Everyone’s favorite bad-guy-turned good-guy, Harry Maybourne, is joining David Read LIVE on Dial the Gate. Actor Tom McBeath will take your questions!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Opening Credits
0:27 – Welcome and Episode Outline
01:35 – Guest Introduction
04:21 – “A Christmas Carol”
13:38 – Dissecting Scrooge
18:55 – “A Zoom Christmas Carol”
22:09 – Who are your heroes?
26:31 – What makes art/entertainment?
33:44 – Tom’s Mentor
37:04 – Coming into Film and Television
39:50 – “If they offer me something and it scares me, I’ll do it”
41:40 – Auditioning for Maybourne
49:09 – Character Transformation after “Foothold”
51:31 – Michael Greenburg story (MacGyver)
52:53 – Frozen Bad Guy in “Watergate”
56:37 – “Starsky and Hutch”
59:23 – Fishing with C4
1:02:41 – “48 Hours” Gas Station Scene
1:04:12 – “It’s Good to be King”
1:08:08 – Calling Stargate Command from Jamaica
1:12:00 – Working with Ronny Cox
1:15:03 – Too Recognizable for Atlantis?
1:16:46 – Relationships with cast off-camera
1:17:39 – Directed by Amanda Tapping on “Travelers”
1:19:18 – Remembering Lines
1:25:45 – Theater VS a lens
1:27:32 – Tom’s Household Memorabilia
1:33:01 – Guest Thanks
1:34:00 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:40:33 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
We are at 10 already. Thank you so much for joining me on Dial the Gate. My name is David Read. We are going to be bringing in one of my favorite human beings, as well as performers and just an all-around great guy, Mr. Tom McBeath, in just a moment here, and we have a lot to talk about so I’m just going to cut right to it. So, before we get started with Tom, if you like Stargate and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, it would mean a great deal if you click that Like button, it really makes a difference with YouTube’s algorithm, and it’s definitely going to help the show grow its audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend, and if you want to get notified about future episodes, click that 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 guest changes. This is key if you plan on watching live, because these talent are working and schedules change all the time. And clips of this livestream will hopefully be released over the course of the next several days on both Dial the Gate and the GateWorld.net YouTube channels. Without further ado, Mr. Tom McBeath!

Tom McBeath:
Hello, all.

David Read:
Hello, Harry! How are you, my friend?

Tom McBeath:
For an old guy, I’m really great, actually.

David Read:
How are things going, have you been keeping busy?

Tom McBeath:
Well, again, I’ll mention age again, because as you go through this life as an actor, when you get older, things slow down, so when you add COVID in, you don’t actually slow down very much at all, because you’re almost there already! It’s true! There’s been more golfing and a lot of — since COVID — a lot of walking, and here in Vancouver it’s a beautiful place, we have the beautiful Stanley Park up here, and it’s from my place up to Prospect Point, which is a beautiful place to see the Lionsgate Bridge go across to West Vancouver, it’s about a 45-minute hike and then 45 back, so, fresh air. And we’ve been doing some golf with the boys, and Karin and I – my partner – we’ve been doing some pitch-and-putt, and that’s been lots of fun. Haven’t seen much of my family, I did get a little trip up to San Merar Merir for my sister’s… my birthday was… hers was 79, but that’s the only trip I’ve had. My one brother and her are the only ones I’ve seen, family-wise, since March, so it’s kind of odd. A couple of friends once in a while — as in golf guys — once in a while.

David Read:
It’s been an interesting year, for sure. You still having your poker game?

Tom McBeath:
We have our poker game every Tuesday night now, and we have in on Skype. There’s eight of us, and we’ve found this old Java poker game that only us members can play, there’s eight of us can play and no-one else can play and it’s just us. And we have a choice of games, there’s about 20, but we only play three or four of them. Most of them have too many wild cards. But it’s an old game from back in the mid-80’s, or early ‘80’s, and it’s really low-tech, you just have the poker table and you know nothing about the dealer, and I suppose the cards are random, we sometimes think they might not be, but we’re not sure.

David Read:
You’d have to wonder, you know? Absolutely.

Tom McBeath:
We’ll have our 25th week next Tuesday, and then, of course, the following Tuesday we’ve moved the game to Monday so that we can hang in for the big election at home with our friends.

David Read:
Absolutely. Watch what’s going to go down there. Tom, you have, for the past several Christmases, off and on, made it a point to study and bring to life my favorite literary character of all time, and probably what is my favorite book, A Christmas Carol. Kieran [Dickson] and I were privileged to talk to you about that role a couple of years ago and I would love to talk with you about it now for people who haven’t had a chance to see that piece over on the Stargate Command website. Talk about bringing Ebenezer Scrooge to life for me.

Tom McBeath:
Well, the first time I was asked to do it was maybe six years ago, I’m not sure, six or seven, I thought, “There’s no way I can play Scrooge.” My cheeks are too big, I’m not a skinny rake, and I don’t care how much putty you put on my face, I can never look like what – in my growing up years – I believe Scrooge to look like. The Director finally talked me into it, and he basically talked me into it through, also, the Designer lady who did the costumes and stuff, and when she had come up with the costume, and I saw the drawings of the costumes, I realized that it was a character I could play, and with his idea of how he wanted to do it, I said yes. And we started off on a journey that continues to this day.

David Read:
Wow. I’d like to show fans out there some of the images that your theater company was kind enough to provide to us. Do you have those numbers in front of you, by any chance?

Tom McBeath:
Well, I do, but if you describe the picture to me… it’s just the numbers were not in order [inaudible].

David Read:
My apologies.

Tom McBeath:
And I didn’t write them down quick enough!

David Read:
That’s OK! I have a picture of you with Gerry… is it ‘Mu-kay’ or ‘Mack-ee’?

Tom McBeath:
Gerry ‘Mu-kay’… Sorry, yes, Gerry Mackay, yes.

David Read:
He is looming behind you, and you are on your knees staring at camera. He is the Ghost of Christmas Future.

Tom McBeath:
He is. And he played all the Ghosts. That is the scene where he has to realize where he will be, in the grave, in the ground, that he will be done, he will be finished. And he’s never had to contemplate that. And through the journey of the three spirits, he’s come to realize… I think he realizes it quite early in the journey what a jerk he is, what a jerk he has been, what a mess he’s made of his life, and I think it starts to happen really early. When we first started rehearsals, I thought it wasn’t ‘til the end he understood, but it’s almost from the time that we’ll see a picture, later, of a young boy that is holding a book, and I’m pointing into the book…

David Read:
I can pull that one up right now.

Tom McBeath:
That’s actually Scrooge as a boy, and he sees himself as a boy. And he’s left at the school over Christmas, everybody else has gone home, and he’d brought back to that feeling, and he’s brought back to the imagination he had with the material that’s in the book.

David Read:
That’s all he has.

Tom McBeath:
He’s beginning to touch those things that meant things in his life that he’s pushed away, he’s pushed aside, and allowed money to take over everything. So, right from almost that first spirit taking him into the past, almost from the beginning, the walls are starting to crumble around him. And that image with the Ghost of Christmas Future behind him, that big dark figure, the wall is gone.

David Read:
Wow.

Tom McBeath:
And so, when he wakes up, he realizes he’s still alive. He throws open the windows and he asks what day it is, and it’s Christmas, he realizes that he can still participate, so he gets [inaudible].

David Read:
In the book, it basically is, the Ghosts say, “We’re going to visit you, one a night.” And so, he’s [as] shocked as we are that he hasn’t missed it. And you talked about this character fighting through this journey, not wanting to change. He’s perfectly contented being where he is, he doesn’t want to become what they want him to become. But they keep revealing these things to him, and he’s, mentally, just kicking and screaming his way through this process.

