Dial the Gate is privileged to welcome the return of Hollywood legend Erick Avari to the show to share memories from production and discuss what binds us together — the power of storytelling.

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Timecodes
0:00 – Splash Screen
00:21 – Opening Credits
00:52 – Welcome and Episode Outline
03:03 – Welcoming Erick / Contentment
06:26 – Gatecon 2001 and September 11
17:24 – Kasuf’s Prayer and Stargate Film Discussion
26:36 – Independence Day Scene
29:39 – Erick’s Childhood
34:58 – Influence in the TV and FIlm Industry
41:29 – Why Erick Wanted to Come to America
44:40 – Theatre and Education
48:13 – Living in the US in His Early YEars
52:52 – Returning to Stargate for SG-1
57:28 – Sci-Fi, Storytelling and Characters
1:02:31 – TV and Film Comparisons
1:05:23 – “The Chosen” and Challenging Roles
1:12:08 – A Project Erick Regretted
1:14:05 – Babylon 5
1:14:44 – Thoughts on Finishing the Stargate Film Trillogy Originally Planned
1:16:12 – Wrapping up with Erick
1:25:00 – Post Interview Housekeeping
1:26:42 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read
Hello everyone and welcome to episode 214 of Dial the Gate, the Stargate Oral History Project. I am privileged to have back with me on Dial the Gate, and for the first time sitting in the normal seats that we do, Erick Avari. He is someone that I have been privileged to know for the past couple of years now. We have a mutual friend, Allan Gowen, who is very important to both of us. He managed to get us a little bit more connected than we would have been if I just walked up to him and introduced myself to him. We’re here to share stories, which is what this channel is about, and I think it’s going to be a really interesting discussion on the nature of stories and how they encompass who we are as people and how we can use those to tell each other the details that fill in the little gaps of our lives and truly help us to understand each other better. Before we get into the thick of this, I invite you to click that like button. It really makes a difference with the show and continues to help the show grow its audience. If you have any Stargate friends out there, please consider sharing this video with them, and Mummy friends and SeaQuest friends and Heroes friends. The guy has been in everything so please share it with someone because someone’s gonna like “oh yeah, that guy, I know him.” so share this video with them. If you want to get 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 any last minute guest changes. Clips from this live stream will be released over the course of the next few weeks on both the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. This is a live show, Erick is with me here now, so if you are in the YouTube chat and you’re with our moderating team, go ahead and submit questions to Erick through them. They’ll get them over to me and I’ll share some of them with him. Without further ado, Erick Avari, Kasuf to me and many of you first and foremost, but also just a remarkable human being and who I’m privileged to have back with me on the show. Erick, how are you?

Erick Avari
I’m excellent, but I’m hoping to get better.

David Read
Absolutely. What’s been going on with you lately? I see your SAG-AFTRA strong.

Erick Avari
Yes. Sadly, this is about pretty much the extent of my participation in this strike effort. I’ve been pulled away in different directions and life has been taking over, which was actually part of the master plan. Start living life, it’s been busy and fulfilling and there has been a lot of travel and exciting moments. Moments of adventure and discovery and joy, it’s been great.

David Read
Fulfilling is the word that I wanted to hear from you. People always talk about “well, I’m not really happy. If I did this or if I could achieve this I would be happy.” Happy, we are valleys and peaks. In the final analysis, can you walk away fulfilled? I think you really hit it there because the summation of who we are is a lot more than just happy.

Erick Avari
My mom had a word she used quite often, it was content. She would come up and say “I hope you are content.” It’s been more and more meaningful as the years go by, that word. It changes, where your contentment lies evolves with time and your perspective and all that. Growing up, gosh, to be a working actor, that’s all I wanted to be. I never thought about TV or film but stage, to be a working actor in New York nonetheless. I would love to. I heard people dying on stage and I was like, “sign me up man. That’s I want to go.”

David Read
We should to be so lucky, you know, to go out with a bang.

Erick Avari
I’d cover it though. I would work it into the storyline.

David Read
As a good performer would.

Erick Avari
Your last obligation.

David Read
There are many things I want to talk about with you. There’s one in particular that I’ve been dying to ask you for a long time. Dying is so trite? I’ve been wanting to ask you this from your perspective.

Erick Avari
Yearning.

David Read
Yearning. Allan Gowen of Gatecon, very important person in my life and in the relationship of the Stargate family. He told me about Gatecon 2001 when 9/11 happened and it was probably going to derail the event. It was that week.

Erick Avari
It was three days prior I think.

David Read
He had a conversation with you. Gatecon, everyone’s like, “why are we bringing up Gatecon?” Gatecon was like the Stargate mecca of conventions at that time. Stargate really didn’t have a lot of conventions, this was the one and this was the thing. It was coming together to celebrate the show which represented possibilities and all of us in our shared experiences and going to other worlds, and then 9/11 happened. Can you tell us about that week and the convention and how you were going to proceed? And 9/11, how that affected you as a person as well.

