You know and love him as the perennially injured “Sly Siler” on Stargate SG-1, as well as Richard Dean Anderson’s double. Now actor and Stunt Coordinator Dan Shea, always willing to “take one for the team,” takes your questions LIVE on DialtheGate!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Opening Credits
0:57 – Welcome and Episode Outline
02:51 – Guest introduction
09:05 – Dan’s Daughter was the Urrone Solen
12:22 – Where did your love of stunt performing come from?
16:37 – Dan’s Scripts
19:01 – People Who Shaped Dan
24:39 – Love of Science Fiction
28:51 – Dan Shea as Jaffa Guard
35:18 – What do you think makes this franchise so endearing?
38:40 – Attending a Vegas Fight with Michael Greenburg and Christopher Judge
42:12 – Getting the Role of Siler
44:55 – Stargate and Ben Affleck
48:24 – How do you keep all of your roles straight?
51:05 – How much input would you have in different scenes?
53:34 – Message in a Bottle Ratchet Pull
59:55 – Nimbleness and Aging
1:02:04 – How do you execute a face plant stunt?
1:04:29 – Most Serious Accident Witnessed
1:07:18 – Tower Jaffa Story
1:10:28 – Wrench Prop — What Happened to it?
1:14:35 – Knowing Stunt Work is Appreciated By Fans
1:15:57 – Correcting a Stunt About to Go Wrong
1:17:09 – Siler’s Best One-Liner
1:20:03 – Fan Thoughts
1:20:46 – A Stunt You Later Regretted
1:21:44 – Do you still hang out with Richard Dean Anderson
1:23:34 – How does the Vancouver area benefit aquatic stunts?
1:28:30 – Christopher Judge’s Head Meets Door in Window of Opportunity
1:29:56 – Would you return for SG4?
1:30:29 – Thank you, Dan!
1:32:02 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:34:50 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
Find an error? Submit it here.

David Read:
Hello everyone, welcome to Dial the Gate, my name is David Read. It says episode 40 but we’re technically episode 39 because we’re moving Corin Nemec later. He had to reschedule so when we have more information about when he’s going to be coming back to join us I will be putting that information up. My name is David Read:, thank you for joining. I have Dan Shea, stunt coordinator for Stargate SG-1 and Sergeant Siler as well. He is waiting in the wings here, standing by. But before we bring him in, I want to give you the run of the show. So what’s going to happen is, we’re going to have Dan on, I have a series of questions for him about his work on Stargate, and about his life, and his professional and personal heroes. We’re also then going to invite you to submit your questions right now in the YouTube chat at YouTube.com/DialTheGate, and those questions will be related by the moderators over to me. So big thanks to Summer, Ian, Tracy, Keith, Jeremy, Reese. You guys are the best for hooking us up there. And well as Jennifer Kirby my assistant and Linda “GateGabber” Furey, my co-producer. So, before we start the show, I do want to invite you, if you like Stargate and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, it would mean a great deal if you click the “like” button. It really makes a difference with YouTube’s algorithm and will definitely 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 the “subscribe” icon. Giving the bell icon a click will notify you the moment a new episode drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last minute guest changes. This is key if you plan on watching live. Clips like, clips from this live stream will be released over the next several days on GateWorld.net and you can expect clips from this show to appear on Dial The Gate as well over the next few weeks. You’ve been waiting for him, he has arrived! Mr. Dan Shea.

Dan Shea:
Woohoo!

David Read:
Hello sir!

Dan Shea:
How you doing?

David Read:
I’m well, how are you?

Dan Shea:
Quite lovely. Quite, quite lovely indeed.

David Read:
So have you been keeping busy, or laying low, or how are you things, you’re, I’m assuming you’re in Vancouver, right?

Dan Shea:
I am in fact in Kitsilano, in Vancouver, a couple of blocks up from [inaudible] Kits Beach. I just did the polar bear swim about a week ago. Because of Covid, we, they shut the official swim down. I just went down to Kits Beach myself and jumped in. But there’s like a hundred people down there, who were doing it. So it was, it was fantastic. We just stayed apart from one another.

David Read:
Holy cow! Right, exactly, you kept your distance.

Dan Shea:
And jumped in, yeah.

David Read:
Wow, man, that’s sounds like, like a, I hear you say this, you know I’m not surprised, that sounds like something that Dan would do.

