don’t get life insurance.”

David Read
It’s wild, anything can happen. Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double on Harry Potter, the boy died.

Dan Shea
I missed that. What happened there?

David Read
How did he die?

Dan Shea
I didn’t know he died.

David Read
Maybe he died after but he was definitely injured heavily during production.

Dan Shea
There was that stunt woman from L.A, she was incredible, incredible motorcycle girl. She was blasting about 120 miles an hour and there is the camera on a like on an ultimate arm and I guess it’s swung across and hit her. I think she lost an arm and a leg. That was awful.

David Read
Yeah, it was a flying sequence. No, he wasn’t killed during production but he sustained an injury during one of the flying sequences. He lost feeling across his whole body from his finger tips down to his toes. The injury changed him and had long lasting effects plagued him for the rest of his his life. You know what, I better correct myself on this before I proceed. He’s not dead, I apologize. He hasn’t died but he is but he is a paraplegic. That’s the risk that you take when you go out there. I guess you know what you’re getting in for, that anything is possible.

Dan Shea
That’s supposed to be the idea, you don’t want anything to happen to you. There’s one guy who was doing a snow thing, launched off and hadn’t checked the snow depth, hit a rock and he’s also a quad but an incomplete quad. But he swims down a kid’s pool four times a week with me and first I’m like, “how do you swim?” He has partial use of both of his arms and he kind of swims on his side and he does a bunch of lengths. He’s a better swimmer than me. He gets in his car and he drives to the pool and he parks, he goes there every day and he’s upbeat. Wow, this guy…

David Read
You look at people like that and you wonder how you can ever have the will to complain about anything.

Dan Shea
Yeah, well I whine about the SAG strike and the writers strike. You figure well, “we got through COVID and we thought are movies going to come back ever? They’re probably not going to come back.” They came back in a huge way. We had Raiders, we had Mission Impossible and then we had Barbenheimer that weekend. It was Tom Cruise who said “I’m going to go and watch both” and that’s become a thing. Barbie’s made over a billion bucks. So what do they do? They go on strike. What can you do?

David Read
Who was it? Rob Fournier went by Bridge Studios the other day, four or five cars in the parking lot. It’s maddening, pulls your hair out.

Dan Shea
Yeah it’s nasty. Hopefully it’ll be resolved.

David Read
Absolutely, it’s just a question of when. So you’re working with Martin Wood, any other Stargate folks on that project?

Dan Shea
No. Not Stargate folks. No.

David Read
And mechanical reindeer?

Dan Shea
Mechanical. I’m not sure. Am I allowed to talk about script before something even shows?

David Read
Probably not, but that still sounds cool. I’m trying to get Martin on the show so maybe he can expound further. Dan, I’m curious as to the process that you would have for going through a specific Stargate script. First of all, was it different or unique in any respects to any of the other content that you’ve worked on? Can you take me through the process of what you would have to do to prepare and execute what was on the page? How many weeks in advance would you get the script? How would you prepare? What’s the process that you would go through if you don’t mind from beginning to end?

Dan Shea
Episodic, we’d have about a week and a half prep and an eight day shoot. You get the script, you read the script, you start highlighting the script, all the stunts and all the actor action beats. There’s an ND sequence where you have a bunch of Jaffa running around or something getting blown up. How many do you think we should try and get for this and should we make it cool? Is it enough for them just to jump off an apple box? We’ve seen Jaffa running and flying and blown up before. Are they going to get bored if we just have them fall over or should we put them on wires? How do you have the wires? Do we need to bring in a huge crane that costs 50 grand or are there big trees there? Maybe we can convince Martin Wood or Peter Deluise. Let’s have the action over by the trees and we can put pick points up in the trees and then we can have it come down to a ratchet which has 1000 pounds per square inch of oxygen in the machine that can propel people through the air as quickly as humanly possible. You can yank them so hard their boots would fall off. Do we want to have them fall off camera on your pad? Do we have Wray Douglas set up some flames up the rear end so that’s kind of cool as they’re blasting away. Then we need fire retardant gel to put on their face. These are just conceptual things you would go through during the concept meeting which would be the first meeting. You then put together your preliminary stunt budget and then you got to be careful. Are they whining about money these days? Are the ratings high? Should I go big or should I go go small? If you go a little bit big, ask for 10, maybe you can get away with 8 stunt people. You do your preliminary budget, no one whines about the numbers so then you figure “oh great.” You start thinking about hiring people then you start sending the pictures of the people to the director. What do you think of this person? “We’ve hired Ronnie Robinson [Ronald Robinson] too many times. He’s six foot four, 235, he’s great but we saw him last season.” I want to talk briefly about a Ronnie Robinson anecdote later as we wrap up.

David Read
You got it, I’ll bring it up.

Dan Shea
It’s a Peter DeLuise and Ronnie Robinson story. So now you do that concept meeting, you discuss discuss discuss. Then you have your specific stunt meeting where you go into details about how are we going to make it look cool? How are we going to make it safe? Then you have the tech survey. Everyone gets on the happy bus and you go around to all the different locations and you discuss exactly what you’re going to be doing. The Stargate is going to be over there and people are gonna be coming up over the hill. It might be kind of cool to have a guy being shot and roll down the hill. Things might pop into your head that are location specific that you hadn’t thought of before and you run it past the director and they say, “no, you’re an idiot” or they go “that’s kind of a cool idea.” That’s the other thing too, if directors are kind of not very pleasant you tend not to want to give ideas because they make you look like an idiot. Our guys like Martin Wood and Deluise, they’re hilarious. They would encourage you even to give the stupidest ideas and I always came up with a lot of stupid ideas. Now we’ve got the tech survey, we got that scoped in so now we’re pretty much locked and then we start actually hiring the people. The people go for their wardrobe fittings and they go for their haircuts and so on. Then we get the schedule. We hire everybody and then the schedule changes 13,000 times and the 10, 15, 30 people that you hired are now no longer available because they’re going to work on the Will Smith I, Robot thing which is huge and it’s more money and it’s cooler and it’s a 135 buyout for the actors to be on camera instead of a 110. You know with buyouts they can use your image for years and not have to pay you residuals whereas in SAG there’s no buyout so you get residuals right away but you don’t get double your salary up front like we do here at UBCP. They love features because you make more money in features. So then you gotta hire 10 more people then the wardrobe people are like “what? We fitted all these guys and now we got to fit a bunch of other guys. What’s going on?” “Not my fault.” “Oh, this guy has got a tattoo, We got to bring in someone else three hours earlier to get rid of the tattoo. I’m going to complain to the PM [Production Manager] that the stunts are causing all these budgets alerts.” This guy’s got bleached hair, Jaffa and…

David Read
I remember that specific actor with bleached hair.