Erick Avari
Boy, I remember it like it was yesterday, as I’m sure many many of us do, where you were at the seminal moment. I was asleep in L.A. and my mother-in-law called, it was 6:15, something like that, in the morning. She was like, “turn on the TV, turn on the TV.” I swear my first thought was “Jean, you’ve seen me in a dozen shows now. Don’t call me at six o’clock to tell me I’m on a sitcom.” There was something really frantic in her voice. I turned it on and I saw it and then I saw the second one hit. Right away…

David Read
The world changed with that second plane.

Erick Avari
The world changed. I remember going back to the Timothy McVeigh days, bombing. I bring that up because when that came up my first thought was oh, “thank whoever, it’s not a Middle Eastern guy.” I knew the significance of being with this look, in Hollywood, as an actor who’s been fighting type [prejudice] ever since, you know. To see this and know the significance of that, to me. I do feel ashamed, I got to admit it. I saw 9/11 happen, this wave of depression just came down like a blanket over me. A lot of it had to do with the thought of “that’s the end of my career. Now that’s what I’m going to be confronted with, offered.” I knew I was the go-to guy in that age range and that look with that resume. This was my destiny now. I went to bed and I thought long and hard. I was thinking about this, the anger, the shock. The shock of this happening on American soil by outsiders, it just seemed inconceivable. I knew that the way my life in America on a day to day basis has changed, I remember clearly. The next day, 9/12, I was trying to move on and was like, “okay, we’ve lived through earthquakes and we’ve lived through floods and fires.” I went shopping for a fire pit. I lived in L.A. Anyway, I went to this fire pit store in L.A. and I was waiting at the counter for them to bring this thing up. There was this young dad with the most adorable little kid, he was throwing the kid up and the kid was just laughing and giggling. It just took you right out of this whole thing. There were other people around and everyone was looking at this kid, captivated, with a smile. The father was proud, the father was showing her off and he turned at looked at me. The minute he saw me his face just dropped and he turned and shielded the kid from me. It was in that moment, crystal clear, how my life in America has now changed. It’s all about me.

David Read
No, that’s not fair. We were all in shock and our preconceptions were going to be challenged one way or the other. I can recall instances where I’ve conveyed a look or made a judgment call because…The subconscious is what triggers an expression and then we have a chance to register it and then we correct, or we don’t correct. I can remember, similar to this, but just in relating to people, conveying an emotion that I didn’t intend to and being embarrassed and not correcting it. I could see on the other person’s face how they were going to carry that with them, for at least a little while. It was so complicated what happened to us and on top of that you’re dealing with Gatecon which was about to happen at that time.

Erick Avari
That was the question wasn’t it?

David Read
I’m really, really glad you teed this up because this is important context for you, it’s important context for us as Americans and for the rest of the world who watch this. With that in mind, Gatecon was about to happen. In the scheme of things it’s so frivolous by comparison, in one respect, but then again, it’s not because of what it represents.

Erick Avari
Absolutely. I remember, just by the skin of its teeth it hung on. A lot of us got there, a lot of people couldn’t. The people that came had overcome adversity so that right away was a bonding experience.

David Read
It was so easy to forget that the planes weren’t flying just a few days before.

Erick Avari
That’s right. That’s right. Fran and Allan and all the organizers were like, “we don’t know, but we want to make this happen.” God bless them, they really kind of put it out there and it was important to enough people, which was remarkable. An eye opener, because it was my first convention, I’d never been to a convention before. That was my very first exposure to a convention, I had no idea what to expect. I’d seen the Galaxy [Quest] movie and I was really sort of on my guard as to what to expect there.

David Read
Allan told me, he said in his communication with you, you were one of the linchpins for moving forward with this because it was like, “we’re not gonna let evil stop us from creating something that does such great good” and Make a Wish [Foundation] and everything that folded into it.

Erick Avari
Yeah. I was on a panel and I lead the prayer from Kasuf’s prayer Ancient Egyptian. It just felt so right and it felt so calming and healing and there was something kind of magical about that moment.

David Read
There was a prayer in the film that was cut for time.

Erick Avari
You hear it vaguely in the background?

David Read
Do you recall this prayer?

Erick Avari
I do. Yes, I do.

David Read
Would you recite it for us?

Erick Avari
Almost verbatim. Usually I don’t remember my lines from a play I did last week. I’m there, the minute we close it’s done, it’s out of my head, room for new stuff.

David Read
Would you be willing to recite it for me?

Erick Avari
Yes. [recites prayer in Egyptian]

David Read
The work that you guys put in to make that project what it was and the fact that we’re still talking about it, it’s gonna be 30 years old next year. Can you believe it? What does that franchise mean to you?