Dan Shea:
Well, we do it every year but ordinarily its official. In fact the person who runs it used to be catering on MacGyver. She’s good friends with Rick, Richard Dean. Her dad or her grandfather was the first polar bear swim dude in Vancouver back in 1910 or something, so she’s been running it the last thirty or forty years.

David Read:
Are there medical benefits, proven medical benefits to this? Or is it just an exhilaration thing? What’s the story behind that?

Dan Shea:
I don’t know if there’s anything proven. I know it feels great when it’s over with. It’s certainly exhilarating. It’s more of a tradition. Like, you get there and there’s like a thousand people, and they have the big sign with the big polar bear, so you get your picture taken, and they have music, and they have people up in the stands talking, and you get all exited, and you ring in the new year. And it’s kind of a pain because you’re all jammed on the beach and you don’t want to get your stuff ripped off, but no one rips you off because they’re all afraid of getting ripped off too.

David Read:
So it’s a social event.

Dan Shea:
I guess it could be considered a social event. And my daughter Stephie, who I think hopefully is on here as well. A second ago she said that it hadn’t let her in to the room yet, but she’s a lifeguard. Both my daughters, Stephie and Joey, used to be lifeguards. So, she traditionally is off the shore in a rowboat, trying to save any of us, in case our hearts explode out of our chests.

David Read:
Oh my gosh! Jeez. Well, let me go ahead and see about this here. I’ve never brought in someone live before.

Dan Shea:
Oh.

David Read:
So I’m not exactly sure how this is going to happen.

Dan Shea:
OK.

David Read:
But let me pull her in here and see…

Dan Shea:
Alright.

David Read:
..what happens.

Dan Shea:
I know [inaudible]…

David Read:
She’s not sharing video and she’s not sharing audio. I’m asking her to unmute.

Dan Shea:
Oh, you’re asking her to unmute?

David Read:
Mmm hmmm.

Dan Shea:
OK.

David Read:
Let me see here. Switch over to this. So…

Stephanie Shea:
Hello, can you hear me?

David Read:
…everyone is going to. Everyone is going to see how I do this on the fly. Yes, we can hear you.

Stephanie Shea:
OK! I’m on the bus. Hi.

Dan Shea:
[Inaudible] Hey, how you doing? Woohoo! You made it. [Inaudible].

Stephanie Shea:
[Inaudible] you can’t see me though.

Dan Shea:
There’s no video though, but that’s OK.

David Read:
There she is!

Dan Shea:
Woohoo!

Stephanie Shea:
Little bit, sorry, I’m on the bus, and I have a mask on, so it’s not optimal conditions.

David Read:
No it’s, hey, we’re able to see and hear you. So Stephanie, you are Dan’s daughter, is that correct?

Stephanie Shea:
I am. Yes, yup, yup.

David Read:
You were Solen in, I think, Learning Curve.

Dan Shea:
Yup.

Stephanie Shea:
I was. Back in the day, I think I was nine or ten.

David Read:
Wow!

Stephanie Shea:
Yup. I think I had two lines, I remember.

David Read:
Yes. “It’s an honor to accept your information, Teal’c.”

Stephanie Shea:
Oh! Yup.

David Read:
Or something like that.

Dan Shea:
Yeah yeah yeah! That’s it! You know it!

Stephanie Shea:
And “Please explain this iris” I think was the second line.

David Read:
Ha ha, wow!

Stephanie Shea:
I still got it.

David Read:
Absolutely! Where are you in Ireland?

Stephanie Shea:
On the bus between Cork and Clonmel. So it’s a two hour bus ride.

David Read:
Oh my gosh.

Stephanie Shea:
I’m an hour in.

David Read:
Are you living there now? Or, what’s going on. Are you working?

Stephanie Shea:
Yes, I’m living there. I’m going to medical school there. So I’m in my final year there.

David Read:
Wow, well good for you. So what’s your specific intent? Doctor? Like, what’s, or nurse? What’s your goal?

Stephanie Shea:
Yes, doctor is the plan, yeah. Doctor, yeah, family doctor, yeah.

David Read:
Wow, good for you!

Stephanie Shea:
Yeah.

David Read:
That’s fantastic. Do you get to talk to your dad much?

Stephanie Shea:
Every once in awhile, when I feel like it. No, just kidding!

Dan Shea:
I talk to her when I need technical advice. Like what happens if, everything is online now with work. Like, your payroll and everything. So I’m an idiot, so I will WhatsApp either Stephanie in Ireland, or my daughter Joey in Cairo…

David Read:
Right.