Dan Shea
Yeah, they can’t have it or they specifically want it. we had Glenn Ennis and Michael, I can’t think of Michael’s name at the moment, they were huge blonde haired guys, they’re six foot four. Glenn Ennis now, as an aside, was a Jaffa and he doubled, gosh, who’s the biggest guy in Hollywood now, who’s Aquaman, he doubled him.

David Read
Oh Jason Mamoa.

Dan Shea
You know Jason. Glenn and Ken Kirzinger who was a stunt Jaffa Commander, stunt actor, are going somewhere this weekend for a convention. Maybe you’re familiar with it because they played Jason in a bunch of movies. There’s some convention somewhere in your great country where these two buddies of mine, both 6’4, 6’5, one 270, are going to a convention. Brad Loree also because they play Jason. Glenn did a little video on youtube today where he’s putting all these Jason masks in a suitcase, packing to go to his little convention. Then you get all the new people and then you’re about to shoot. As you’re about to blow stuff up they send you another script and you start prepping as you’re on set and you repeat all over again. But now it’s overlapping because now you’re shooting one episode and prepping the next. That was the fun part. When the WB stunt shows came, the stunt coordinator named JJ Makaro came up with this miraculous idea of having a stunt coordinator and a dedicated fight choreographer, a dedicated budget guy and a dedicated tech survey guy. That cost a ton of money but the formula worked. With that we got Superman and Legends and Arrow and Flash. Back in my day I was the idiot who did everything, and still do. Then you throw in COVID, the schedule changes and everyone’s been tested. Now we got to get a whole bunch more [test kits] and we got to get them tested. When I was doing Animal Control, we’d actually done the fight choreography, we did the pre-vis. Pre-vis is where we shoot the video and you cut it and you show it to the grown ups and get them to sign off on it so we’re all dialed in. Then everybody went to Whistler [film festival] to see the stunt person, Marny Eng’s, incredible movie. They’re at the film festival and they were partying and drinking and hugging and then they all got COVID. All my fighters have got COVID and I gotta bring in five new people on Monday to work on Tuesday. I bring them all in and we’re doing the PCR test which takes seven hours, they’re all positive. So now I gotta bring in seven more and it’s at night and their call time’s 5am the next morning. I bring in ten, I say “the people who don’t test positive, you’re working.” We did a nice fight on another show called Animal Control, not Stargate, but still a funny show. So that’s another thing, the whole COVID thing. When we got to the end of another show that I was working on, Animal Control, So Help Me Todd and this other show called Under the Bridge. It’s a story about a south South Asian 15 year old girl from Victoria, you know Vancouver Island is Victoria. 15 years ago she got beat up and drowned by a bunch of 15 year old girls. We got to the end of that and the last month of that show we didn’t have to do COVID tests. No testing, no masks, no nothing, it was heaven. Sorry for the ramble. The lead on that show, she’s incredible. Her mother was Lisa Marie Presley, she died four months ago so we were on hiatus for a month. I forget the lead’s name, she’s incredibly talented, but that was Under the Bridge. You can knock it off, I see you’re typing it in, you’re gonna get it. She’s in a bunch of stuff and she’s really thriving.

David Read
Danielle Riley Keough.

Dan Shea
That’s the one. Riley Keough. Did I ramble. Did I answer your question.

David Read
Yeah. So you would get to the day, you would get the people that you had. Would the stunt business end when production ended? Would you be brought in at all in post for anything?

Dan Shea
No, no post for me. We would be second unit cleanup. We would do all the stuff with the actors and we have to think “okay, what’s going to be in the background of the shot of Chris Judge?” We got some stunt people flying off of what’s called air rams where they, pound per square inch, it’s like a little diving bar thing, you step on it, it projects you through the air. We’d have to remember, as second unit, where everybody was doing their business and we would recreate close ups of them doing their action shtick. They wanted to get all this stuff for the actors because they needed to be in the next scene for the next day’s work whereas the stunt people weren’t locked in. We could take two days as second unit just to knock off tons of people getting shot and blown up and burnt and thrown into walls and kicked in the crotch and so on. So Ronnie Robinson he was a 6’5 260 lb Jaffa, he’s hilarious. He was an ex-professional ballplayer, played for the Detroit Lions and then he came here for BC Lions in the CFL. He had this Jaffa thing on his forehead, they are really intricate, those things they would…

David Read
Tattoos? The gold ones?

Dan Shea
Not the gold one, it was different.

David Read
The black ones. Yeah, the First Prime tattoos, the System Lord symbols.

Dan Shea
That’s right. I’m just thinking of the word, it’s not a tattoo. So Ronnie Robinson had it and it took like an hour to put this on him and he had his close up. We went to lunch and Ronnie had a little sleep and then we came back after lunch and Peter DeLuise was shooting his stuff and he did this close up of Ronnie. All of a sudden the script person said “hey, where’s his tattoo, where’s his emblem, where’s the thing on his forehead?” Peter DeLuise was like “what?” Sure enough, Ronnie’s thing was no longer there. We’re like, “what the hell?” We just shot him with it and now we shot it without him for like an hour. What’s up? Peter took Ronnie off to the side, he said, “Ronnie…” just like when you’re talking to your kid, “don’t lie, I won’t get mad. Just telling me what the hell happened to your thing.” Ronnie said “well I was sleeping and then I may have put my hand on…I don’t think I did.” Peter said, “I won’t get mad Ronnie, just please tell me the truth.” I think what happened was Ronnie fell asleep, he was all sweaty, 6’5, 260 and he was sleeping and he wiped the whole thing. He had to go back and take an hour to put the thing back on again to go shoot a bunch of other crap. So that was a little Ronnie Robinson incident. What we all love is how Peter DeLuise took him to the side and said, and Peter is quite big, he’s like 6’2 himself and Ronnie’s 6’5. He’s going like, “okay, I’m not gonna get mad but please don’t lie…” not that Ronnie would lie…”but what happened to that emblem?”

David Read
My gosh, it’s little things like that. There’s one episode early on, I think it’s the Enemy Within, I think it’s the episode right after the pilot where Teal’c’s serpent tattoo is upside down. Go back and watch Enemy Within. It’s like, “ah, oh yeah, no, no.” You know what, you catch as much as you can and you move forward. The air rams? I’m curious. Would those activate when the Jaffa would approach it? Would it physically feel him or is there a button that timing it with?

Dan Shea
When you’re foot touches it it would go. The buttons you’re referring to were squibs. The effects guys would have squibs where stuff would blow up and they’d have to time it. Let me do you a quick squib story. There’s another show in Australia where we were up in this big huge tower on a cliff, what are those things called where the ships are coming in and they got the lights?

David Read
Lighthouses?

David Read
Did they figure out what’s wrong before between take one and take two or are they just going to try it again?