Erick Avari
A lot. It’s funny the things that have contributed to my career, career path. This seemed kind of trivial at the time and insignificant and then as time went on it seemed to gather more significance. When Stargate came out it did not nothing for my career, the phone was not ringing off the hook by any stretch of the imagination. It was only much later that directors would bring me in and talk about Stargate or something and ask about the language and so on so forth, but not at the time. For me I learned a lot on that movie. I’d done The Beast [of War] which was this war film but that was a very tight script. It was a play that had been adapted for the screen. The ad libbing wasn’t a big thing, being spontaneous and present, yes. That was a learning experience. In Stargate with the language hurdle, that was so fun to play. Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin were just so nurturing about that. It allowed me the freedom to not feel like, “Oh, should I try this?” I felt emboldened to try something, if they don’t like it, they won’t to use it, in terms of allowing the moments to keep me flexible and try to sort of ad lib in a strange language that you have to go and get translated. So often the Egyptologist would just say, “there’s no word for that, the closest we can get is mu mu or something that sounded like a cat being strangled. Your like, “how do I make this sound like…so I don’t burst out laughing?” And very adverse conditions, the temperatures in the first week in Yuma, Arizona, was up in the 140s [F], it was insane.

David Read
The extras were dropping like flies, they wouldn’t come back the next day.

Erick Avari
They should be boom operators, their hands are up above their heart and they just go boom [collpase]. I shouldn’t laugh, but yeah, people will just drop and then the sand, getting sinus infections and stuff like that.

David Read
But you got through it and you made an amazing film.

Erick Avari
We absolutely did and I think that’s what brought people together. It was a wonderful ensemble, for such a big movie, it really was an ensemble piece. Obviously Kurt and James were at the tip of that spear but it was a very full production.

David Read
You have several hero’s journeys going on simultaneously. You have both Daniel and Jack, have their own, Skaara has his own, Kasuf has his own as well.

Erick Avari
They each have their own arc. Kasuf was one line I believe. If it is was more, it was maybe half a sentence but that was all that was in the script. But in the rubrics we see Kasuf doing [more] so that that was encouraging, but it was basically one line. I grappled with it. I had just come to L.A. and thought I had a kind of a hotshot career in New York and stuff in a studio film. Here I am now going to be booked out for a one line part playing an 80 year old guy speaking a foreign language.

David Read
You’re in your 40s at this point, right?

Erick Avari
Yeah. 40, early 40s, 43 I guess. I was born in [19]52, so when…

David Read
40, 41, 42, around there when you’re filming for sure.

Erick Avari
Yeah. I was young, 40. For the most part I kind of played up the age and did the movement and stuff. But on that final scene, that charge down the hill, something, God took over and I was flying down that hill and popped the hamstring. Dean’s reaction with “Erick popped a hamstring” was “good he’ll run slower next time.” And I did, I just did this hobble. It was such a wonderful experience.

David Read
I have to convey a story with you before I go into your childhood. There are two films that make up my movie going awakening as a kid and neither of them are Stargate. The first was Jurassic Park and the magic of seeing dinosaurs come to life. The other was Independence Day. You are one of my bright lights from that film. “If this isn’t an insanely beautiful woman I’m hanging up.” You’re on film for a minute and a half, in your PJs, trying to avoid being knocked out by golf balls.

Erick Avari
Back in a robe.

David Read
Back in a robe, that’s right. You embued this little character with so much life and energy, I think so much of it is your physicality. Kasuf had a lot of that as well, so much of the humor of him is like “what, what is happening?” and so much of that transferred into this guy too. It’s one of my favorite scenes from any film.

Erick Avari
The first day of shooting on Independence Day, the first day when I was called in, that was a dream gig. I did very little work over a period of six days, “just sit down and hang out.” Should I get into wardrobe? “I don’t think we’re gonna get to you but hang on.” Anyway, the first day I was there and Joseph Porro, genius costume designer, pulls me into wardrobe and pulls out the Stargate constume and says “just put it on.” I put it on and I walked out on set, it was with the staff and everything. Will and Judd Hirsch were doing a scene and I just walked in front of camera in slow steady pace with the stick. I want to say there was a little bit of a pause and then Will kind of picked up and tried to keep going.

David Read
So this is on camera.

Erick Avari
This was on camera and you could hear the sniggers from the crew, they were in on it. Judd finally goes “what the fuck!”

David Read
This is an homage to the previous film. It’s funny. You grew up in Darjeeling in India?

Erick Avari
Mm hmm.

David Read
Am I reading this right that your father owned two movie theaters?

Erick Avari
The only two in town. It was my grandfather’s. My dad was a really a military man and he was forced, being the only son, to come back and take over the business which my grandfather never let go of until the day he died which was a healthy 86.

David Read
What impact did the cinema have on you as a young person?

Erick Avari
Have you seen Cinema Paradiso?

David Read
I have. It’s a good film.