Dan Shea:
…and I will hold my phone up in front of the screen and say “how do I do this? How do I get paid? How do I get to the next step?”

David Read:
Jeez!

Dan Shea:
I’m just a fool. We did a, I did this Netflix feature that just finished about a month ago called Love Hard and we had to do this Covid online thing before we could be allowed to work. And they said it was, “it’s just forty-five minutes and it’s a little test afterwards”. It took me three and a half hours to do this thing, and then you had to get eighty-five percent, and I couldn’t get any more mistakes. So I phoned the guy in the office and said “well, what’s the answer to this question? If I get it wrong, I’m gonna to fail. I’m not going to be able to work on the show.” And so I was trying to, and then I said, “I’m going to have to WhatsApp my daughter in Egypt to get her to answer the question.” Well I got it right and I wound up doing the show. But that kind of stuff, to a geezer like me, you guys love it, it’s nothing to you but to a geezer like me, it freaks me out, because it’s just not, I’m not comfortable with it.

David Read:
I don’t know, Stephanie. Some of this stuff even is beginning to get ahead of me. It’s like, they want us to do what now, with what? And connect the DNS server to what?

Dan Shea:
[inaudible]

Stephanie Shea:
It is true, it’s not always easy.

David Read:
Yeah, absolutely. Dan, we’ve got one of your daughters on. You’ve got to tell us an embarrassing story. She had to have been on the Stargate set a lot.

Stephanie Shea:
Oh oh.

Dan Shea:
You know what, she was on there a lot when she was young. And Richard Dean, I used to say, she was never impressed by anything. I’d say “Stephie, what do you think of that big Stargate over there?” She, honestly, couldn’t care less about any of it. And so, Richard Dean, we used to call her “arrogant and indifferent”.

David Read:
Oh god!

Dan Shea:
That was her nickname. She was like eight years old. But the thing was, in her defense, she’d been there all the time. Other people would give their, you know, whatever just to be there on set, just to show up or to work. But she was hanging around. I’d bring her there, and she would be there all the time. I guess for a kid, you’re not doing anything. So it’s kind of annoying. So we nicknamed her “arrogant and indifferent”.

David Read:
Oh my gosh.

Stephanie Shea:
I swear I’m not as arrogant anymore.

David Read:
Well it is a pleasure to have you. Do you want to stick around in the background while I talk with your dad, or?

Stephanie Shea:
Yeah, yeah.

David Read:
OK.

Stephanie Shea:
Yeah, for sure. Just saying hi, and yeah, thank you very much for having me.

David Read:
Oh, absolutely. It’s terrific to have you. I love this spontaneous stuff because you never know who you’re going to get.

Dan Shea:
Let me know when you get there safely, Steph.

Stephanie Shea:
[inaudible]

Dan Shea:
Oh oh! Let me tell you a bus story! Can we do that, about Steph?

David Read:
Yeah, absolutely.

Dan Shea:
After she graduated from university, my wife is a flight attendant, so my kids would fly all over the world on standby. So she went to Vietnam and she was there, I think, maybe you can correct me Stephie, for like three months. She plotted the whole thing. But one night she was on a bus and the bus got in to an accident. And I think the bus driver either got killed for was seriously injured…

David Read:
Oh my god!

Dan Shea:
…so they all had to take the people from the bus. It was like a thousand degrees. They’re all sweating. It’s like four in the morning, and put them on to another bus. But the thing is, she could have been killed in Vietnam, and her ID could have flew out of the window in to a rice paddy and could have sunk, and they could never have identified her body. And we could never have known what had ever happened to her, ever. And then they were on the bus and they drove, they were on the bus for another seven hours, two bus-filled people on to one bus, to the next place.

David Read:
Gosh!

Dan Shea:
Is that at all accurate, Steph? Close? She’s not…

Stephanie Shea:
Yeah, it’s a good story while I’m on a bus right now.

David Read:
Oh my gosh! Yeah, thanks Dad, thanks a lot for bringing appropriate memories to, jeez, to the front. Stephanie, you’re welcome to hang with us. Can you…

Stephanie Shea:
[inaudible]

David Read:
Yeah, go ahead.

Stephanie Shea:
[inaudible] but thank you very much.

David Read:
Do me a favor, can you, oh! I think, is she still there? OK, if you could just…

Stephanie Shea:
Sorry, yeah?

David Read:
If you could just, yeah you’re welcome to stick around. Just do me a favour and mute your video for me, OK?