Tom McBeath:
Yeah, he does fight it, but he’s taking it all in. He’s taking it all in, and it is eroding him. He doesn’t get a lot of… yeah, he does argue with all of the spirits. This version, this stage version is a version, and there are many, many, many out there. Michael Shamata, who directed this show, put this one together about 27 years ago in a production he did in Eastern Canada, in Halifax. That show has been done there, on and off, for that many years, and has been done in Toronto every year, often with the same cast, or some of the same cast, sometimes switching positions as well. He’s directed many of them, and each time he’s gone to direct them, or looked at them again, to say, “Yes, you can do this,” he’ll do little tweaks and stuff. His play itself does not cover everything in the novel, it’s impossible to do that, but the highlights that he brings out… the stage for this show is just a large sort of arc, like the Arc de Triomphe, it’s kind of an arch like that, with a big clock up top, and cupids and stuff hanging off the sides, and a great set of doors in the middle that are used quite often. And two doors on either side that are built into the theater, actually, up on the stage. And it’s a beautiful little theater in Victoria, from an old church, so they can’t do everything on it, but they can do a lot. The set, the only change that happens is with furniture pieces that come out, and the desk that I sit at in the play is this thing that was probably 10 feet long and four feet wide, on wheels, and that thing just flows in and gets stuck in place, and a chair comes in, and books come out and flop down, and there’s a couple of spirits that move around and help set each scene, sometimes characters do it, but usually these two spirits do everything, and dressed as some kind of weird sort of spiritual things that no one can see, but they can see everything. So, it’s got this beautiful theatrical quality to it, rather than just a narrative. So, it’s really powerful that way, and it’s a beautiful little version, a theatrical version, of the novel. As I said, it doesn’t cover all of it, but it certainly digs into ‘love does actually conquer everything’.

David Read:
It sure does. I have a picture of you with Conor Wylie, here. I’m guessing that’s his nephew, if I’m not mistaken?

Tom McBeath:
Yes

David Read:
And then… what was the other one I had here just a moment ago?

Tom McBeath:
That one with Evan, that’s Cratchit.

David Read:
Evan is Cratchit?

Tom McBeath:
Yeah

David Read:
Ah, yes, Evan Frayne. You had a couple of different Cratchits over the years, is that right?

Tom McBeath:
Yeah, we’ve had three different Cratchits.

David Read:
Can you please talk briefly about how the typical Cratchit, in terms of how we normally perceive him being… excuse me, the typical Scrooge, how we normally perceive him as being curmudgeoning and loud and everything else, and the advantage that you had of the size of the theater, and your approach to it, based on the intimacy of that production. I love this story.

Tom McBeath:
Sorry, I’m not quite sure what you’re referring to.

David Read:
Where you were able to talk, where you were able to whisper, and infer that you didn’t have to be loud and obnoxious because these people are just… they don’t need all of that energy. All you have to do is just say a little bit.

Tom McBeath:
I think you can be as powerful with a smile and a look of, [softly] “Don’t you understand, you idiot?” as you can calling someone [forcefully] “an idiot”. So, if you can work on their self-confidence and all their weaknesses, without yelling, you get much farther ahead in controlling people. Now this all came from the director as well.

David Read:
Oh, OK.

Tom McBeath:
So, the last time we did it, which was not last year, the year before, we moved much more towards the guy who, on the front of it, no one would think, except those people that knew him, that he was a curmudgeon, because he could be personable, but he actually wasn’t, he was very private. But he could put that mask on and protect himself, but it was exhausting for him when he would… there was one beautiful scene in the play, that his housekeeper… it begins with his housekeeper, and we have the first scene in the big office, and that’s finished, and he’s yelled at… well, not necessarily… he’s dealt with Cratchit, and he’s dealt with his nephew, and sent the nephew off and said, “No, I’m not coming, I’m not coming. Tough.” And the stage goes to kind of black, and those things get taken off, and then lights sort of come up, and from one side door, this person walks in all dressed in black, with a very straight back, and this actress – totally fierce, beautiful actress – carrying a long stand with a candle on the top, and she carries that in so bloody slow you go, “What the hell is going on? This is so boring.” And she sets it down, she walk all the way across the front of the stage and sets it down, then she walks off, same speed, then she comes back on with a chair. At exactly the same speed. And walks across… and by the time she sets the chair down and walks off, the audience is killing themselves laughing. And it’s just a great… you can’t believe how wonderful real clown is when it’s… you just commit to something so strongly, and there’s hardly an ounce of action going on. And then I come in, and snap my fingers to get my clothes taken off, and get my housecoat on, and I’m exhausted from my day of being so goddam nice! And so glad to be home and I can yell at her, because she doesn’t do my shoes fast enough, my slippers, or get my coat off the right way, or get me into my gown the right way. It’s just a beautiful setup for finding out what a jerk he is, because you might not believe it for the first two scenes. Although, you realize he is controlling them, controlling the weaker people. And so, that gown, that housecoat, the director said, “I can’t send you into the world out there with the sleeping cap on and in a nightgown. I want you to look good.” And him and the designer worked this all out, and they came up with that coat, so I get to wear that coat through the whole thing. And the flow of that coat, the way it moves and picks up the light, and throughout the whole evening I look like this marvelous actor, but it’s the cloak!

David Read:
You look like a million bucks! The last time I talked with you, I was asking you about what was going on, and you said that you guys were trying to come up with a way of doing the show, or pieces of it, something is in development on Zoom. And I would love to be able to feature a piece of that, some of the cast, all of the cast, for a preview, before whatever it is that you are going to do comes out, to get that featured in some element on Dial the Gate. Because I think fans would eat it up, getting a chance to see you perform live.

Tom McBeath:
Well, you see, the thing is, the actors will not be together, we will all be seated, we will probably be reading, and from what we remember, recall, or how much work we decide to put back into the script, how many of the faces we’ll be able to see and who you’re talking to, I’m not sure how it’s all going to work. I think they’re going to try and do a… they’re tempting maybe to get it together well before they present it, or before they present it, so that they can add in photos as we move through the story to show you what that character looks like, to show you what the lighting and the set will look like as we move through. But that’s starting to get into production values, and theaters aren’t making money nowadays, so it depends on how much they can find to put this thing together. And they think it’s going to air on the 23rd, I think that’s what they were trying for, to air it on December the 23rd, I guess on Zoom. I don’t know if that goes through YouTube, or how it all works. So I don’t know what’s gonna really be available, I’ve no idea, I’m not in on this production process of it other than being the actor, so I don’t know what they’re going to come up with, but anything they do come up with and they will allow to get out there that I can pass off to you, I certainly will.

David Read:
Please and thank you, yeah. The nice thing about Zoom, especially with the actors if they’re all on their own controls, is that they can turn their own video on and off. So if they’re in a scene, or they’re not in a scene, they can do their… and it’ll change the gallery view scene by scene. So, I suspect it’ll work itself out, and if you use the software like I do — it’s called OBS – you can put a background on there of the location that you’re in. So it’s just like inviting the audience to go on a journey with you of the imagination, just like any play is. So, all it comes down to is the audience’s will to go, so I’m looking forward to it, regardless of whether or not we can do something together with the production company, I wish you guys all the best.

Tom McBeath:
Well, thank you, thank you.

David Read:
Tom, who are your heroes? Who are the people responsible, directly and indirectly in your life, for making you the person that you’ve become.

Tom McBeath:
Wow.

David Read:
No pressure! Just that!

Tom McBeath:
I don’t know, a lot of people know what they want to do, which direction they want to go relatively early in life, and even by the time I got out of high school I had no idea what I wanted to do, and then I mucked around on some labor jobs, and I never thought I was smart enough to go to University until I realized that some of the friends I used to hang out with were going to University. Then I went, “Oh, wait a minute, I don’t know how I got that idea in my head.” But I did go off and became a computer programmer, and ended up working in Winnipeg, away from home and new friends, I’m accidentally at a bar one night, ended up getting talked into going for rehearsals for an amateur musical called Oklahoma, and I went, and I mostly was chasing females. And I belonged to that group for three years, but I also, once I’d done a few of the musical stuff, one of the directors got me into his amateur group that did Canadian home-written stuff, and then I also joined a couple of other amateur groups doing stuff, so I was actually spending more time mucking around doing theater stuff than I was actually at work. And I decided that I wanted to go to theater school. I sort of got enough encouragement from a couple of people who’d say, “You know, look into it, but don’t just decide to be an actor and go do it, go get some training.” So I went off, I managed to audition for the University of Alberta’s BFA program and got in there and spent three years there. While I was there, I met a couple of people, but one of them, the one that really stands out, is currently in the hospital just having had her hip operated on, she fell down and broke it. She’s… let’s see, how old is she… she’s 87. She lives on her own outside of Sault Ste. Marie, her husband died a few years ago, he was a painter who designed our loonie.