Erick Avari
It’s the story of our hometown, it practically is. The cinema, the cinemas, two, capital and the rink. The rink used to be a skating rink, roller skating rink and my grandfather converted into a movie theater. The capital was the town hall and that was just vacant and he leased it. So these two places in this very small, beautiful town, big tourist attraction. Both foreign and domestic tourists flocked to Darjeeling for the site of the snow range, the Himalayas. That was the meeting place. The way it was set up, you go to the movie, you sit through a bunch of shorts, Indian news reels and things like that. The movie would start and about 10 or 15 minutes into it, sort of like a long teaser, it would cut for an intermission. You would go out and there was a bar and food and all of that and you could bring all of that into the movie theater. Those 15 minutes were bustling with activity, people talking about the film, talking about this, talking about whatever. It was more of a town hall then than it was when it was serving as the town hall. Movies changed, there was a big turnover. Wednesdays and Saturdays, everyone lived for those two days, that’s when the movies changed. “What’s this movie about? Can I get tickets?” I was the most popular kid in school on Wednesdays and Saturdays. It was an event. My brother, my sister and myself and my mom would walk home. It was about a 20 minute walk, beautiful stars, you could see the Milky Way, it was just a magical setting. I’d make my mom tell us the story of the movie that we just watched. I didn’t want to let it go, I wanted it to linger in my mind. I remember that so vividly about my childhood, it’s the stories, I’d just get lost. My dad was just a wonderful, wonderful storyteller; he was a racconto extraordinaire. As kids, all his nephews and nieces and stuff, we came from a big family, family reunions they’d all go to Uncle Erick “tell us a baby monkey story.” He would just spin these stories about baby monkey, he was the one who was always getting into trouble. Each animal had its own voice, characteristic and a little moral if you will at the end. He would just come up with them like that, it was wonderful. That to me, storytelling, was magical. It activated my imagination more than economics or mathematics and I just gravitated toward that.

David Read
There is something about theater, about film that takes us back to the fireside. I think there’s nothing more human than stories and I think it’s the reason why we’re so captivated by the cinema and by actors. By following people that we aspire to be like, there’s something I think pure about it. The movies that made us when we were little, as much as in some respects are, at least for me, my parents makeup a part of my identity. Star Trek was all I was allowed to watch until I was six or seven years old, along with Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and all these. It was public television and it was Star Trek. Those kind of established my philosophy about life along with what I learned from my folks. Those kind of details you don’t shake, those things make you up as a person when it all boils down.

Erick Avari
Someone asked me about sci-fi, what’s so appealing about sci-fi. For me, it’s the moral behind the story, that there is one.

David Read
You’re not just entertaining. It’s very important to do that but when you’re walking away you’re left resonating with something else.

Erick Avari
Entertainment is the tool to which you get to the point of it which was the moral, the lesson, the thought provoking ideas. You engaged, like a good professor is engaged and engaging. That doesn’t negate the point of being engaging. This is where I really rue where our industry is today. We have so much innate violence built in and all with perfectly justifiable reasons. If you’re the good guy, you are justified, you have a right and a duty to go out and avenge someone’s death or whatever the hell it is. It’s all about assuming the right position. You were talking about storytelling, I grew up with, as you were saying, with movies. Hollywood westerns were a huge, huge draw. Oh my goodness, the movie, it doesn’t matter which one, was sold out for the week before we even get started. Westerns were a big thing. But look how it conditions one’s mind; there’s the good guy and there’s the Red Indian savage.

David Read
It’s binary.

Erick Avari
Here’s this culture that is Ancient and rich and full of wisdom and endured the ages and takes into account the world that we live in a profound way that Western society had no clue about. But somehow you’re the savages and we’re the good guys. I grew up with that, I grew up with the USIS Information Service. They would come to school book fairs and hand out these beautifully colored brochures about colleges in the US. It was a pipe dream for us because foreign travel for Indians at the time, there was no foreign exchange, it was impossible. You could not leave the country. You could leave but the Indian rupee was a soft currency, it was not valued anywhere at all. It talks about the yearning for that and the things that attracted me to America. I’ve asked several people, they talk about “I love this country, I’d never live anywhere else.” “What is it? What is it to you that makes this country great?” Really, I find many of them have never thought of that.

David Read
It’s a default position, we’re the good guys in the movies.

Erick Avari
You’re right, but why? There is a lot but I don’t think you’ve thought of those things and I don’t think you’ve embraced those things. You need to and hold on to those things because the other stuff is just crap. It’s garbage and it’s screwing up the good stuff. I don’t know how I got off on this.

David Read
How old were you when you knew you wanted to come to America?

Erick Avari
Oh, I wanted to ever since I was maybe six. It was probably sitting in the rink cinema watching a movie going, “oh I wish I could be there.”

David Read
Why did you want to come to America?

Erick Avari
There were so many, to me. When you talk about freedoms, that’s what really resonated, in so many different ways. Let’s start with curriculum, just something as dry as that, we were on such a strict regimen. This is what you studied, and da da da da da and this grade and that grade and that grade and and then you were done. In America, my gosh, you could take a course in astronomy or you could take a guitar lesson or you could take up environmental studies, subjects I’ve never heard. On that level, just the freedom of that in and of itself was literally like having my grey suit and tie stripped away. We were so regimented. Then other events, things like Vietnam. Kids had such a voice in India, we were there to be seen and not heard. There’s good and bad in that ut I’m talking about as a perspective of a young kid looking at this and saying “they got to protest Vietnam, they got to oust Richard Nixon.”