Stephanie Shea:
Yes, I will. Perfect, thank you!

David Read:
Thank you so much. Dan, thank you for that. This is a real treat. Let me go ahead and fix my screens here real quick, on the fly. I wanted to know…there we go. OK. I wanted to know, who, OK. How does anyone grow up and say “You know what, I want to get hurt for a living. I want to be the one who gets lit on fire. Or gets ratcheted across the room on ropes and cables, and slams in to some serious metal drums”. Where did your love of stunt performing come from? Where did this whole thing start for you?

Dan Shea:
Well it was more, anything from Hollywood from the small town I was from seemed like the other side of the galaxy and totally insurmountable. So I always thought I would be a screenwriter and I’d be like Sylvester Stallone with Rocky. I’d write my own screenplay and star in it, and I’d do my own stunts and I’d do catering. So I wrote a million scripts that everybody has despised for the past fifty years. In fact I still keep all of my rejection letters. My first hundred scripts were about hockey, and I remember one of the, from The Writer’s reporter said “He shoots he scores, the crowd yawns”.

David Read:
Oh jeez!

Dan Shea:
So everything that I’ve done has been crap. But I wound up getting to Vancouver and I crashed an audition, and two days later I’m on a plane, first class ticket, to Hawaii, doing a beer commercial on a jet ski with the young actress hottie from Meatballs. I had just seen the movie Meatballs with Bill Murray two days before I got on the plane. And when I got off the plane I saw this movie star girl, and I’m thinking “well that’s the girl from Meatballs”. And she had to play my girlfriend in the commercial. So we were in Kauai, riding up and down this river, smashing off the wake. And I had this incredibly attractive female who was a movie star person, on the back of my wet bike, having to hold on to me, pretending to like me, pretending to be my girlfriend, for a week. And so I sort of got hooked on showbiz from that. And I came back to Vancouver and I looked around. So I got on MacGyver. We did a hockey episode. I was Richard Dean’s stunt double, Rick’s stunt double, on this hockey episode of MacGyver. So we got to be pretty good, cool, tight friends. I became his hockey guy, and we would have games all over Vancouver, after fourteen hours of MacGyver. We would go to [inaudible] and we’d play, we’d go to [inaudible], these are places in Vancouver. We’d play hockey. And then I met his stunt double Stevie Blalock, who was on a SAG contract from L.A. He got per diem, he drove a Mercedes convertible, he was suntanned, he was jacked, he just lifted weights all day. And I thought “man”. Then I heard, what he got is, residual cheques from the very beginning of MacGyver. You know, deh deh deh deh deh, deh deh deh [MacGyver theme song]. From him flying through the air, he got all this money, just from residuals. I’m like “holy crap”. That was when we focused on the stunt thing. It wasn’t like I always wanted to be a stunt guy. I always wanted to do something. And then, by doubling for Rick on the MacGyver episode and then seeing his buddy. And then, what’s his name, Vince Deadrick Junior was the stunt coordinator, and his dad was just a stunt legend in Hollywood. Vince had done, what was the one where the jeep went over a waterfall, Romancing the Stone? He was Michael Douglas’ stunt double. And Vince did that. He was a legend, and he almost got killed doing the stunt. Because they were in South America with no hospitals, and no CGI, and no nothing. They literally were in a Jeep and they went over a waterfall and dropped seventy feet and he almost died. Vince was the guy who then got me interested and got me training a little bit for MacGyver. And then that’s sort of where it all started. Was that the question? It seems like I’ve been talking for an hour.

David Read:
Yeah, yeah, how you really got involved with this.

Dan Shea:
[Inaudible]

David Read:
I didn’t know you’d written scripts.

Dan Shea:
I got a bunch of them downstairs. In fact, when the world ended, when last March in the Covid thing, I just finished Magicians, a sci-fi series, we finished season five. I was the stunt coordinator, and then I went right to a thing called, a Netflix series called Brand New Cherry Flavor, which still has not aired because they had to get a bunch of stuff in Los Angeles right after that, and then L.A. shut down. And they never actually got their scenes until just before last Thanksgiving, and so they won’t be coming up until June. Brand New Cherry Flavor. And, where was I going with this? Why did I bounce to Brand New Cherry Flavor. What was I talking about. Stunts. Where the hell is this anecdote going.

David Read:
I was going to ask you anyway, what is going to be coming out soon.