Dan Shea
We had this guy named J.J. Makaro who I mentioned earlier, he was a high fall specialist. His gag was to run, he’s at the very top of this lighthouse, run towards the glass, the hard glass and just as he launched himself, they were supposed to blow the glass and he was supposed to go out and drop like 150 feet onto an airbag. He had to be running as fast as he could to dive out through this glass. So take one, running running running running, just as he’s going the effects guy is just lined up with a glass and he presses the button and the button doesn’t go. J.J Makaro goes boom into the thing like a little fly or a bee on a windshield and kind of falls down like this. It was like “holy crap,” take two. He’s gotta do it again, he’s gottaa run just as fast at that plexiglass and he has to pray to someone that this time it actually will go.

Dan Shea
Hopefully. They were like, “uh, ah, hmm, I think it was the doohickey that didn’t go.”

David Read
The damn doohickey.

Dan Shea
The thing is if he doesn’t get out far enough he’s gonna die because you know how lighthouses kind of come out a little bit.

David Read
You have to get past the lip of the of the top level.

Dan Shea
Correct, you gotta get out at least eight feet to get to his airbag. Can you imagine what goes on inside your head when you’re on take to your running? It’s like running towards a brick wall and please blow this thing. Don’t blow it too soon because then he blows all the glass in your eyes. You gotta look and see where your mark is and if they blow it too soon it blows up in your face. Also the timings wrong, the audience can see it’s supposed to be you breaking it and if it blows before you get there then “oh god we gotta do it again.” When he was on take two they nailed it and he dropped 150, maybe 70 feet onto his air bag.

David Read
Can I ask about that?

Dan Shea
Yeah.

David Read
Why not use candy glass? Why not let him break it?

Dan Shea
Candy glass isn’t quite as good, it disintegrates, it doesn’t look as cool as tempered glass. Tempered glass is the real thing but it’s also kind of real dangerous. I did one of those things too when I did a dive through, a similar thing. They were a bit late, I still have the knuckle here from it. I hit the thing and it didn’t break but my hands went like this [hands in front of head] and then it broke and then I went through.

David Read
Was this Stargate?

Dan Shea
No sorry, it’s for an earlier thing. Lou Bollo is a coordinater who you don’t know and just trying to think of the show, would have been a candle show. I just dropped 10 feet on the pads, not 100 feet like the cool people do. What was I supposed to answer before I digressed?

David Read
I was asking about the about the air rams.

Dan Shea
So air rams are these these lids and when you run and your foot touches it, it activates and it throws you. They’re nasty because if your leg is back like this and it goes, it throws your legs out in front of you and then the lid comes up and you hit your head. If you’re not right, the thing comes up and can snap your achilles, it can snap your leg. There’s a guy named Gerald Pates who was a Jaffa a few times on Stargate, he just disintegrated his leg from an air ram. Also sometimes they’re slipy. When you practice air rams you’re in a gymnasium and your feet are dry and everything’s ideal conditions. But when we do stuff for real on shows like Stargate, it’s always raining, it’s always night, it’s always the worst case scenario. These guys are through the roof great when it’s dry, they need all that extra skill to do it because on the day everything’s 10 times harder.

David Read
If someone gets injured do you try and make sure that that shot is worthy of ending up in the final product? They got hurt but I imagine it’s a question of “did we get it?”

Dan Shea
Yeah, the stunt guy would certainly want it to be there because he or she couldn’t do it again. At least if they got hurt they would want it to be there. The other problem is when people get hurt and it looks nasty, a coordinator might want to put that in to win an award. Like, “oh god, that’s gnarly!” But then you don’t want to be using stunt people breaking their legs to win you awards. That’s one of the reasons why apparently they never had stunt awards. They didn’t want stunt coodinators…

David Read
An injury competition.

Dan Shea
To be pushing the envelope with these poor people because they push the envelope enough. To be injuring these guys just so you can put on a tuxedo and go on TV and hold up a little trophy, hopefully we would be responsible enough that we wouldn’t do that.

David Read
When I was at prop works we sold 50 of those Jaffa costumes. I don’t know if people realize how complicated those darn things are. The number of pieces that are involved, the amount of Velcro that you have to count on, keep the buckle on the front in place from the belt. You got all these different sizes of guys and not all of them are going to fit exactly right. Did you have pieces falling off all the time?

Dan Shea
They did. I want to tell you about this guy, he’s a stunt performer and stunt coordinator named Scott Nicholson. He was a Jaffa a bunch of times and he was a stunt actor one time. He did not want to put the Jaffa suit on because they were incredibly incredibly uncomfortable. He got in his stunt room with his shirt off. He looked good, he 0.03% body fat, he was a bodybuilder and he looked good with his shirt off. The thing was, we wanted him with his Jaffa suit on. He said “I’ll be there for you on the day but I just don’t want to put the crap on now.” It took two wardrobe people to put it on. We had Jason Calder, who was Daniel’s stand-in, we threw all the Jaffa stuff on him and we put him up this tower while the stunt guy was in his room nice and warm. I remember the reason we had a stunt person up there, there’s supposed to be squibs and stuff and going on, he was supposed to be up there looking handsome, blue eyes holding on his big gun. Twitchy Calder was up there in the tower, he would stand in for the Shanks and then he would go up just in the background. Martin would say “would you mind just going up there Twitchy in the background. Throw an old wet Jaffa suit on.” He’d go up there just on an extras voucher, which is like a 10th of the money that the stunt guy was making on the stunt performers contract in his warm room. This went on for three days, the stunt guy was getting paid like a contract and a half to be sitting in his room. Now it was time to bring in the Jaffa, the stunt tower Jaffa. He went up there and he was all shiny and sparkly and all the wardrobe people put on all the velcro straps. They spritz’d him and he did his little close up shot and then it came time to blow it up. They said, “okay, let’s get everybody out of there.” I’m like, “what?” I thought “what do you mean?” Wray said “we gotta duck, we’re gonna blow the hell out of this thing.” I thought it was just gonna be squibs, that’s the reason we had the guy. We got everybody, including the stunt Jaffa guy out of there. He said “let me put a dummy up there” and they blew the hell out of the tower and the dummy.

David Read
This is Into the Fire with Teal’c and Hammond are flying over and they blew the hell out of that thing.

Dan Shea
That’s the one. We had this guy there, I couldn’t tell the producers, but we had budgeted for him for four days, a contract and a half and then we didn’t even use him, we used a dummy. Then the sci-fi magazine came out, I forget what it was called, but in the centerfold of that episode, there he was, what I call Tower Jaffa, up there for his huge close up, he looked incredibly impressive. That was the only time he was up there, he’s up there for like seven minutes for the close up.

David Read
The shots of him scanning around.

Dan Shea
Yeah, that’s right. He got the big close up for the show and he got the big close up for the magazine and he was only there for seven minutes.