David Read:
On the coin.

Tom McBeath:
He died about 4 years ago, cancer. She’s lived on her own since, and two weeks before… no, about a month before he died, she broke her leg. And I was there when she broke it. And so she spent a week in the hospital, and then demanded that she get out so she could go back out to the house to look after him, and I left about that time to come back here to Vancouver. So, she did look after him, but over the last four years, and I have gone every year to visit them for many, many years, usually in the spring to help with the gardening. And so I have done that until this year, and I couldn’t go. Last year it was difficult, I would have to stop watching her go up and down the stairs. The bathroom was upstairs and her bedroom was upstairs, and I had to stop watching her because it was just too frightening. She’s got all this massive strength inside her, but her body is kind of failing. And she wants to die there, she said this is where they’ve decided that’s where they want to end things, so there’s no way to talk them into getting out, or talk her into getting out, now, but we don’t know what’s going to happen with this one when she ends up getting out. But she is the lady, a stage designer, who taught an odd course that they developed at the U of A. What was it called…? I can’t even remember, the name will come back, but it was basically teaching actors or teaching students how to understand art aesthetics. What makes art art? Why is, say, the carving of the lobster fisherman from Nova Scotia or from Maine not really considered a piece of art, and Michaelangelo’s David is considered a piece of art. What in the theater – we’re acting students – can be considered art, and what’s considered to be entertainment? Can you call yourself an artist in theater or are you a collaborative artist? How many pieces of inspiration come into you that are someone else’s inspiration? Someone else’s vision for the first time that they’ve ever brought that up? And then a writer puts it on a page, and a designer pulls it from somewhere, maybe steals it, who knows? I mean, a lot of good writers say, “If you want to write well, steal.” And they say Shakespeare did too.

David Read:
Oh, he most certainly did.

Tom McBeath:
But it’s the way you take those pieces of information and put them together. Then you bring an actor in, and a director in, and more inspiration comes in, or more road blocks, or more hurdles to climb over. So, that course, the very first thing you had to do was to do a still life of something, that made a statement, that had something to say, something that could be argued, something that could be discussed. Some of the students were successful, some of them were absolutely not successful. One person put up a nice piece of black felt with a vase and a flower in it, with some of the petals had fallen off. And she was so livid with that student, she said, “We can’t talk about that! That says nothing. It says nothing. That’s got something to do with feelings and emotion. We want to discuss something. There’s nothing specific enough about that.” One guy put up… what did he do…? It was a school house that he put firecrackers inside and blew it up.

David Read:
There’s something to talk about! My God!

Tom McBeath:
That kid left before the end of the school year, and he could play James Taylor and sing all James Taylor’s stuff, and everybody just loved this guy, and he could talk a mile a minute, but he was a total destroyer, he was a total manipulator, and he eventually… a few of us sort of ganged up on him at one point in a movements class. I can’t remember what he was doing, but we kind of forced him out of the class, and then he went and quit. Then a few years later, some of the lady friends stayed written friends with him, and he was asking for money from them, and some of them were sending him money, and then eventually he was in jail in Florida for something! He was just a fast mover. So that was his little… the destruction. She did talk in theater there, and I’ve heard this since, many times from different people, that in art you deal with creation, not destruction. You can use, perhaps, a destructive image to say stuff, but ultimately those things have to create something. And mine, I had no idea what she was talking about, this lady used terrible words like ‘gestalt’ and ‘universal’ and all these weird terms, and I just thought she was just mouth, mouth, mouth. And mine, I had a skull, it was an ashtray, and you used the mouth to put your ashes in, so it was holes for the eyes and ears, so I took that and I put a bunch of twigs in it, in all the holes, and I hung all religious symbols all over the tree. I just said, “Well, you know, the only reason we have religion is because we’re all scared to die.” So that was my little thing. And she thought that was pretty interesting, and so I got a little bit of praise from her, but I still didn’t like her. And it wasn’t ‘til we got into the next step of things where we had to write a little stage production, and produce it, and get actors to do it, and light it, and get the set up for it, and it had to say something. And somebody had done something about some kind of Coke machine thing, and at the end of it we would discuss stuff. If she thought it was worth discussing, she would open up the floor to discuss, and say, “OK, let’s see what this has to say.” At some point, somebody had said something that I didn’t quite agree with, so I put my hand up to talk, and then I changed my mind and I put my hand down, and she said, “No, Tom, what do you have to say?” Because I hadn’t said much for the first six weeks or so, so I said, “No, it’s OK, it’s OK. Never mind.” And she went, “No, no, what do you have to say? You were going to say something, what is it?” I said, “It doesn’t matter, forget it!” And she started walking around my chair that I was sitting in, she started poking me in the back, and said, “Come on, say it! It won’t hurt, say it! Say it! Just say it!” And I went, “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” So I said it, and she said “See? That wasn’t so hard. You know, he’s got a point. Now, it’s not really a great point, but it’s a point.” So, she told me years later, and it wasn’t long after that I got to understand all those terms that she used, but she said, “You were taking over my class,” she said, “and I had to stop that.” See, I was the oldest person in the class. She said, “All these kids were thinking you were a god.” She said, “I had to fix that, because it was my class, not yours.” So, she said, “I decided to push you hard enough to either come across to my side, or shut up, and then I would tell you to shut up now, you can’t talk any more, you’re not in my class. You can watch. But you came across and everything worked.” Over the next two and a half years, I think the thing she taught me most was about responsibility, and I don’t know if I’d ever understood what that meant as a child, growing up, responsibility to your parents, or your brothers or sisters, or to the school you were going to, or to the class you were in, or to the subject you were taking, or…

David Read:
To yourself.

Tom McBeath:
Yeah, I don’t think I understood responsibility at all. And she said, “You know, in the theater, the writer, you have to be responsible to that writer and that writer’s vision, and his vision of what he’s going for, even if the director decides to take it some place else. You have to be responsible and accept the director’s vision, even sometimes — as often as not — is a non-vision. You have to learn to work with that, you can’t simply fight it. You have to participate with the actors that you work with, you have to respect what they are bringing, or not bringing, and if there’s…” She did say one great thing that’s always stuck in my mind, she said, “There’s no such thing as a bad actor. There’s actors, and there’s non-actors. So, if you’re working with a bunch of non-actors, the best actors will make those non-actors look good. So that’s [inaudible] your jobs. If you want a piece of theater to work, you have to get involved with everyone there on stage, and with the director, and largely with the writer, and you can’t simply believe that your way is the only way.” So, over the years, some of that I took too far for a while, then when you get out into the world… one of the things she did also say to me was… well, this was my favorite thing, she said, “Tom, you have a small talent. Look after it.”

David Read:
That’s an interesting slap across the [face]. “It’s a good talent, but it’s a little one!”

Tom McBeath:
“You have a small talent, so look after it.” And I understood it in many different ways over the years. You can take it as an insult, but she also thought the word ‘talent’ was a huge word. So, I think she knew that I would never be one of the great world actors, but she did know that I was a fine actor, that I could get out there on stage and that I could carry a show, I could work with people, I had a decent brain, she made me understand that too, that I didn’t have to protect it. Sometimes I took that a little too far in protecting what I believe, when I got out and first started working. The things she used to talk about came back again and again and again, and I always did, even from the beginning, had favorite actors I worked with here in Vancouver, that they would just blow my mind with what they could do, and how they could do it, how easily they could do it. And then as I’ve got older, I’ve realized that there are just so many different kinds of actors, and they all don’t work the same, and especially when you get into the film and TV business, it was really tough for a long time working my way into that business, because it’s so much different, style-wise, from the stage where I worked for years, and had been trained in. Just so many things that are different. And so, the rapid way you had to learn a scene that you had to go in to audition for, and then if you got the job, had to get to the set, you had no idea what was going to happen in the next half hour, you had to really keep your mind open, you had to really be on top of your lines, you really had to be accepting of everything that was happening around you, the way the director wanted to shoot it, or whatever changes the DoP made, or the cameraman made, or if there were three cameras on you, the way you had to move around the set. All of that stuff is so different from stage work, and you had to be really open to stuff going long. And all of that fed back into stage work for me as well. So, it’s been a long – and still – process of learning, and it started with that lady, and I’ve talked to her two times a week for the last four years, and she’s in the hospital right now and she’s got no phone because she doesn’t know how to use a mobile, and they don’t have any of the old phones in there any more. So, it’s a bit tough for her, and I haven’t talked to her in a week and a half, and she fell on the floor at noon, and the lady who comes to see her every morning to make her coffee and breakfast, she didn’t arrive ‘til the next morning, at eight o’clock.