Dan Shea:
I know, but why was I saying, oh, about the writing. Oh yes!

David Read:
Yes!

Dan Shea:
So, nothing else to do, and then I wrote this script that has been bouncing around may head, about this Middle East thing, this stunt double doubling an Israeli girl. And I wrote it and I sent it to L.A. for this coverage, professional coverage. That’s where actual TV shows and movies send their scripts for polish and stuff. And I actually for the first time in sixty years, I’m not that old, first time in thirty years I got a positive coverage, positive writer’s report for my script. And for me, we’re still trying to shop around and whatever. And actually, what’s her name would be great, from Wonder Woman, she’d be perfect [inaudible].

David Read:
Gal Gadot?

Dan Shea:
Yeah, she would play both parts. The stunt double and then the actual lead, the Israeli star. So that was kind of, speaking of writing, that was sort of exciting and they called it the best script of the month that had been sent down to these people. Which means nothing. If producers say it’s the best script, then that’s good. This company that just gives you writer’s reports. I got a positive one. Anyways.

David Read:
You know what, you got to start somewhere, man. And so, you can get traction on that, all the better. Keep us in the loop.

Dan Shea:
Exactly.

David Read:
Please, for sure. Dan, who were your heroes? Who are the people who kind of shaped you in to the person you are, personally? And who are your professional heroes as well?

Dan Shea:
Well, personally would be our hockey coaches from my little small town back in Ontario, population five thousand. It was called Hespeler, and they made the best hockey sticks and the best hockey players in the world. And then my old coach Bob McKillop from the University of Waterloo. And Bobby Hull was the best left winger to ever play the game, from the Chicago Blackhawks. He was my hero. As far as showbiz folks go, I used to love Burt Reynolds because he said he did his own stunts. I don’t ever think he actually did. One thing I learned about actors from doing this crap for thirty years is that none of them do their own stunts except Tom Cruise. That guy is like, he took all that heat for getting mad at his crew for the Covid thing, and that he was totally justified in doing that because that’s the first big feature out there now, making movies, and if they mess up, then the rest of us, we’re not going to get work. So, now on our sets, for Love Hard, we have these safety protocols. We had to wear an N-95 mask, we had to wear goggles, and we had to stay away from everybody. And if anyone didn’t do that, we were kicked outside. If you did it again, we’d be fired. So I don’t know why everyone made a big deal about Tom Cruise doing that. Because what he did was totally justified. Anyway, in terms of my heroes, one guy I really loved was Steve Martin, because I did stand up comedy for ten years. Back in my era, you guys, he’d probably be an old man for you guys. But from my era, he hosted Saturday Night Live. They were the Czech brothers, him and Dan Ackroyd. He hosted the Tonight Show. And myself and my girlfriend were down in L.A. once and went to see him on the Tonight Show. And then we saw him and his girlfriend Bernadette Peters wandering around afterwards. They went in to a record store so I ran in afterwards, and got his record and said “Mr. Martin, I’m a fan of yours. Can you sign my record of you?” And he said “Well, have you paid for it?” I said “oh no”. I ran, I went in line, I waited in line. And I’m waiting and they’re all yakking, and I’m waiting. They’re over there and they’re not going to be there long. I paid for it and went back to him again and said “Mr. Martin, here’s my receipt from your record album.” It was the one with all the banana animals.

David Read:
Right.

Dan Shea:
I said “Would you sign it now?” And he said “Well, do you have a Sharpie?” I said “Well, no.” I just thought they would have them with them to sign. So I ran across the street to the Seven Eleven…

David Read:
Oh my god!

Dan Shea:
And I waited and there is the same idiot who was waiting in line at the record store was now..

David Read:
You’re kidding!

Dan Shea:
A lonely guy just talking to cashiers he didn’t know. Finally I threw a $20 at the guy and I took a bunch of Sharpies across the street. They’re just leaving. “Mr. Martin, I’ve paid for the album, I’ve got a Sharpie, would you mind signing my album?” And he said “Well, could you take the cellophane off first?” [Inaudible] Because he would have signed it on the cellophane, so I took off the cellophane. I gave it to him. And then he finally signed it. And it was like, holy crap. So I had that album. About forty years later, on Pink Panther, I wound up being his stunt double. They shot it in France, and there is one descender gag that they didn’t love. I was a stunt double here in Vancouver. We did the descender gag on the wire but turns out, the director said “It kind of looks like a stunt guy on a wire, just like in France. Do you think you could actually jump?” So stupidly I jumped off a twelve foot ladder and face-planted on to a carpet. They wound up using that gag in the trailer. Steve Martin, great guy, playing the banjo every day for the crew. On the very last day, I took the old album, I found it from seventy-five years ago, with his signature on it. I said “Steve,” now because we’re buddies, “Steve, would you mind signing it again.” And he said “Actually no, I can’t be bothered because you’re a moron”. No, he didn’t. He signed it. He signed it again, so I got two Steve Martin signatures on my album of him. It came full circle and that was the end. Steve Martin was my all-time favorite, favorite guy.