David Read
Well, at least you guys ensured that he was going to survive by using a dummy instead.

Dan Shea
He did survive.

David Read
Would you ask that the episodes that were stunt heavy to be followed by an episode that was not stunt heavy? I would imagine at a certain point you would have certain stunt people in one episode, can you necessarily have those people in the next one in the event that they get injured?

Dan Shea
I could never request that, it would be way beyond my pay scale. I wouldn’t have the audacity to say, “oh yeah, we’re busy on this episode, it’s stunt heavy, can the next one be light?” Sometimes it sort of wound up that way but I would never say that because then they might replace me. Also they might say “well, maybe we need a another coordinator so we’ll have two.” “Maybe this guy will be cooler than me. No, that’s fine, I’ll do it.” I’ll get my guy who’s not going to stab me in the back to do the next [episode]. But yeah, your question, that is totally the thing. You never want it back to back heavy because then again you’re prepping and shooting and you get that overlap thing.

David Read
Right, you may miss something in the next one because you’re so busy on this one.

Dan Shea
Then you could just get someone to cover for you, you could get another coordinator to cover, that would be fine. You’re right, my ideal scenario was heavy, light, heavy light but I would never have the audacity to say, “hey, producer guys, would you mind not having…” That’d be too much.

David Read
No, I phrased it poorly. It’s interesting because sometimes you just have to step up and deal with more on your plate this season than the next season. “This season’s episodes didn’t have a lot of stunts, they were more this type of show.” Or “man this season is twice as much as last season.” You probably look at the end of the season and go “well, compared to this, this was kind of this kind of season.”

Dan Shea
Also it’s kind of fun too to go and do other shows. I remember I did a show called Paycheck with Ben Affleck, they were shooting at the Vancouver Film Studios across the street from the Bridge [Studios]. I think I was the only human ever in the history of showbiz to be on camera on two different shows on the same day. No actor would dare do it, you just couldn’t do it, their agent wouldn’t let them. They would change the schedule for them but they would never change the schedule for me. I was doing Paycheck, I started doing Paycheck when we had our Stargate hiatus. They overlaped the features I wanted to do, I went for three or four more days. Then they threw me in for a Siler and I didn’t dare say “oh, I’m not available” because then they say “oh really? You’re a big shot all of a sudden, we won’t put any more Silers in there” so I said I was available. I showed up at the Vancouver Film Studios and I put on my security outfit, jumpsuit, The girl combed my hair to the side. The day before my head had come off and it annoyed her so this time she put on a ton of hairspray to make sure the hair was not going to be flying all over the place. I went to Dan, the third AD, and said “hey Dan, do you think you’ll be needing me for the next seven hours?” and he said “no.” I ran across the street in that wardrobe to my room at Stargate. I took off that jumpsuit, put on my Sergeant Siler blue jumpsuit, Patrick’s [hair stylist] there and said, “how come your hairs like that?” He sprayed my hair, took all the grease out, combed it on the other side. I went and did the principle cast video and I was off camera being Silar. I was crapping my pants because a lot of times they hold my part, they don’t even bother turning around for Siler. They leave him for later which is good because then I can get overtime, I’d be there all day just for one line. But today I did not want to be there, I wanted to get the heck out of there and get back to my gig across the street. Luckily they turned around and they were setting up for my close up and then all of a sudden I got a call on my phone saying “hey, it’s Dan.” I’m like, “whoops, I’m going to be so totally fired from one of these shows.” Turns out it wasn’t Dan the AD from Paycheck telling me to come back, we need you, it was Dan the stunt guy saying “hey, I’m available for work if you need me.” I hung up, I did my line and I took off my jumpsuit from Stargate, I ran across the street with my other jumpsuit and I showed up back on set for Paycheck and nobody had moved. They’re all doing their crosswords, narcolepsy had set in. The hair person looked at me and saw that my hair was combed on the other side and she said “what the hell?” and she said “get back in that room” and then she went through it again, this time with a metal brush and I had little trickles of blood coming down the back of my neck.

David Read
You were really bleeding?

Dan Shea
I might be exaggerating slightly.

David Read
Okay, but she was irritated is the point.

Dan Shea
She was irritated. You know Cruella de Vil with a hairbrush, or was it Cinderella? There’s some story where they comb their hair really rough. Maybe it was the Brady Bunch, I’m not sure. Somebody was combing hair rough.

David Read
And that ladies and gentlemen is how you get two days of pay in one without losing your job.

Dan Shea
I got more than two, I got three because I was also stunt coordinator so it was a triple dip. You can do that if you’re the coordinator because you’re not on camera so if things go sideways you can get someone to cover for you if you have to be on camera as a stunt performer. The thing about this which I should never have done but I’m just so greedy and so irresponsible and someone you should never hire me because now you know what I’m actually like. I was on camera for two TV shows at the same time across the street from one another and somehow I made it happen. I didn’t make anything happen, the will of somebody at a higher place made the universe come together to allow it.

David Read
When you are going through a script, you go and highlight the parts that are going to be stunt heavy or involve anything with you. Have you ever had an “oh crap” moment where a couple of days later you [realise you] missed one. You’re talking about “oh, we go through, we highlight, we highlight.” All I’m thinking of is, “oh my gosh, if I were tasked to do that at some point I would overlook something.” Not like you’d get to set…there’s a whole process that you have to go through, but a little bit further into the process you realize that you missed something that needed to be done and you had to bust your ass to make sure that it got done.

Dan Shea
No, that’s too scary for me, our locations were so far away from humanity. If you needed a bunch of porta pits to come out there for people to fall on it would take three hours for it to happen and you would be so totally fired. I was so petrified of something like that, I never forgot stuff. They would change things and they would add stuff and even then you’re expected to have that on your truck. That’s the joke with the effects people and different different departments. With this director I gotta bring my whole truck because he or she will deviate from prep and a lot of times they’ll make you look bad. They’ll say, “oh, so we’re going to ratchet that guy into the tree” and I’m like “sorry, no. I don’t think we’re gonna do that.” They say “oh, we discussed that did we not?” You don’t want to say no either because then you’re making the director look bad, that’s another way we can get so totally fired. A lot of times you gotta eat crap. Luckily on a show like Stargate, it was so big everybody had all the stuff there anyway. We probably could have hooked somebody up to something and yanked them and I would have had pads there. I could never forget because the outcome and the repercussions would have been so scary I couldn’t have lived. But we did deviate and they did expect us to…

David Read
Read their minds.

Dan Shea
Read their minds, yeah.

David Read
I guess the point is you bring the kitchen sink in terms of your supplies. If you’re going so remote, like out into the GVRD or some of these other places, you gotta be ready.