David Read:
Oh, God! She’s a tough one.

Tom McBeath:
She’s really tough. And she couldn’t drag herself to the couch or into the carpeted area, so, anyway. She’s tough.

David Read:
Thank you for sharing that story.

Tom McBeath:
And I think a great painter, herself, and a wonderful designer too.

David Read:
You told me something once that stuck with me. “If they offer me something and it scares me, I’ll do it.” I mean, you were George in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’, and other George in ‘Of Mice and Men’.

Tom McBeath:
I have taken on jobs where they have been, for me, a huge challenge, but it’s because the people wanting me have had their arms wide open inviting me in to do it, that gave me the courage to go ahead with it. So, I don’t think it’s simply me saying, “Oh, that’s so scary, I have to do it.” I know for Virginia Woolf I said ‘no’ three or four times. I just said, “Look, I’m way too young for this.” Because I’d only seen older guys play him, and then it was a production manager who had been pushing me, and she said, “Read the play. Read the character description.” So, I read the character description and found out it was a guy that was my age. And so that [clicks fingers] made me say, “OK, I’ll do it.” And it took the first week and a half of rehearsals, and I’d done a lot of work before I started on it, it took me a week and a half into rehearsal before I could drop all those things I’d learned from seeing old guys play him.

David Read:
Your preconceptions.

Tom McBeath:
And then it became mine. So, yeah, it’s really hard to leave preconceptions behind.

David Read:
Harry Maybourne. What a tour de force for you. In many respects, Ebenezer Scrooge, in surprising ways. You came in in Season One, and bowed out in Season Eight. That character is fully articulated over the course of those seven years, and GateGab – one of my moderators – and I wanted to ask you right out of the gate here – pardon the pun – about auditioning and getting that part. Now, you tried to get some work on MacGyver, for years.

Tom McBeath:
Yes I did, I never got hired. I think I probably did 35 or 40 odd auditions for MacGyver. A little story I’ll add a little bit later with that, about Michael Greenburg! [inaudible] And he was great about it. I always hated having to audition for military people, because I never felt that, first of all, that I had the stature, or the voice, or the looks, or the character to be, and to me, the sides I had were relatively one-dimensional, and I thought, “Well, maybe that’s what they’re asking for, it’s just this one-dimensional thing that SG-1 has to overcome.” But I went, and I did the audition, and I was amazed that I got a call-back, and then I got hired. And that’s really when I got scared, and I went in and I got the costume fitting with this beautiful uniform, and the hat with the braid, and the buttons, and I look at it and go, “Ooh, I don’t know. Oh God, I don’t know, I don’t know!” So, I got in there and… what was that first one called? Enigma.

David Read:
That was Enigma. Yeah, there you go, good for you!

Tom McBeath:
Well, no, I did my homework today, I finally sat down and went through and decided I’ll figure out… some of them I still don’t really know what went on, but it’s so wonderful that you can go to YouTube and you can get them all, bam, bam, bam.

David Read:
It’s right there. Absolutely.

Tom McBeath:
So, I did do a little catch-up on it. And as I was watching through all of those things, and I probably saw them early on, but I don’t think I paid a lot of attention since then. And I think I’ve gone back and sort of looked at Paradise Lost and Good to be King, and then the odd little moment in other stuff. But re-watching them, the man in uniform at times, God, I looked good!

David Read:
You did! Absolutely! Those Air Force blues are beautiful.

Tom McBeath:
And in my head, a long time I’ve carried the fact that I really wasn’t very good at the military guy. But I think it wasn’t until Season Three, and I went back and I found out it was Foothold this happened in, and it was the first time they had allowed me to be human. Up until then I was an NID guy, and all I did was smirk at them, give them shit and try to scare them, and…

David Read:
Take Teal’c from them, yeah.

Tom McBeath:
And once in a while get pushed back by a few things, but it was… and I think I talked about this particular scene. There was a scene in Foothold that was cut out of the production, probably because of length, I’m not sure why, but it was with me and Amanda, and it started out with me screwing up Amanda’s warning about foothold, and her famous “Maybourne, you can be an idiot every day of the week, why couldn’t you just take a day off!” Then we work through it all and we save her, and then at the end there’s a scene in the office with the General and with RDA, and we’re clearing stuff up, and they say, “Good job, Maybourne.” And I say something like, “I’d like to give credit to…” was she a Colonel then? Carter?

David Read:
It was Major Carter.

Tom McBeath:
“…Major Carter.” And they all sort of look at me like… and it takes me a while to try to say it, and she says something, and I say something back, and then I said something like, “Perhaps we’ll see each other again.” And I give her this little look, a kind of embarrassed look, and, “I hope, well, maybe, we’ll see each other again.” And O’Neill says, “Yeah, that would be nice.” And it’s like, for me, it’s the shock thing. Well, it was that missing scene that made me do that scene that way, because it was in that scene where I had said something to her, and she looked at me like, “He’s human!” And I think Maybourne had, at some level, fallen slightly in love with Carter.

David Read:
Who can blame him? We were all in love with Carter!

Tom McBeath:
Oh, I know! [inaudible] his little heart, he’s gone, “My God, what’s happening to me?” And I can’t remember exactly what the scene looked like, I can’t remember the dialogue, I don’t have any scripts and stuff, so I’ve no idea what it looked like on the page, or what it looked like when they filmed it, but it was that little look back to her when I said, “Well, perhaps we’ll get a chance to see each other again.” And it was just this little…

David Read:
Glance.

Tom McBeath:
This little kinda half embarrassed, half excited glance that maybe it’ll happen again. And it was not too long after that, I think, the following season… was it Shades of Gray where I get frozen?

David Read:
We’re skipping ahead a little bit, but that’s Watergate when you get frozen, in Siberia.

Tom McBeath:
And I’m out of the uniform after that, and from then on, I felt like I was Maybourne, and I didn’t have to be the NID guy. I could be my own mischievous manipulator of things, I didn’t have to answer to anybody. There was a joy to it, it was Maybourne on his own. And he could help where he wanted or he could ask for help when he needed it.

David Read:
I loved that movement through Season Three and Season Four. After that episode in Foothold, “You’re an idiot every day of the week, why don’t you just take one day off?” And that glimmer of humanity we see in him, the next time we see him, he’s back at his old tricks again, he finds out what’s happened with Jack at the SGC and recruits him into his mission, and it’s just a descent into darkness for this guy. “If you could dispense with the melodrama as I crank up Pagliacci over here, I’ll talk about joining your team.” I think a big part of the arc of Maybourne really starts right there, because after that he’s on the run. He has to get in bed with the Russians just to keep from getting his head cut off.

Tom McBeath:
See, those are parts of the build through it that I had forgotten, and I’d have to go back and look at the whole episodes to see really what happens there, and maybe even at the time, I was so confused about it I’d just go do the scenes. Because I often had no idea…

David Read:
The larger story?

Tom McBeath:
Suddenly, I got my own airplane.

David Read:
Right? Exactly!

Tom McBeath:
All this shit, I had no idea I had that kind of power to start with. Now, the writers… I don’t know… The character, obviously, they had a lot of fun with, and thank God they kept adding… every time I’d come on set, there would be another color in the character that I’d have to incorporate. And as I say, I think the first episode I kinda started off one-dimensional, but every time I came back there would be these colors added in, just the genius of the writing was amazing to me. To finally… jumping way ahead to Paradise Lost…

David Read:
Mmm, good episode.

Tom McBeath:
…and Good to be King, from where that character started, and they took him all the way through all that stuff, and got him to those places, just magical.

David Read:
You want to bring up the Michael Greenburg comment now?

Tom McBeath:
Oh, I can’t remember which… I think around Season…

David Read:
Think it was around Foothold.