David Read
Their peers are going and dying, they better be able to protest something.

Erick Avari
Yeah. My dad being a military man, the controversy that it brought up between us and him, his point of view.

David Read
My dad as well. My dad served in Vietnam.

Erick Avari
My dad was second world war, it was a completely different war.

David Read
Yeah, very different.

Erick Avari
Very different. I was a big track and field sports guy.

David Read
Chris Klug and you played basketball together.

Erick Avari
I was terrible a terrible basketball player.

David Read
Chris Klug was with me on Stargate Worlds and he told me to tell Nari Avari hello. Was theater your immediate go to?

Erick Avari
Yeah, that’s what was familiar to me. I was very fortunate to have gone to a school and lived in a town where the arts were very important. There was this lady, Auntie Manisha, she was an English woman who married a young Air Force Wing Commander in India and had, at the time, three lovely little kids. She and her eldest boy went to the air show to watch the big show and his plane went down while they were there. She dedicated the rest of her life to teaching kids, free of charge, anyone in the town, piano. She was a very gifted musician herself. She would teach us all piano and we were sent off. Even there it was regimented. We’d have lessons set up, an examiner from Trinity College London would come out, she would pay the extra fare to come up to Darjeeling because it was such a small thing. So many of us went through that. She would put on plays in her living room, a nativity play and a Christmas pageant and an Easter thing. That’s where I really started doing that as a kid. School and college plays were a big thing and I did at that, I loved it. I was pretty good at literature, those were my subjects that I did excel at. I loved Shakespeare and the classics because it was character.

David Read
The stuff that we’re made of.

Erick Avari
Yes, yes, I’ll tell you a funny [story] since we’re talking about education. I thought I did pretty well in history and when the results came I almost flunked. I was shocked because I enjoyed that the subject. My dates and all that were pretty good, I had facts and figures, but I filled in all kinds of hidden motivations for kings to do certain things. I had these, I guess stories in my head, that were not fact based.

David Read
The storyteller has run amok ladies and gentlemen.

Erick Avari
1776, this is what happened while he was sitting on the toilet as a matter of fact.

David Read
He wrote The Star Spangled Banner on the toilet. Geez. Oh man. How old were you when you came to the US?

Erick Avari
23.

David Read
What was it like assimilating in school and in academia and all these other things? What kind of challenges were there? What were you surprised at about America about what you had in your mind all those years and now you’re here? It’s time for the rubber to meet the road, you’ve got to get to work?

Erick Avari
On the flight over from London to LaGuardia airport, sorry, JFK, Heathrow to JFK. There was a movie, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings with Burt Reynolds, it was very down south, dialect was heavy. I’m watching this movie and I can’t understand a word anyone’s saying. I’m a little jet lagged but still, I think “I have come here to become an actor and I don’t even speak the language.”

David Read
To be fair he’s in the South, there’s a lot of drawl.

Erick Avari
My first stop was actually Charleston, South Carolina so that’s where I was headed via New York. My first day, smoking, those days you woke up in the morning, lit a cigarette. I’d come in late at night and my roommate was just waking up and I said, “hi, I am so and so, do you have an ashtray on that side of the room?” He said, “no, you’re just gonna have to go down to the cafeteria and rip one off.” Rip one off? Is there one thats loose somewhere? Yank out of the wall or something? It’s such a violent image. There were things like that that just would constantly trip me up.

David Read
I just need a bowl, I don’t need to steal it.

Erick Avari
A glass, a little water. I’m into non-violence, you know, Gandhi and everything.

David Read
Gandhi and everything. I only recently saw that film in the past couple of years.

Erick Avari
Which one?

David Read
The one with…what’s his face? He was so brilliant. The Gandhi film.

Erick Avari
Oh Ben Kingsley.

David Read
Ben Kingsley, thank you. I knew the story and I knew what he had done. But he was brilliant in that.

Erick Avari
It was amazing. Never went to drama school.

David Read
Just innate talent.

Erick Avari
Well, I heard actually an Englishman, quite a well respected actor in his own right, talk about Sir Ben, say, “well, what a stretch, you played an Indian!”

David Read
Come on.

Erick Avari
Englishman. Does that negate all your work? Played in India, Ben hard hardly ever been to India before.

David Read
That’s right. There’s study that goes into this.

Erick Avari
He was terrific. He was terrific. He’s also terrific in Pinter. He does Pinter better than I’ve seen anyone else do Pinter?

David Read
Tell me about being invited to be a part of the TV series, Stargate SG-1.

Erick Avari
SG-1. It was a strange experience. We’d gone through the whole movie and the language was the big thing and now that was turning on its head. Now, all of a sudden, Kasuf speaks English.

David Read
All of a sudden.

Erick Avari
All of a sudden, yeah. I figured that’s one of those things I just got to make an adjustment in my head.