Dan Shea
If it’s a small show, no, they don’t expect you…they don’t have any dough. The guy’s supposed to fall over, you have a pad, end of story. But the big shows, yeah, you gotta be ready.

David Read
There was an episode called Forever in a Day in season three. It opens up with Rob Fournier on the back of the M.A.L.P that has been rigged with a very large submachine gun and the Jaffa are just coming over the hill and he’s mowing them down. How do you coordinate to make sure that these guys don’t fall all over each other? It was like a free for all this shot. Eventually Jack gets on it and takes over.

Dan Shea
Well, you can’t really because they’re a bunch of stunt Jaffa coming over and they’re rolling down sand and the odd time you do get kicked in the chops. I remember this one girl I had doubling Amanda. It was another thing, not that same one, we had another one where we’re rolling down a hill where a big creature was pulling everybody.

David Read
The Unas, yeah, that’s Demons.

Dan Shea
Unas, yeah. They all rolled down that hill and a couple of them got kicked in the chops. You’re talking about Fournier, I’ll remember that forever because we had to put some gel on him. He got hot, he was up there and there was an explosion on him and I think we yanked him back.

David Read
Yes, you did.

Dan Shea
There’s a bigger story. We had to put a bunch of fire retardant gel on him. I think that was a 35k that he was shooting and that was Peter DeLuise’s episode. There wasn’t a million Jaffa, Peter DeLuise did the duplication thing.

David Read
Okay, digitally inserted them in post.

Dan Shea
Maybe we had seven or eight of them. They would be in a row and then they could duplicate that row ten or twenty times and then we could make fifty out of eight or something, or out of ten. Actually, now that I think about it, it is one of the scary things that they’re on strike for with AI. They can basically create everything without using any humans.

David Read
Yep, they’ll take a digital image of them and use them in perpetuity. That’s what AMPTP suggested earlier on and it was very much like not “no” but “hell no.” We got to be on guard for things like that because you can’t pay a person one day and then expect them to just “okay, thanks.” “Thanks for that one day of pay, we’ve got you now for good.”

Dan Shea
And it started on Stargate with crowd duplication. It’s Peter DeLuise’s fault.

David Read
And the Unas, I think it was Orpheus, no not Orpheus, it was Enemy Mine in season seven. You have the row of Unas going all the way down and it was this same pack again and again and again and they just duplicated the Unas to make them look like a whole village.

Dan Shea
We had the L.A. Unas, I think his name is Vince, he’s like six foot eight and he was a specialist in being creatures. Then we wound up using a guy in town for some reason. He was a big guy but he hadn’t done that kind of stuff before, he got super super hot. The Unas costume is layer upon layer upon layer of latex and heat could not escape anywhere. We had this Unas guy running up at the GVRD in the heat and we ended up taking him to emergency because he got so hot. They had to modify the costume and they changed it for other costumes for other shows also. The Incredible Hulk and The Thing from Fantastic 4, they had little things pumped in, I think it was water or something to cool them off. We could also only let him work for like 20 minutes at a time and then we had to take his head off and cool him down a bit.

David Read
Yeah, you can suffocate in your own heat.

Dan Shea
Yeah, the heat is through the roof. I did a thing, it was the toughest day I ever had. I was, what was the name of the show? Hopefully it will pop into my brain as I’m talking. We were like super soldiers from Stargate but it was a different show and we were running around the same way. After a while you’re so dizzy and then they put the contact lenses in your eyes and you can’t see where you’re going and you’re tripping. Speaking of contact lenses I want to go back to a Stargate episode. We were in a concept meeting and the producer said, “oh, we have to put these contacts in these guys.” They weren’t Jaffa, they were older guys. They said, “they’re gonna have a hard time seeing with these contacts, should they be stunt people?” I said “yes” because half the time they’re saying, “we don’t want to pay stunt people” and this time they’re saying “should they be stunt people?”

David Read
Are you talking about the Priors in seasons nine and ten?

Dan Shea
Yeah. These guys went through and they got the prosthetic done, it was really expensive and looked really, really cool. They brought in a PA for each of these three people to take them by the hand, to take them everywhere, because they are going to be totally blind. They put the contacts in on the day and they can see perfectly. I’m like “holy crap, we brought in all these people. If the producers find out that they can see perfectly, we’re going to be in trouble.” I was in a show called, I was Pa Buckner in Cabin in the Woods, and I couldn’t see at all but that’s a totally different story.

David Read
Good movie though man.

Dan Shea
Yes, so now they can see perfectly but we have a PA taking them by the hand everywhere and they have to pretend to be blind for four days. Jason twitchy Calder who doubled the Shanks was hilarious. He was pretending to bump into things, always bumping into walls and bumping into doors and going over the top with it.

David Read
That’s too funny.

Dan Shea
Yeah. If I can do a quick Cabin in the Woods.

David Read
Yeah, please.

Dan Shea
Five hours of effects makeup and putting a bunch of glue around your eyes so you wouldn’t see the space. In fact, Dan Payne played my son, he was another one of those guys, zombie. The story point was that he took an axe and cut my jaw and it had a big slice. In the prosthetic I had my chin pulled back like this. When they did the prosthetic in L.A. they said, “are you claustrophobic?” I said, “No, no problem.” They said “we had a stunt guy in here a couple of days ago and he freaked out when we did this. We had to bring in his wife and she had to hold his hand while we did it.” I’m like, “no wives are going to be holding my hands.” We put this thing on and they fold the thing back and I’ve got little bits of saliva kind of coming down and I’m trying to swallow to breathe. As they put more cement on all of a sudden I can’t hear them anymore because they’re further and further away and it’s getting harder and harder. I’m having a hard time breathing because of the little drips of saliva and I have to let it pool and build up and then I got to swallow it and hope I don’t choke. I got to do that every minute and a half because it keeps building up. Now we’re back, we’re on the day we’re working and my gag was that the Winnebago went into the water and now we’re in the water and the zombie who’s already dead somehow drowns. We have this stunt girl named Maja who’s on top of the Winnebago with the sunroof. I cannot get a regulator in my mouth because I’ve got the fangs and I got this thing pulled back. The diver guys mocked up, it’s like a welder’s mask, I had to hold it against my face. I’m blind, I’m totally blind underwater and I trained for a month to get used to being blind underwater. You just freak out. So they bring me down 25 feet and they’re holding onto me and I’m blind and I’m trusting this thing. Little bits of water are dripping in because you can’t get a seal. They put me into the Winnebago and they close the door and I hear the loudspeaker “okay, take away the mask.” I take off the mask and I’m holding my breath and Maja puts her leg down through the sunroof and they say “action.” She starts kicking me in the head, kicking me in the head and I’m like the zombie Pa Buckner guy, holding my breath until I couldn’t anymore. I don’t know which way is up and which way is down but I feel where the console is and I push my feet off the console to the back of the Winnebago, which is open, and two scuba divers aach take my wrists and take me 20 feet up to the surface so I can breathe. If I would have panicked or if I would have thought “that way’s up and that way’s down” they couldn’t have forced the regulator in my mouth like you do underwater in panic situations. That was the freakiest gag I’d ever done, being blind underwater and that was for Cabin in the Woods.