Tom McBeath:
Well, it was Season Two or Season Three, usually at lunchtime they would read the next episode, so if you were in the next episode you would come at their lunchtime for the episode they were shooting, everyone would get around the table, and they would read it, and the [actors] that knew their characters would talk about, “I think we should build on that part a little bit, but I think this part here doesn’t land in the character, and this is why I think that. Can anybody tell me, am I right or wrong or should we muck with that?” And notes would be taken and all that kind of stuff. And at one point during the reading, maybe it was close to the end, Greenburg looked down and I was maybe five seats down from it at the big table, so we were people all around this large table, and he looked down to me, and he said, “God, you’re a good actor. How come we never had you on MacGyver?” And I looked down the table and I said, “I auditioned for you fuckers 40 times and you never hired me. That’s why I wasn’t on fucking MacGyver.”

David Read:
He took it well, though.

Tom McBeath:
And then we laughed like Hell.

David Read:
Oh, God! Oh, man, that is funny! But, in Foothold, Jack joins his team and the next time we see him, he’s with the Russians. And you’re in an industrial kitchen, in a freezer, frozen like a Borg. And there’s a story there. Your poor eyes.

Tom McBeath:
So, they haul me out, and they put me on the industrial kitchen table. And this was a huge kitchen for one of the major exposition sites for Expo 86 that we had here in Vancouver, and they still did a lot of conventions and stuff in this particular place, so it was a huge working kitchen. They threw me up onto the warming counter, with the infra-red lights, there was three or four or five hanging above me where the meals cooked, and they throw it out their way and keep it warm until the waiter comes in to grab them and take them away. And I’d been frozen with my eyes open, so I was covered all over with, they spritzed me all over with warm wax, and let it dry, and so it looked like ice and frost, and then they snowed it and did all this stuff. So, I’m laying there, and they’re thawing me out underneath there, and eventually I thaw out…

David Read:
Just the eyes. It’s the creepiest scene.

Tom McBeath:
And then I sit up, and I start to walk around in funny ways, and O’Neill pulls out his gun and says, “Maybourne, stop it, stop this!” And I turn around and walk past him again, and I get so far, and he says, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” And Teal’c is standing down there towards the end, and suddenly I stop, and do a freeze, and then fall onto my knees, and I vomit. And then I stand up and I realize that the vomit is the stuff that is…

David Read:
The entity.

Tom McBeath:
…keeping me alive, but it’s also the bad thing, so I grab O’Neill and I throw him into the freezer and Teal’c gets the stuff, then it all continues, and I eventually end up in jail. To be hung for treason. And so, later in the day, as we continue to film, my eyes start to kind of fog over, and they feel kind of odd, and things are getting blurry. Not extremely so, but enough for me to start to worry about it a bit. So, I went to the first aid person, and she looked and she said, “Oh, no, looks fine,” gave me some eye drops and stuff. During the day they got a tad better, and it wasn’t ‘til when I got home, and they were still foggy and weird, and I went, “Oh my God! I was lying there underneath these infra-red lamps, and got my eyeballs cooked!” So, they’d obviously done something to part of the eyes.

David Read:
How long did it take to clear up?

Tom McBeath:
I was only two or three days, or four days.

David Read:
But still, how scary?

Tom McBeath:
For someone in the community of Stargate that have all this knowledge, no-one knew I was having my eyeballs cooked.

David Read:
Yeah, exactly! In the very next episode we see him on death row, and Jack goes in and says, “We need your help here.” “Alright, alright, I’ll help you, get me out of here, get me one of those nice pretty Presidential pardons.” That great exchange, the Starsky and Hutch, which I think, if I remember correctly, you said that was an ad-lib from Rick, with Ronny Cox, is that right? Tell us that story, it’s a great story.

Tom McBeath:
Well, it was actually his wife was at the door. She came to the door first, and they wanted to talk to the Senator, and she said, “Who’s calling?” and he said, “Just tell him it’s Starsky and Hutch,” or whatever. And I looked at him…

David Read:
This is not in the script?

Tom McBeath:
It’s not in the script. And I look at him, and then he goes, “He’s Starsky, I’m Hutch.” He looks at me, gives me a look like, “Huh?” and then he goes, “He’s Starsky and I’m Hutch.” And I’ve got to stand there and just go, “Hmm, yeah.” And she says, “I’ll be right back,” and she closes the door, and I go, “You bastard.”

David Read:
It’s like he wanted to throw stuff at you just to watch you dance, in the heat of the moment.

Tom McBeath:
That wasn’t the only time he would change something up. I was told that he really enjoyed working with me, and I certainly enjoyed working with him, so much so, especially in the later part stuff. But even before that, the back-and-forth stuff was fun too. But I think he used to throw those things just to see my face, this absolute fear in my face as I had to work my way through it and continue. I think he got a lot of joy out of that.

David Read:
Absolutely! There’s an odd-couple chemistry that is just undeniable, and I think it’s the reason that they kept on having you back, was because it worked, you know? They would put you guys in situations where you had to work your way out, and it was hysterical, for us as audience members, to watch these two people who don’t really like each other all that much, but they recognize the utility in each other, that, “Alright, here we go, I gotta get back together with Maybourne and pull this thing off, because he’s the only one that can get me out.” It was just hilarious!

Tom McBeath:
Yeah, I totally enjoyed that man.

David Read:
Paradise Lost. Fishing with C4. One of my favorite scenes. “It’s just wrong on so many levels.”

Tom McBeath:
Well, even looking at how I manipulated everyone to get through the gate, and him jumping up off [inaudible]

David Read:
With the hot dogs, and lighting the gate coordinates on fire.

Tom McBeath:
And actually taking out Carter with that thing and all.

David Read:
Yes.

Tom McBeath:
Yeah, so there we were, just the two of us, in the middle of, apparently, nowhere, looking for this place that, ultimately, has been decaying for hundreds of years, that didn’t really exist, or didn’t still exist. And having very little to eat, we did find a certain vegetable there that we can eat, which ultimately, in the episode, drives us both a little crazy. But at one point, when we’re sort of only, well, I don’t know, I think we were starting to get a little crazy, I’d been off somewhere on my own after an argument or something…

David Read:
And Jack’s been eating more fish than you have, so you’ve been getting much more of the compound than he has, just to set up people who haven’t seen the story in a while.

Tom McBeath:
So, O’Neill’s down fishing, so I walk down and ask him how he’s doing, and he says, “A couple of nibbles, not much.” And so I reach into my pocket, and pull out something, and look down at it, and take it and throw it into the water, and there’s an explosion! And all these fish come to the top, and he just gives me this look, like, “What?” And I’m instructed to walk — the cameras are on me — to walk into the water, and I’m supposed to take fish, and bring the fish back. But there were so many fish that I just started grabbing… I’d grab a fish and then I’d throw it at him, and I just kept throwing fish at him! He was jumping around, it was fun! Those kind of times were great, when you could just jump a little bit off the script. It was fun. But it was also in there, that I was told, “Well, Maybourne was Special Ops.” And I went, “I was Special Ops? We’re six seasons later, and I was Special Ops?” And they said, “Yeah!” So I’m supposed to know how to fire all these weapons. Well, at one point I’m supposed to start throwing… what’s the stuff? The plastic explosives?

David Read:
The C4.

Tom McBeath:
Yeah, I’m supposed to be throwing it like grenades over the wall, little chunks of it at O’Neill over in that part, and I said, “How do I do this?” And they said, “You’re Special Ops, you’re supposed to know this.” I said, “I don’t! And I wasn’t.” So they had to teach me how to… I didn’t want to do it like I’d seen in the old black and white movies, because I didn’t know if that was real.

David Read:
Yeah, there’s got to be a right way to do it, of course.

Tom McBeath:
That was fun.

David Read:
My personal favorite Maybourne moment is 48 Hours, and Jack’s getting gas.

Tom McBeath:
Oh, this one, yeah. That’s a good scene, huh?

David Read:
The truck between them is the only thing saving Maybourne’s ass, ‘cause he thinks that the last time they saw each other that Maybourne shot him. “You rat bastard! I’m so gonna kick your ass!” The last time that you and I were together you had mentioned your favorite moment as 48 Hours, Jack accuses Maybourne of being a traitor, and Maybourne stops, and he turns around, and he marches straight back to him and says, “Do you believe that?” And Rick — and O’Neill — are completely disarmed, because Maybourne has never been like that with him, and you deliberately took a moment there just to be like, “OK, you jerk, I’m working with you here, are you really going to accuse me of doing this, right now, when your friend is in danger?”