David Read
Daniel taught them, he was there for a while.

Erick Avari
And, you know, Kasuf just had a way with languages. But then it became “okay, so what’s the dialect now?” I didn’t want to do a Middle Eastern dialect, why should he? He’s learning from someone who speaks…and he’s learning phonetically. There are things to take into consideration when you’re playing with that. That never quite sat, I was never in a comfortable place as an actor with that part of it. Now all of a sudden this world that I knew that was like that [small and defined] has gone out into all kinds of different directions and stuff. It was sort of a little bit of the old and a lot of the new, and a different genre. We’re now in television land.

David Read
Did you have trouble recognizing it? Aside from the fact that you’re now speaking a whole new language, did you have trouble recognizing what it was that you had been a part of? Or was it like, “no, this is Stargate, it’s just grown up more.”

Erick Avari
It would be like my life in India and now my life in America, it’s gonna be different. Your dialect changes, you don’t say [carnt] anymore, you say [cant]. You don’t say maths anymore, you say math. You don’t drive on the right side, the left side of the road unless you want to get killed. That’s, you know, those types of things.

David Read
My understanding was that you were invited back for the pilot but there was a scheduling conflict.

Erick Avari
Not for the pilot, it was for a later episode. I was doing Dragon at the time.

David Read
Okay, yes. You come in in Secrets in season two with Vaitiare Bandera, who is now playing your daughter, Sha’re. I thought that was a wonderful episode. My problem was that when we would see you we wouldn’t get you for very long. You were there to facilitate the stories and that was kind of my frustration.

Erick Avari
Yeah, I did feel like that it was a little bit of that. I was happy to be associated with it and to get to play with those guys. It was different. Fun set, fun cast, was good times and Vancouver’s beautiful.

David Read
They have taken this franchise and they have made it so accessible to so many people around the world. I can’t wait for for MGM to start working on the next whatever it is going to be through Amazon. We’re just waiting for the right time to come along.

Erick Avari
I wish we’d see more old fashioned sci-fi like Star Trek. Films of that era, yes there was a naivete, but I yearn for that. I just feel like we’ve gotten so blase about so many things that it’s not shocking anymore to hear about a 14 year old kid shooting someone in the face. They get nothing out of it, they’ve done it in video games. I just fear where Hollywood has really chosen to put its energy into storytelling. What kind of stories are we telling now with a partisan divide? Now you see movies that are this or that.

David Read
Yeah, it’s crystal clear, you’re either for us or you’re against us with this one. Movies should bring us together. The cinema is a place where we should be able to get together and embrace a story that is common enough to all of us that we can go back and say, that was a fun time, wasn’t it?” “Oh, I don’t necessarily agree with you as a person but we enjoyed that, didn’t we? What are the common threads that we had with that?”

Erick Avari
There’s that bonding thing and also the informative value of how people are depicted on screen. Slight tangent here but this was something that as a young actor taking on Indian, Middle Eastern, kind of any foreign Eastern European kind of country. I always felt an obligation to portray them as humanly as possible, find humor, find the moments that make them more than just a dialect. I had a rule of thumb because I have this conversation and sometimes an argument with directors about just how far to go with the accent or the head shake or what not to do. If you take away the dialect, is that character still fun? If not, then that’s racist. If the only thing funny about that character is the dialogue then you need another writer.

David Read
Absolutely. The character has to show humanity in and of themselves, not just be a costume on a stick giving off a certain accent.

Erick Avari
NCIS, the first episode I did on that, I forget which one it was, but I played this Egyptian character. They turned all the stereotypes on its head, the guy says, “oh, isn’t it time for you to pray?” and he goes, “I don’t know, Presbyterians, we don’t really have the time.”

David Read
That’s great.

Erick Avari
Yeah, just things like that. I love that, I feel like we need more of that rather than identifying a swath of people in a certain light with a certain perspective. It’s wrong and it sets people back.

David Read
I have some fan questions for you. Lockwatcher and Rick Doner – You’ve worked in both film and television, both in Stargate. What differences do you find between working day to day on a film versus working on a TV series? Which energy do you yourself prefer?

Erick Avari
I do love film. I love the coming together of different people, the cast and crew. Especially when you’re on location and jammed in, you’re locked in together. You have this wonderful experience, for the most part, and then you go your separate ways. I love the time that one can take to make the film, to shoot it, find those really delicate moments, chance, blame flying overhead. Just those little things, I love that. It’s more kind of like theater in that sense. It’s more subtle. Yeah, I shouldn’t say that.

David Read
You have more time to explore.

Erick Avari
You do and you can play around with the different takes. TV series is very formulaic in terms of how a director goes about their day. It’s like you get the master, get the coverage, move up. Get master, get the coverage, move up. Film, it’s a little more loosey goosey. You got to pick up a scene here, two months down the road maybe pick up the second half of that scene. I like the energy of a movie, especially an independent film. There’s something about that that makes it really fun and engaging. The stakes are not that high, they’re not a bunch of suits telling you how to make the movie.