David Read
I’m sure Joss Whedon appreciated it.

Dan Shea
He was a great guy. Who’s the director? He was nice too.

David Read
I think it was Joss Whedon.

Dan Shea
No, no. Joss wrote it and he directed the second unit. It was…

David Read
It was Drew Goddard.

Dan Shea
Drew Goddard, yeah. Drew Goddard did Martian too. That was a good group of humans there.

David Read
You still got some time?

Dan Shea
Yeah.

David Read
I’ve got some fan questions for you.

Dan Shea
Okay, good. Yeah.

David Read
Elizabeth Lee – Did you find your wrench?

Dan Shea
Did I ever find the wrench Elizabeth?

David Read
Yes, it was in the basement last time.

Dan Shea
It was. Does Elizabeth have a visual? Can she see me? Okay, so Elizabeth, here’s the answer to your question. [holds up the wrench] I found the wrench, the wrench was downstairs. We had a Stargate convention here in September and I brought the wrench out with me. I also brought my daughter Steffie, who’s actually a doctor now, she’s a GP. She starts over on Vancouver Island in a week. She played Solen in Learning Curve as an 11 year old so we got a bunch of pictures made up and she came along to the convention in September. We were on stage together, kind of cool being on stage with your daughter. I suspect a little bit cool for the fans also to see an 11 year old, now she’s grown up and they can ask questions about being Solen and what was it like having a jerk, like a stunt coordinator, for a dad. She could rat me out in front of the all the fans, that was kind of cool. We had Johnny Ulmer who doubled Chris Judge and he also played a fireman in one of the episodes.

David Read
Yes, The Changeling.

Dan Shea
Then everybody wound up getting COVID, everybody except me. My daughter who was an intern over on Vancouver Island couldn’t work for two weeks. Man was she pissed off. I said, “Steffie come on over for the convention. We’ll have fun.” Now she’s out of work and she’s a health person. She’s not supposed to be spreading COVID to people. I was the only guy who didn’t get it.

David Read
Wow. We had a similar situation in Gatecon 2020. A number of the people who were around me and wearing masks and everything else, they went home with COVID. I’ve still never had it. We’ve all had it but I’ve never manifested symptoms. I don’t really take care of myself so why me?

Dan Shea
That was the first time where I was around humans. I was never petrified of COVID from a health standpoint. I was an idiot, I was more concerned about the money I lost because I wasn’t working. I appreciate other people, people died, but personally I thought it would bounce off me. I didn’t really care as much for me.

David Read
I have a question about the girls. Lockwatcher says “both of your daughters have done stunt work as well as acting. How has it been to work with them? Was it a foregone conclusion that that’s something that they would do at some points because you were involved in that?”

Dan Shea
I have two daughters, Stephanie and Joey. Stephanie did stunts and she did a little bit of acting on Stargate. I did a series called Psych for eight seasons, they both did a bunch of stuff on there, that was a comedy and they got to help pay for college. Joey was three years younger. She was on a highly rated episode of X-Files where she played Scully as an eight year old in a flashback. She wants to have a baby or something but her brother steals her rabbit and kills her rabbit and the rabbit is full of maggots. My daughter Joey, as Scully as an eight year old, has to react to the rabbit. Another woman is in a church and she’s in a casket, apparently she got drowned and that’s how she died. The actress in the casket, now there’s a flashback of her being underwater and my daughter getting to react. Joey was quite a good actress and she was more showbizzy than Steph. Joey was a bit too young for Stargate although she did do a scene where she was hanging up somewhere

David Read
Fragile Balance for the Asgard, yeah.

Dan Shea
She was hanging on the wire. She also did, I think the last episode we shot with Peter DeLuise, she was a little girl on a little bicycle.

David Read
Affinity when Teal’c’s living in the appartment.

Dan Shea
So they both did it. Joey has been living in the Middle East for a decade. She was in Beirut, Lebanon, for five years, she was in Cairo, Egypt, for five years, she’s fluent in Arabic. She now works for the Human Rights Watch. When she was in Cairo she was doubling one of the female leads there, one of the biggest box office draws in Cairo for a couple of feature films. She said it is really sketchy, you make no money there. It’s still sketchy because they hang you up, it’s not like here where everything is 100% safe. It was like “holy crap.” She was helping Syrian refugees. She was on MSNBC two weeks ago doing an interview for LIV, the Saudi Arabia golfing. A month before that she was on the BBC talking about Afghanistan refugees. Her boyfriend is a guy named Raf Sanchez who is a journalist for MSNBC. He interviewed Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, two weeks ago. So that’s their thing, they’re into politics now. Both kids did show biz all the way through and they’re still union members. When they come home I like to get them out, have them fall over and make a bit of dough and work with them. One’s a GP and one works for the human rights watch and she lives in Tel Aviv at the moment.

David Read
You did well Dan.

Dan Shea
Yeah, good girls.

David Read
Dan, Jim Kite wants to know, where did you get your initial training to do all the various things that you’ve learned to do? Or is it just “okay, we’re gonna learn how to do this, we’re gonna learn how to do this, and so on.”

Dan Shea
I’m kind of old school. The perfect stunt person is like an Olympic medalist who says, “I’m going to do stunts and I’m going to first learn how to fly cars, I’m going to learn how to do wheelies on motorcycles. They’re going to teach me how to do parkour stuff and I’m going to get my black belt in martial arts.” That’s what they do in England, they don’t let you on set until you can do everything. Here, if you’re a martial artistist and we need someone to do a spinning back kick, you can get hired. Then you get hired to do stunt peer person so you’re a fighter then you think, “wow, if I can learn how to slide a car then they’ll bring me out for the car stuff.” Then you go down to L.A. and you take the driving course there, the Rick Seaman driving course. Now you’re a fighter and now you’re a driver and as you move along then “maybe I’ll learn that thing.” There are some guys here, and girls, a small percentage, who are not just proficient but they’re excellent in everything. Most of us were kind of good in a couple of things and as we progressed along we would learn new things. It took me six years to get my black belt and I was doing that as I was doing stunts. I’m the least talented of all, I was just a hockey player. I was lucky because Richard Dean Anderson was a hockey player and he needed a hockey player to double for him for an episode. That’s how I met him, we hit it off pretty well because hockey players like hockey players. From then on, that’s when I thought, “well, if I can learn how to flight, if I can learn how to slide cars, if I can learn how to do this, then I’ll get more work” and that’s how I did it. That’s not the preferred way.