Tom McBeath:
Yeah, you drop everything and just say who you are. It’s not protective, it’s not anything else.

David Read:
When we finally got to see him after the incident on the planet with the skeletons, in Paradise Lost, he had come a bit of a long way. Kieran, when we were back at the GateCon Convention, he mentioned that his favorite moment of Harry is the opening shot, where we’re seeing his village, and Maybourne is, I think, enjoying, like, a fruit, or something, with all the girls around him, and the team walks in, and he’s like, “Hi guys! How ya doing?” Tell us about It’s Good to Be King.

Tom McBeath:
Well, you know, what a surprise when they say, “You’re coming back,” because…

David Read:
You took a year off.

Tom McBeath:
…I wasn’t in Season Seven, and then when the script came up it was there: It’s Good to Be King, and I’m in the whole episode, kind of, and you just go, “Wow!” Because most of the episodes, there’s two or three stories, at least two stories going on at once, and this one here was largely just one large story. And then you add that, you walk into your costume fitting, and you got furs, and you got a little crown. And then you get on set and they do have all these ladies around, and you can just snap your fingers for stuff.

David Read:
He’s a king!

Tom McBeath:
Oh, it was very different from the Maybourne I knew!

David Read:
Absolutely, I would suspect so, and going up against Wayne Brady as the Jaffa, I think it was Trelak?

Tom McBeath:
Oh, I don’t know what the names were.

David Read:
It was a good send-off to a character who had come full circle, who had just started off as this hatchet guy wanting to kill everyone, all the aliens in the Gate room, to someone who had taken a look at his own soul, and either he recognized that he was flawed, or just every little bit of trying to move in the right direction with people, he was recognizing he was liking the dopamine hit of being a nicer guy. I think what’s interesting about Maybourne was that his objectives were not exactly exclusive from SG-1’s, but his way to go about it was just completely different. He did want to protect the Earth from alien interference.

Tom McBeath:
Yeah, I agree with that. But you can also look at it in a couple of ways, like, you can look at Trump trying to save America the way he wants to, and then the way maybe we should go about it. I think his was more in the destructive way of it, but it’s also what you grow up with and your understanding of the world, and he understood it in a certain way and ran with that baton in that direction. Then as he moves through that he gets hit with real life stuff and starts to become educated, starts to become human. Even though he was human to start with, he had a very narrow vision, and he probably had a narrow vision from the time he was a young person, on how to get out there and participate in the world.

David Read:
If there was any single scene that I loved in terms of watching this character become one thing into another, it’s the scene where you guys were down by… I forget where it is… the location where they made it look like Jamaica.

Tom McBeath:
Oh yeah.

David Read:
And Maybourne is calling the SGC – how he got this number I have no idea – but Kinsey arranged for Maybourne to be moved to another place while he awaits his execution, and you took an opportunity with a background actress and ran with it. Tell this story one more time.

Tom McBeath:
If any of you have been to Vancouver, you may have been to English Bay…

David Read:
English Bay, that’s it.

Tom McBeath:
…which is a beautiful… was it English Bay? Yes, yes, but not quite English Bay, so it was more towards Sunset Beach, but it’s the same area, and it’s a beautiful ocean thing with a false creek across the way and you can see the Gulf Islands – it’s not the Gulf Islands, but West Vancouver and stuff, and some of the islands – and they wrapped the telephone poles with hemp, and hung fronds off it, and they hired a steel band, and the order went out to get every Black extra that they could find to come down, and I had on a pair of long white socks with sandals and shorts, and the t-shirt with the Hawaiian, kind of tropical shirt, and big straw hat. This was the end of Chain Reaction.

David Read:
Mm-hm, that’s right. They’ve just finished incriminating the Senator, who felt obliged to help.

Tom McBeath:
Yeah. At some level either O’Neill lets me get away or I manage to escape. And they’re trying to set this up to be, I think, I’m making a phone call from Jamaica, I think, but I’m actually just in English Bay.

David Read:
It’s somewhere in the Caribbean, yeah.

Tom McBeath:
So, I make the phone call, and at the end of the phone call I kind of hold up the phone so Jack can hear the music. And I hang up, and the Director just said, “OK, now once you hang up, just walk down towards the band, and we’ll finish off with you just walking away, and we’ll go back to the scene in the office with Jack and the General.” So, I’m walking down there and this extra walks right in front of me, and I guess she’s been told to walk across, and she does, and I grab her, and we start to dance, and we dance all the way down to the band, and finally they yell cut and everybody just breaks into laughter. And I didn’t think it was that funny, but they kept it.

David Read:
Absolutely. It’s things like that that show even a person whose motives on the outside are not favorable, there’s hope. There’s a piece of humanity in there somewhere.

Tom McBeath:
Well, there’s a bit of celebration. That was also the episode that Ronny Cox was in, playing the Senator. Of course, I’d always admired him in what I’d seen him in, and I knew he’d been in a couple of episodes anyway, but it was so great to meet him. A lovely, lovely gentleman. And he talked about acting, and being a Canadian actor, and he talked about him and his wife. His wife was…gosh… some kind of physics or medical… huge degree out of University with honors, and ended up having to work at a lesser level than what she was capable because she was a woman. He’d got out of theater school and was trying to keep food on the table playing his banjo in coffee clubs. And out of the blue he got a call to come to fly to LA to audition for a film because of his banjo playing, not because of his acting. And so he went, and he auditioned, and he got the part, and it was in Deliverance.

David Read:
Great movie.

Tom McBeath:
He said, “Since that time, I’ve never had to audition for anything.” And he said, “The difference between what I had to do for the years after I got out of theater school and that particular incident,” he said, “I was just an actor.” And he said, “After that, I just scripts sent, I got asked to do stuff, the whole world just changed, from one thing.” But he also mentioned, he said somebody had… It was one of the first PT cruisers, you know that little Pontiac [Chrysler] that they made, that looked like an old-style van-type thing, they had just come out and one of the teamsters had got one, and so it was the first one that many had seen for real. So, he had parked it right up in the front and center of his house with the big columns and stuff, and everybody was looking at it, including Ronny, and he says, “You know, we just got a new car, this Lexus…” and he gave a number. He said, “It’s a beautiful car, you should go drive one of those, they’re just wonderful.” And I looked at him, and I said, “Ronny, I’m a Canadian actor.” And he just put his hands up to his face and says, “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, oh God, I’m sorry, I forgot, I forgot, I forgot, I forgot!” And that’s when he told me the story of when he was just a New York actor.

David Read:
Ah, I see. For some people, the lightning just strikes for them, and you have to be thankful for the opportunities that you’ve been given, for sure.

Tom McBeath:
Yeah, some producer, somewhere, saw him in a bar or in a coffee house in New York and looked him up and found out he was also an actor, and…

David Read:
That’s it, absolutely. You had mentioned to me that you had… I think you had auditioned for Atlantis at some point, or maybe later on in SG-1, and they said, “You’re too recognizable as Maybourne.”

Tom McBeath:
No, I actually got sent the audition to do it and then it was cancelled before I got there, just because they said, “No, everyone knows you as Maybourne and we can’t bring you in here as somebody else.” No, I understand that, totally.

David Read:
I do too, but it still sucks! Other actors have come in, you know, Garwin Sandford, Ona Grauer, they’ve played other people with the same face. It just seems frustrating.

Tom McBeath:
Well, I do know, back in the old days… let’s see if I can remember which one it was. Well, some of the Canal stuff, we got in Canal stuff over and over and over again, and in… oh, come on, Tom… oh, golly…!

David Read:
It’s OK!

Tom McBeath:
Oh, this is really weird because it’s one of the big series that came out of Vancouver for years. X-Files!

David Read:
Ah, OK!

Tom McBeath:
X-Files, I was three different characters there. They didn’t care, like, you’d come back and people understood – you’re an actor! But, I think as things have moved on that kind of stuff doesn’t happen as much any more. It’s pretty tough to come on and play different characters in stuff.

David Read:
Unobfuscated wanted to know, what was your relationship like with the cast off-camera, considering your character, especially so early on, was so antagonistic?