David Read
Speaking of independent work, Joseph Mynard says “I loved you as Nicodemus in The Chosen.” I have not seen it yet, I am going to. He says “it was powerful, it was deeply moving. How did you feel about your time on that project?”

Erick Avari
I had pretty much left Hollywood in 2016 and I was in no hurry to get back to working, I wanted to take a break. I just felt like I was in a rut, I wasn’t enjoying it, I needed it. I needed to allow things to settle in and see where I landed and how I landed. I knew I was not happy. I wasn’t happy with the roles that I was being offered or going out for, I wasn’t happy with putting my life on hold for something that I wasn’t particularly enthused about doing. Over the years I felt like the business has changed and certain things, when I hurt my back, I feel that I wasn’t invincible, this can’t go on.

David Read
We are finite. You have to be selective about your time.

Erick Avari
Yes. You may have to quit the theater before you can hope to die on stage. That’s essentially what happened. I don’t see myself making that commitment anymore. Both physically and mentally.

David Read
Now that you’ve stepped back a little bit more do you feel more fulfilled as a person having more of an open approach towards projects?

Erick Avari
Absolutely and conversely I think I am a better actor today for it. To answer his question, Joseph, it was a time when my dog, it was just me and Tootsie on the road now for the past four years, she had passed. I wasn’t doing that great, it was a tough one.

David Read
Yeah, I completely understand.

Erick Avari
10 days, maybe, if that. Enough time for me to realize that I really need to shake myself out of this.

David Read
The show did that for you?

Erick Avari
Absolutely. The script came along and it was a page turner. It was certainly the best role that I’ve been offered on film and TV. I just had my back surgery so I was recovering from that. I did think about it long and hard because I did feel like a hypocrite. Had this been a story about Allah instead of Jesus Christ, I would reject it out of hand. I would have sid “nice part but I really don’t want to get into all of that controversy and all that stuff.” Religion is tough unless you’re making a real Gandhi.

David Read
I haven’t seen it yet, I’m gonna jump on it now that we’ve talked about it. I think if the story speaks truth to what it is to be human and what it is to to live well, I think that that speaks a lot to whether or not something is worth the energy to put into it and to dedicate to it. I don’t think I articulated that very well

Erick Avari
I think it has to speak to you on some level, you know, absolutely. Clearly I recognized that the the character has wonderful arc, so just looking at it from a dramatic point of view I did feel like, “now that’s interesting.” I kind of said no to a lot of projects based on the association with the religion.

David Read
There’s also an interesting perspective about testing yourself a little bit to. Tom McBeath and I had an interesting conversation once, he said he doesn’t like to take a role unless it’s one that scares him a little bit.

Erick Avari
Oh yeah, challenging.

David Read
Absolutely. Put yourself a little bit outside of your comfort zone and see if you can tackle it. Are we good on time?

Erick Avari
Yes.

David Read
Okay. Teresa Mc wanted to know “is there any project that you regretted doing? You don’t necessarily have to name it if there is one. I’m just curious how you felt and what you learned along the way. “Well, we’re not gonna do that one again.”

Erick Avari
There was one. You know JK Simmons, right?

David Read
I do indeed.

Erick Avari
He was on it and I figured, “well, if it’s okay for JK it’s okay for me.” Oh god, it was just awful. The movie, I could not sit through it, it was revolting. But they came up with my quote which was a rarity in those days.

David Read
You got paid you know, so…

Erick Avari
I regretted Encino Man only because it was too small a role to really kind of make any character. It defined me in that period of time all of a sudden. I was going out for Indian roles and young people come running up on the street “say the line, say the line.” It was crazy.

David Read
Mack Bolan’s conscience – What are your thoughts on Babylon 5 and working on Babylon 5?

Erick Avari
I don’t have a lot of real memories. It was very pleasant and they were very nice people. It was one that was right in the comfort zone, I wasn’t stretched.

David Read
I went, I did that, next.

Erick Avari
Yeah. It was nice. Thank you.

David Read
Dan Ben says here if you have any opinion on how…how do I want to phrase this. So there were two more Stargate films planned, would you have been involved to your knowledge or would you have any interest in seeing where those would have gone? What were your thoughts on the two additional films?

Erick Avari
Yes and yes. Yeah, absolutely. I would love to have seen…because that was what Dean talked about initially. He said “this is part of a trilogy.” I enjoyed working with them a lot, it was a very fun experience, very open. Dean has become a good friend, I should say. I’m taking liberties by calling him one but he’s been very good to me and I think there’s a mutual respect that’s really nice.

David Read
Absolutely. Erick, before I let you go, when am I going to be able to read your autobiography? Have you given thought to it?

Erick Avari
Just recently in the last couple of weeks I did think about it in some form or another. I am at a stage where I feel like I want to talk about just where I came from and the path. It’s been a real roller coaster ride in many ways, both up, down, sideways. It’s been a great, great ride and to document it, I think might be…

David Read
I would be thrilled. I relish this time that we have together. I think that your voice and your perspective, coupled with your passion, are worth celebrating. You have lived the American dream.