David Read
Yeah, but you’ve obviously made a living doing it. The natural human instinct is to shy away from danger, injury. Are there some people who are just more willing to take risk with bodily harm or is it something that people have to desensitize themselves to?

Dan Shea
Stunt people in general are like that, they’re danger junkies, that’s how they’re wired, that’s their DNA. The people that I mentioned who are great in all the different disciplines, they wind up getting hired a lot and they wind up doing huge nasty gags but they’re also the people who wind up getting hurt and getting banged up. All these guys who started were flippity dippity and they were 10th degree black belts and they could set themselves on fire. Unfortunately they get banged up and it’s idiots like me that do easy stunts that kind of keep on crawling along and have a 30 year career whereas the superstars wind up getting banged up and they have to wind up in coordinating. Generally speaking, they’re junkies, they’re adrenaline junkies and they love that. Plus the precision of being a stunt person. They’re doing the finals on you but you’re focusing on “I got to hit my mark and I got to do this and if I don’t do that I’m going to look like an idiot. I’m going to make the coordinator look bad and I’m going to blow $100,000 shot but I may also break my ankle.” So that sense of precision and not screwing up. You get a little bit of applause and then you get to go for lunch and then you get paid; that’s a fun day.

David Read
You talk about danger junkies. Have you ever had to be on the lookout for, or come across a situation where you have to save people from themselves? “You can’t do that, you are really going to get hurt?” “Oh man, I can’t wait.” “No, no.”

Dan Shea
There was a person up in a place called Squamish here which is almost at Whistler. There’s this rock face where they wanted a guy to jump off this rock face, I guess, with one of those parachutes. I guess the mountaineering experts said, “nah, that’s not a good idea.” But one guy said “ah, I do that all the time will, I can do that.” They hired this guy, it wasn’t my show, and he went off the cliff and he died. You as a coordinator, you can never listen to anybody. If anyone says they can do something, you never believe them. You only hire people who you know can do whatever it is that you’re supposed to do. Even then there’s a risk of something going wrong. It doesn’t happen because they’re so well trained and you only use the people that you know can do what they’re supposed to do.

David Read
Okay. By the time they get to set they’ve been vetted. You have people in your network who can vouch.

Dan Shea
Even then there’s still a margin of error, right? You’ve done your best and you’ve hired the best so liability wise, if something goes sideways, “well, I hired the best person.” They have the best chance to do the best gag and to do it safely.

David Read
Absolutely. General Maximus, we answered your question but thank you. Pamela Tarajcak says “this may be a stupid question…” I don’t think there are any stupid questions “are stunts in a sci-fi show in any degree more complex or exciting than stunts in non-genre action series? Is there any kind of a technical difference or is it all of a piece?”

Dan Shea
Well, it just depends specifically what the show wants. Sci-fi tends to be beyond your imagination and in that sense it could be more dangerous and more specific because it doesn’t have to be real. Therefore you’re like, “oh, how are we going to do that?” Then you have to figure out how to do it and there could be more risk involved. There might be a little bit of that in sci-fi only because you’re limited by the imagination of the writer and the ability of your technical people to make it a reality…and money and time.

David Read
Absolutely. Teresa Mc – did every one of the main cast have a double available?

Dan Shea
Yes. I don’t think Teryl did because I don’t think we ever had any stunts for Teryl Rothery. We should have had a stunt for the one time because Rick got really mad at this. Speaking of this, [holds up wrench] s sergeant Siler I was always in the infirmary in bed and Teryl, old doc, would come over and be checking out Siler. One time I wound up taking the wrench and putting it under the covers. You can sort of imagine what happened when Teryl started feeling around for my injuries. We thought that kind of stuff was funny back then but when Rick found out that I’d done that he was so pissed off at me. Of course, we could never even think about doing anything like that nowadays.

David Read
So that was the end of the wrench.

Dan Shea
It might have been, yeah. Might have been.

David Read
Who started this? Was it you or Martin Wood?

Dan Shea
Who started the wrench or who putting it under the covers?

David Read
No, I mean in general. You have these complex pieces of equipment on the ramp with all these little pieces and you have this huge thing and you and Martin Wood are passing it back and forth. That’s so funny man.

Dan Shea
It might have been Martin or maybe Peter. I think Martin Wood because he said “it’s so complicated taking people to the other side of the universe and basically you need a wrench.” Just like we need on Earth, you always just need an idiot with a wrench to bang something.

David Read
It’s not like you’re hitting it, you’re tightening stuff on it, both of you have straight faces, you’re passing it back and forth.

Dan Shea
We’re saying that something that can take you to the other side of the galaxy has a bunch of bolts and nuts and bolts and that’s how it works. I just saw this thing, maybe it was on was on YouTube, last night about time and space. Albert Einstein, how the universe works. The Earth is like a ball rolling on like a blanket kind of thing and they’re trying to figure out how to travel faster than the speed of light. Apparently, what they’re realistically trying to come up with is not using fuel but using a way that you can attach on to parts of the universe and have it roll you along faster than the speed of light. As opposed to propelling you, you’re somehow using time and space itself to pull you along. Apparently that’s real and they’re actually looking into that now. Whether it’ll ever materialize is…

David Read
If we can get out of our own way with one another I think we’ll find a way to bend Einstein’s laws and make it work. Yeah, that’s really cool though. Who first introduced this wrench. What size of a wrench is it and who first introduced it? What was the genesis of that?

Dan Shea
You know what? I don’t even know if I know that. I think that was a Martin Wood thing. He thought it was funny to have this stupid wrench. I think it was Martin who just gave it to me one day to give me some business. People smoke on camera and some people need to…what’s his name? What’s his name, loves sipping his tea? He’s the guy who replaced Shanks for a couple of episodes.

David Read
Corin Nemec, Jonas Quinn.

Dan Shea
Yeah Corin, he loved having a tea bag. That was his shtick.

David Read
And Jack’s, Rick’s was taking stuff out of the cups too. He would see things swimming around. You go back and watch that show, there’s four or five instances where he’s finding something swimming and he’s throwing it away.

Dan Shea
Is that Rick or Corin?

David Read
That’s Rick. Corin had a mug in his first episode, the legend is Rick came along and said “that’s my thing” so Corin went to fruit.

Dan Shea
I know it didn’t last long, I thought it was because the producers didn’t like it. Like, “what the hell’s he doing with this color?” Maybe you’re probably right.

David Read
At what point did the embossing on the side of the wrench…was that during the show that you guys had that done or have you done that since? Sly Siler’s steel, when was that added?

Dan Shea
They did that for me, that was a gift. I think that was a gift from Martin. In fact, I just took a picture of myself with the wrench and I’m gonna send it to Martin after I’m done here to let him know I just did this and to let him know that the wrench is still around.