Tom McBeath:
You know, that was one of the greatest sets to arrive on. Everyone, through the producers, the crew, the camera people, and I believe the actors set the tone for it. When you got a call that you were coming back to that set, you just went, “Ooh, gosh!” And you’d come back and you were just embraced as part of the family. And they appeared – whether they were just good actors, you know, I don’t know – but they appeared to really enjoy having you back, you know? It was awfully, awfully, awfully nice. It was exhilarating.

David Read:
Claire Cowan wanted to know what it was like being directed by Amanda Tapping in Travelers?

Tom McBeath:
Oh, my.

David Read:
Another great role.

Tom McBeath:
Well, it’s too bad it was only the one episode.

David Read:
This is true, it was a good show.

Tom McBeath:
Oh, gosh, what was the name of the character? It was a French name… Bo… something…

David Read:
Ellis. Traveler 0014, was a farmer.

Tom McBeath:
Oh! I’m sorry, we’re talking about her episode. Sorry, we’re talking about that series. I thought we were talking about her show.

David Read:
Oh, I’m sorry, I’m talking about Travelers. Didn’t Amanda guest…

Tom McBeath:
Yes, she did, yeah.

David Read:
Yeah, she directed that one.

Tom McBeath:
Once in a while, you look over and you see her being serious with you about something, but most of the time it’s a great pleasure. And that was, “God, I had fun on that one, too.” That was a ton of fun. And I thought since I had such a low number they would never kill me off!

David Read:
That’s right. 0014. It was one of the earlier Travelers. If you have not seen that series, go check out Travelers, it is fantastic. Brad Wright, three seasons, it’s a good binge.

Tom McBeath:
Yeah, and you always have to keep asking Brad questions to try and understand the concept.

David Read:
Absolutely, he’s so far ahead. The audience were like, “Want some more information!” “Ah, you’ve just got to wait!” So, The Time Prophet. “Have you always been able to remember your lines, or did you develop a technique for learning lines and retaining them?” I’m always curious about this, asking actors, because I can never remember a sentence to save my life without reading it.

Tom McBeath:
It’s really weird because as I’m getting older, I worry about that more than anything. And trying to learn in two days, three or four pages for an audition, I need at least that much time now. And still then, if there’s too many sentences with too much description and names of chemicals or people, or places, I want it to be correct, and if I miss one thing I fall apart. I can’t keep going. I never did have a real facility, was never trained to have the facility, to improvise, and I never had much practice at it. And one of the things I may have to practice is as I’m moving into this thing of not really having the lines down 200% of being able to continue. I always did have trouble with too much description stuff. One of the techniques that you use when you’ve done enough series television, is, you just say, “I’m starting over,” and you go back without a cut, but you got to know when and how to do that, and I haven’t done enough TV in the last four or five years to know when I can do that any more, so, I wouldn’t be comfortable trying to do it, I’d just say, “Sorry, we have to do that again,” instead of just saying, “I’m going back to the beginning, bang, start over.” Because that editing process, as an actor, I’ve not been involved in this business long enough to really keep that idea in my head, that of course it’s all being edited. So, I do like to have, for auditions, I love to have lines for a couple of days. That doesn’t always happen, but more and more now we are auditioning at home, we’re doing our own at-home auditions, with our blue screen, or a blue sheet behind us, with the lighting we have, and the sirens or the dogs barking outside. And with really no feedback from the Director, or from a Casting Director. They do say that they are amazed at the number of people they can now see, which they couldn’t when they had to have actors come to the studios to do the auditions, that they can see a much broader base of people, and it may be one of the reasons why some of you feel you’re not getting the work you should.

David Read:
Tony Amendola was telling us that at any one time, typically, 6% of actors are working. That’s… wow. That’s small.

Tom McBeath:
I don’t know what the percentages are. They say if you get one in ten auditions you’re doing fine. I think I get one in 16 or 20. And sometimes I can go, even in the good days, I can go three or four or five months and do numbers of auditions and not get something, and eventually you start to go, “Well, there must be something wrong.”

David Read:
Well, on top of that, that’s a lot of gasoline, and a lot of time spent working on material that doesn’t see the light of day.

Tom McBeath:
Nowadays, I’m not in as much of a rush to get work, simply because it’s work. I’ve had a long talk with my agent back and forth about what kind of roles are out there, and I say, “Well, if you think – you were an actor once – if you think this is interesting, as an actor, let me read it, but if it’s the uncle, or the father, or the next-door neighbor on a Hallmark, forget it!”

David Read:
All the Hallmark stuff is shot up in Vancouver. They stamp so many of those things out, it’s crazy!

Tom McBeath:
If you need to make dough it’s there to do, if you need an income, and I suppose I do too, but I’m old enough now where I get Canada pension, and I get old-age pension, I’m having to take out… thank God this business was the business it’s been over the years, because the RRSP’s that have been taken from my Union to put it into an investment vehicle called Actra Fraternal Benefits Society, is phenomenal, and every month I have to now take money out of that, I’m obliged to, I can no longer put any in, but I have to take a certain percentage of it every year, and I do mine monthly. You can do it once a year, or monthly, or weekly, so there’s no need for me to rush and get back there unless it’s something interesting. It also opens me up for more theater, but of course, now with COVID, that’s all gone down the drain. And who knows when it’s going to come back. It’s coming back in small ways, one person shows and small audiences, and Zoom audiences, or Skype audiences. But there’s not enough out there for us… this city has a lot of stage actors here, there’s a lot of small companies who are looking at their own little stuff, but the big companies where I can work, they’re basically on hold.

David Read:
Scary.

Tom McBeath:
That’s sad itself, and it is my favorite place to be, is on stage. I love preparing long before rehearsal starts, I love being in rehearsal, and I love, basically, the first week of a run. I don’t necessarily like the following weeks because you’ve got the experience of that audience, and… what’s new?

David Read:
What’s going to happen next? There is something, all the way back to the 15, 1600’s with Shakespeare, there’s something magical about being in a small group of people watching a small group of performers on stage pretend to be somewhere else, and you are invited to go elsewhere with them, whatever journey they’re going to take you.

Tom McBeath:
It’s a great place to be, it’s where I feel most comfortable. Once you’ve been in something like Stargate as long as I was, over that period of time, and know that you’re welcome, and then you get a script like It’s Good to Be King, you feel like your feet are on the ground, you feel like you’re back in the theater, but when you’re going for something that you don’t know the characters, you don’t know the background, you perhaps have auditioned without having seen the script, or perhaps you have seen the script, or some parts of one, you still don’t have enough knowledge to ever feel like your feet are solidly on the ground, or I don’t. I’m sure actors who have only done this kind of work, the film work and the TV work, I’m sure they have learned how to get their feet [on] the ground, just because that’s been their life, that’s what they’ve trained for, and they know when their feet are on the ground, they know when they’re handling it well. Every time I go back, if I haven’t been back in front of a camera for a number of months or a year, I’m nervous as a cat…

David Read:
Sure, absolutely.

Tom McBeath:
…and it’s like I have to be retrained.

David Read:
Well, it shows that you’re not arrogant about the process as well. And there’s some excitement to that. And an episode like It’s Good to Be King, in Season Eight, bonus territory for a lot of shows to get to a Season Eight, what is an episode like that meant to be if not to say to you, “Job well done, Tom.” And put a crown on your head!

Tom McBeath:
It was awfully nice.

David Read:
It’s been awfully nice to have you on. Can you hazard a guess at how many people we’ve had watching us over the last 90 minutes?

Tom McBeath:
I will not hazard a guess, I don’t understand this business either.

David Read:
1500.

Tom McBeath:
Oh my goodness! [blows kisses]

David Read:
And a lot of them have been asking – my final question for you – can you tell us a little bit about the art behind you?

Tom McBeath:
About the which? Oh, the art behind me.

David Read:
Is that Salish?