Erick Avari
I have indeed and that was something I actually wanted to talk. What are the wonderful things that people don’t necessarily embrace or realize the importance of. The fact that this is the only nation that is truly a melting pot I think is the strength of this country, not its weakness. We’ve fallen prey to politicians, divide and conquer. Eisenhower had it right, we don’t have to worry about anything outside, it’s inside we’ve got to worry about.

David Read
It has its benefits and it’s very certain drawbacks as well. I am privileged to know you and to be able to share in your telling of stories. I think you’ve got more to tell.

Erick Avari
Well thank you for doing this because you’re actually facilitating storytelling or insights into character, biographies. I love biographies. It’s a worthwhile endeavor, it’s not just frivolity. There’s value in what you do and I think we sometimes forget that and get caught up with the frivolity of it. I’ll tell you a very quick story. It was years ago, 1980, I was doing Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night’s Dream and we were taking it on the road. We came through New York and were playing in Prospect Park. My dearest buddy from college came to see it and he just loved it We went to dinner afterwards and he was bubbling over with it and all that stuff. I was like, “okay Mark, enough of that, thank you.”

David Read
He had a good time.

Erick Avari
Three days later I’m pulling into a hotel in Iowa with the bus and truck company and I found out that Mark had been killed in a freak accident in New York City, run over. I had to do the show that night, I had to do Romeo and Juliet, Friar Laurence. I remember just before curtain, the whole cast, we made a circle, we would do that anyway. It just came out of me, I said, “the last time I saw Mark was after we all made his night for him. He was bubbling over and brought him so much joy and so much happiness and you guys did that. That was what we did for him the last time I remember him.” It’s important and I don’t think he would have been that overwhelmed if we had been all about ourselves. It was a wonderful production, it was an ensemble production and it was a lot of energy, it wasn’t about any one person, the production. I think that that rings true when that happens. It’s not often, but a good production, that’s what happens. He was caught up in it and it brought him joy.

David Read
Good stories, they remind us as to the sum of what we are and what we are by ourselves and the mountains that we have to scale by ourselves and those that we that we help scale mountains along the way and the journeys that we walk together.

Erick Avari
Yeah.

David Read
They remind us that we’re awfully fragile. I said this in Episode 199 when I had my crew on to thank them for 200 shows. If there is something that you need to say to someone, don’t put it off. If you need to communicate how you feel to someone, let them know because tomorrow isn’t guaranteed.

Erick Avari
Yesterday, I was texting a friend, I said “I wish I had reached out to Diamond.” This friend, high school friend, not highschool, kindergarten friend. Went to kindergarten and all the way through school and college together. I just assumed he was going to be there when I went back to visit, I was going to stay at his hotel in fact. Halen Hardy, dropped dead, massive heart attack. It really rocked us because he did not change one bit. He looked the same from high school to his obituary photograph.

David Read
You can never tell. Live every day as best you can.

Erick Avari
Things that are on your mind, nice things.

David Read
Absolutely. Erick, this has been wonderful, thank you for taking the time. Next year is the 30th anniversary of this franchise. I don’t know how I’m going to celebrate it but when it goes over that big three zero mark I’d love to have you back.

Erick Avari
Count me in.

David Read
Thank you so much sir, it means a lot to have you on.

Erick Avari
Thank you David, it’s been a pleasure.

David Read
Take care of yourself.

Erick Avari
I hope this is a better recording than the first one.

David Read
Hey, doing what we can with what we got.

Erick Avari
I suddenly realized how ancient the computer was and how bad the camera was.

David Read
You’re great. Once we figured out the audio, we were good. Please take care of yourself.

Erick Avari
You too. Thank you.

David Read
Be well, sir. Bye bye. Erick Avari every one, Kasuf in Stargate and SG-1. I cannot say enough about this man. He is a storyteller and he’s thoughtful and he’s introspective and he just draws you in. You gotta lean into what he has to say because it’s like “I don’t want to miss anything.” Thank you Erick for coming on and thanks to Allan for spurring the original connection which got us talking before Gatecon, the last time. I got to know him a little bit better there as a result. We have more episodes coming your way very soon. I don’t have any on the books right now but stay tuned because I’ve got a few irons in the fire and we’re going to make a few new episodes here happen. My thanks to my production team, Linda “GateGabber” Furey, for continuing to be at my side through all of these shows. My moderating team Tracy, Jeremy Antony, Sommer, Rhys, you guys continue to make the show possible week after week and episode after episode. Thanks to Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb, he’s our web developer at Dial the Gate, for continuing to keep the website up and running. Keep it there for more announcements about future episodes. Wormhole X-Tremists! is going to be back next Sunday and we’re going to be wrapping up season three of SG-1. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. Thank you once again to Erick Avari for coming on. We’ll see you on the other side.