David Read
Absolutely and let him know I say hello and that I’m looking forward to him coming back on.

Dan Shea
Yeah, for sure.

David Read
This is good stuff man. Okay, we’ve got a couple more here and then we’re wrapping it up. Dan Ben – these days, have you ever watched one of the shows you’ve worked on and noticed things that you wanted to fix? Like visible equipment or safety mats or “gosh, I wish I had seen that then” or do you not go back and watch?

Dan Shea
No, I do watch it. I remember I was hearing Quentin Tarantino interviewed a couple of nights ago and he was saying he would like to go back and redo Reservoir Dogs because now he’s so skilled he can make it better. I hear that from directors, they sort of wince, and I hear it from actors. For me, no. We did the best we could do at the time and if you’re episodic, you’re kind of, not rushing, but you’re moving along pretty quickly. You prep and shoot and prep and shoot. Features, they have forever to set up stuff. I don’t do that. When I watch it I always remember what was happening behind the scenes. I remember hearing an actress talking about that on a talk show, saying how the fans remember what they see on camera and the actors and stunt people working on it remember what was happening behind the scenes at the time. It’s just a totally different perception and you always remember what was actually happening behind the camera while the camera was rolling. No, that’s not a thing that I do. I appreciate watching because a lot of times I remember “that was a day that we got in trouble for laughing or someone’s phone went off.” When cell phones started in the beginning people’s phones were going off and they hadn’t invented, or maybe they did invent…

David Read
The silent switch.

Dan Shea
Yeah. Finally, after a little bit of time, they said “if anyone’s phone goes off, your fired, that’s the end of it.” I was always had my phone on silent, I never turned it on. For some reason the night before, Vinny, one of the ADs, had called me and I didn’t get the call. I turned on my phone so I could hear the ring if someone’s gonna call me. The next day it was Rick’s close up and all of a sudden, the close up of Richard Dean Anderson, we heard “ring ring.” I’m like, “god, what idiot’s gonna get fired because their phone is on.” All of a sudden “ring ring.” You would think when the phone rang once this moron would have shut it off and then I looked down and I saw a red light going off on my phone. I heard it go “ring ring” and I thought, “well, I’m the moron” so I shut it off and then then we cut. Of course Rick wanted to know who it was. Because I was his buddy they didn’t want to fire me. What happened was, about two months later there was a close up on Siler and I was supposed to do my line. Sometimes they wouldn’t be there [the main cast]. There’d be like an “X”, that’s Rick, that’s Judge, that’s Amanda. You didn’t need them there because I just had to say one line. But on this day they were all there for my one line. I think “that’s nice. Maybe they think I’m a real actor now, they respected me, I’m one of them now, This is great.” They said, “action.” Brad Turner was the director and they said “action.” I was about to say my line and all of a sudden I heard “ring ring” and then I realized what was happening. Rick had remembered this from months earlier and he was waiting for my close up to ring his phone on purpose. All the actors knew that this was going to happen and that’s the reason they were there; they wanted to be in on the fun. I knew that because I’m more of a jerk and I’m more sarcastic that I couldn’t fall apart, I had to stay there. I couldn’t laugh, I couldn’t do anything. Brad would say “action” and I would try to say my line again and all of a sudden “ring ring.”.

David Read
It was pay back buddy.

Dan Shea
I had a little little bead of sweat kind of coming down like this but I wasn’t gonna let Rick break me. I had to hang in and finally it stopped ringing and I said my line. The thing was, there was an older actor, it was his close up next and he was an L.A. guy. They flew him up for his close up and he came up to me and said “do they always do that on your closeups?” He was petrified that someone was going to be ringing a cowbell or like when you’re taking a foul shot in basketball, holding up a bunch of signs to distract you for his close up. I said, “No, no. He was getting back at me for something.”

David Read
That’s exactly right. That was the actor who played Daniel Jackson’s grandfather in the episode Crystal Skull directed by Brad Turner. One of my favorite lines in that entire episode, and it’s interesting that you bring this up, you were opposite Jason Schombing in one scene where he’s trying to determine what the crystal skull is and he looks to you and he says, “what do you think?” And you say to him, “I think you’re gonna get fired.” In that same episode you’re getting payback for what…Jeez, that’s funny. Oh, gosh. Dan, thank you so much for coming on. It really means a lot for me to have you. I’m glad that you’re continuing to work. It’s up in the air for so many folks right now.

Dan Shea
Yeah, it’s nasty.

David Read
Yeah. Well I appreciate you coming on sir.

Dan Shea
Plus I can always fall back on the gay porn, I did that back in the 70s.

David Read
There are options.

Dan Shea
Yeah, porn for old people is very popular now so it may be an option so keep a lookout for me.

David Read
Oh, one last question. TheDragonaf1 – do you think Siler is actually in Jack’s will?

Dan Shea
No chance. In fact he would try to kill me so no, I wouldn’t be in the will. He’d be the guy responsible for my death.

David Read
But at least they both love the Simpsons.

Dan Shea
Exactly.

David Read
There you go. Dan Shea, stunt coordinator and Rick’s photo double and Siler.

David Read
Stunt double.

David Read
Rick’s stunt double, my apologies.

Dan Shea
I started off as a photo double back in MacGyver.

David Read
Okay, I got that mixed up. And sergeant Siler on Stargate SG-1. Sir, thank you so much for joining.

Dan Shea
Thank you David Read.

David Read
Bye bye, be well.

Dan Shea
And thank you guys, nice talking to you.

David Read
Bye bye. Dan Shea, great guy, love having him on. Hope you enjoyed that one, he’s a walking wealth of knowledge. Really appreciate you all tuning in, this was a great show and we’ve got another one heading your way. If everything remains on schedule here, Richard Hudolin, the first production designer for Stargate SG-1 for the first five seasons, he’s going to be joining us on Friday. I’m going to be talking with him momentarily here, it’s gonna be a pre-recorded show. We’re gonna keep on sending you a few more as we move forward here. Thanks so much to Sommer and Antony for moderating this particular episode. My continued thanks to all of my moderators, Tracy, Jeremy and Rhys. Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb who keeps dialthegate.com up and running, really appreciate you sir. My producer, Linda “GateGabber” Furey, she’s gonna be coming back on in the next couple of weeks here. We’ve got some more content heading your way here as we move into fall. Everyone’s asking me “how much longer are you gonna go? How long is season three gonna last?” I don’t know. How long are the strikes gonna last? So many of these behind the camera personnel are available to talk and we’re going to talk to them for as long as we can and as many as who want to come on the show. I’ve been really lucky, I can’t believe we’ve got Richard. That’s Bridget McGuire all over, thanks so much to her. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate, I really appreciate you tuning in, we’ll see you on the other side.