Tom McBeath:
The large piece is a Gordon [Bill] Reid, back in the Expo day, and I think this is the first time they did it in the city. They had done a redo on a very old bridge here that runs over False Creek, the Burrard Street Bridge. They’d redone it and mostly repainted, but they had also hung up banner poles, to put banners on, and they asked artists – and they did this all over the city – to make the city look like it was a present, like it was a gift, that no matter where you went there was things to look at in the city. And Gordon [sic] Reid did the piece here, and they were all lined down on either side of the Burrard Street Bridge, and it was a vision. And Karin Konoval, my partner, back then asked the city for one, and she got one. And it was folded up for many, many years, and we just brought it out when we redid where the art went, and we decided that this thing had to go up. The little colored piece on this side here is one of Karin’s pieces, of a series she did on the homeless, only, what their home was…

David Read:
Is that an umbrella?

Tom McBeath:
No, it’s a man dragging his tent. So, the series was called ‘Home’, and so it was people that made their little home on a corner, and her drawings – from pictures and visions she’d taken – of how people make their home, that don’t have what we consider homes. These black and white ones on the side, that’s a Native street artist’s piece. The photo above is a photo that was given to Karin by the director of… oh, I’m not supposed to say! OK.

David Read:
Oh, she’s saying he’s incorrect!

Tom McBeath:
OK, it’s actually Andy Serkis.

David Read:
His art?

Tom McBeath:
His art.

David Read:
Wow! That’s cool!

Tom McBeath:
And it’s a picture of them…

Karin Konoval:
It’s a photograph that was taken on our first day working on the Planet of the Apes in Tofino.

Tom McBeath:
Did you hear that?

David Read:
I did indeed.

Tom McBeath:
Ok, the first day of filming in Tofino, here on the coast, first day of Planet of the Apes. Above that is a gift to Karin from one of her lady friends, and she’s had that for many, many, many years, it’s a pencil drawing of a man sitting doing some kind of crafty thing at a table.

David Read:
I see what looks like hands, but really elongated.

Tom McBeath:
Karin, come in here just for a sec.

Karin Konoval:
No, I’ll stay. That is a hand- and foot-print of Towan the orangutan, who was my inspiration for Maurice in all three Planet of the Apes films. It’s very special, because it reminds me that’s his hand- and foot-print.

David Read:
Now, she was involved in Planet of the Apes?

Tom McBeath:
Karin played Maurice, the orangutan.

David Read:
Wow!

Tom McBeath:
In all three. And Towan died a few years ago, and that’s his handprints, but that was her inspiration for Maurice, as she was coming to understand how to play an orangutan in her research. She met him in Seattle and became great friends with him and the other orangutans down there, and she hasn’t been able to see them – the ones that are still there – since COVID, but probably every three or four months she’s gone down and spent weekends with them, painting, particularly for one of the older ladies, but for the other few that are there as well. And they all know her.

David Read:
Folks, this has been a treat, thank you so much for sharing part of your home with us, and sharing the stories that you have, Tom, Karin, I appreciate you guys so much. Tom, you’re just… I love you to death, you’re one of my favorite people and it’s so nice to have you as part of the opening salvo of talent for my new show, so, it meant a lot to me to have you come on.

Tom McBeath:
Well, thank you so much, OK? I’m glad that I can help out this project and make it grow too.

David Read:
I appreciate you so much. You take care of yourself. I’ll be in touch about the possibilities of what may come with December, and best of luck with Scrooge in this new format.

Tom McBeath:
Thank you, thank you, and thank you all for listening, and all be safe.

David Read:
Take care of yourself, sir.

Tom McBeath:
You too.

David Read:
Bye-bye.

Tom McBeath:
Bye-bye.

David Read:
Mr. Tom McBeath, everyone. Thank you so much to everyone who has tuned in, we currently have 142 concurrent viewers, that’s improved over the course of the show. At some point here in the near future, I’m going to have Darren back on for a trivia game, and we’re going to go through a lot of the stats for the series, because I’m blown away by the number of international people who are involved, and I think it’s… this information is for everyone, in terms of the global audience for Stargate. You deserve to know who’s watching, because then we can turn around and provide that information to MGM and the like, and saying, “These are the people who are out there who are wanting to watch and consume new content.” So, we’re going to have a look at that and provide that information soon. I have been really negligent in answering some questions that have been placed to me over the last several episodes. I get the talent off and then I just move onto the next one, so I apologize for that. Corporalhicks2310 asked, “David, what platform are you using for the show?” It’s Open Broadcast Software, OBS. I think Keith Homel asked the same thing. No, that’s something else, hang on just a second, yeah. So, OBS is available for free and I taught myself how to use it, so I got myself a little keypad here to control the gestures with my left hand, to toggle between the different screens that we use, for instance, this one, and then with my right hand turn the system on and off. Keith said, “For the fan art segment have you seen Delphine L’s work? She’s @DLANDAIS on Twitter.” I have not, I will check her out. A couple of people have sent artwork, I think there’s a Sally? I have been terrible on email, my apologies, I’m probably going to get to that tonight because my back is out, and I’m not going to be able to go to work, so I’m probably going to have a chance to check up! I’ve been sent a few pieces of fan art, and I’m really looking forward to using them. We need trivia questions! So, if you think you’re adept at Stargate knowledge, go and check out DialtheGate.com, scroll down to the Trivia Questions panel. You can’t do this on a mobile device, it’s not working, so iPads, iPhones, tablets, not a good idea, but if you’re using a desktop or a laptop it will work, and submit your trivia questions to us. Easy, medium and hard. We will be turning those over to some guests in the future and I will be creating questions for them, but those are questions so that they can ask me. We had Robert C. Cooper and Andee Frizzell that I spoke with earlier this week, and Andee did trivia with us, and those two interviews are going to be available on Halloween. Fantastic, almost two hours long each. So, those are fantastic and I can’t wait for you to see those yourself. Keith also asked, do I send a confirmation email to people who email? Yes, I do, so Sally Whiteside’s, I will be getting back, that is my fault, Sally, I do apologize, I do have the message. Just still getting caught up with a rhythm, a routine for how to do the show. And Star Gazer, “Will you be bringing Jaye Davidson on the show at some time? I would love to learn how he spoke.” I will reach out to Jaye. Jaye, I don’t believe, does a lot of interviews. I would love to have him on, I just don’t know if he’ll do it, so I will certainly reach out to him and ask. We had Dean [Devlin] on, we’re going to be having Roland Emmerich on in the future, I mean, it would be a dream to be able to get the likes of Jaye and Kurt and James and Mili. We’ve already had Alexis Cruz. Sorry Alexis, sorry, man, we’ve had him on for the game, last weekend for the roleplaying game, we will be having Alexis on for a full interview later. That’s all I have for you guys here, and if you did enjoy the show… that’s the wrong button… see, I’m still trying to get OBS figured out! If you did enjoy the show, it would mean a great deal to me if you would click that Like button! It really makes a difference with YouTube’s algorithm and it helps grow the audience by sharing with other Stargate fans who have not seen the content before. So when you click ‘Like’, or you share a piece of material, it moves the video higher up in the algorithm for YouTube, that knows that there are Stargate fans out there who like to search for Stargate content, and it’s more likely that that content will be presented to them. And if you want to get notified about a future episode, click the Subscribe icon. If you plan to watch it live, I recommend giving the Bell icon a click so you’ll be the first to know of any schedule changes. Which will happen all the time. And clips from this livestream will hopefully – if I can get my butt in gear – be released over the course of the next several days on both the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. Tomorrow we have Director and Producer, Martin Wood. Another one of my favorite humans. This guy, he is an encyclopedia of knowledge on Stargate and tomorrow we begin what will hopefully be the first of many interviews unlocking those doors and getting some answers to some interesting questions. I’ve watched this with Martin in talking with him, all you have to do is give him an episode name and he’s off! So, it’s going to be interesting keeping it succinct for 90 minutes, but he’s agreed to do the show and he’s agreed to do future shows, and this is one that you’re not going to want to miss. Martin Wood is the most prolific Stargate Director in terms of the number of pieces that he did, the number of episodes, he did Stargate Continuum as well, and he will be here tomorrow to ask those questions. So go to YouTube.com/DialtheGate and you can subscribe and be notified when that show starts streaming, and it’ll also tell you what time, in your time zone, it will begin. I think we’re… what time is it tomorrow? I think it starts at… Noon, 12pm Pacific Time, so I’m going to have to go to bed a little bit earlier tonight! I’m David Read, appreciate you sticking around, and you know what? We’ll see you on the other side. Thanks so much everybody, bye-bye.