David Read:
Are you a sci-fi fan?

Dan Shea:
I am. See, I grew up, I didn’t realize I was a sci-fi fan. When we were doing Stargate, I remember [inaudible] Michael Greenberg saying “agh, we’re doing sci-fi”. He was joking. I didn’t really know the significance of that. Turns out, because of Star Trek, I grew up loving. Also got to double Leonard Nimoy, what was that sci-fi show he did in Vancouver, I was doubling John Noble, the older geezer on that show. But I also got to double…

David Read:
Fringe?

Dan Shea:
Fringe! On Fringe, yeah. I was John Noble’s stunt double on Fringe. In one episode Ricky Pearce, who was the stunt coordinator, brought me out to double Leonard Nimoy!

David Read:
Wow!

Dan Shea:
Not just the fan saying “Hey Leonard Mr. Nimoy, I’m a fan of yours.” We were in the same room with the same wardrobe. He didn’t have the Vulcan ears.

David Read:
No.

Dan Shea:
Those weren’t real. Those were fake. But I got to hang with him for two days and I got my picture taken with him, both us of in the same wardrobe. And so, yeah, Star Trek, I mean, I just loved, just loved it. I didn’t realize I was a sci-fi fan because what happened then was, the whole sci-fi phenomena, you know, and I jokingly when I’m on stage for all the Stargate conventions, I call them Stargate freaks. Lovingly.

David Read:
We are a little freaky.

Dan Shea:
My wife always says “You can’t call people freaks, it’s not very nice”. No, it’s a term of endearment. It means that they’re in to it. I’m a hockey freak, you know what I mean? So I didn’t think I was, certainly wasn’t to the extent of that, but that didn’t exist when I was young, the whole, you know, until Captain Kirk did the bit on SNL.

David Read:
Right! “Get a life, will ya?”

Dan Shea:
That was so funny! But then once it started doing that, so anyway to make a long story short, yes I am because I love Star Trek. But getting to the conventions, I didn’t get it at first. There was one in Vancouver.

David Read:
GateCon.

Dan Shea:
The very first one, I don’t even know. It must have been GateCon.

David Read:
I think so, yeah.

Dan Shea:
First of all of them. I went out, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I actually, they gave me a bodyguard. What do you mean? I’m Dan Shea:, I’m a stunt guy. What are you talk[ing about]. But I would go with Richard Dean. Sometimes he would go to these things and I’d go with him. And he would have a bodyguard. “Grr, we’re leaving now”. It made sense with him because some idiot may want to attack him, whatever. Or, hug him, or whatever. It seemed kind of stupid for me. But once we started doing it, you’ve got to realize that it’s the same people and I got to know them. There’s a dude from Michigan, I call him Figure Skate Dude From Michigan, and Michelle his wife. I got to know all of them and they got to know each other. At all the different conventions. I remember, I think you were in England. I remember talking to you. You’ve been there?

David Read:
I’ve been to England but not for a convention, no. You and I talked a lot at the GateCons.

Dan Shea:
Was it only in Vancouver? Because I thought I had a memory of you [inaudible]. Have you been in Chicago?

David Read:
I have been to Chicago, yeah. That’s quite possible.

Dan Shea:
I thought it was Creation.

David Read:
That would have been Creation.

Dan Shea:
I have a memory of you, not just from Vancouver. I have a memory of you and I talking somewhere away from home.

David Read:
It had to have been Chicago then.

Dan Shea:
Yeah.

David Read:
Unless you came down to San Diego ComicCon.

Dan Shea:
No. Oh, I did do that, but I did that, I wouldn’t have seen you there. There was a couple of individual, I guess quote unquote fans who brought down, and they had their own table.

David Read:
Got it.

Dan Shea:
I was at a couple of them.

David Read:
What an experience that event is.

Dan Shea:
Oh, unbelieve[able]… and somehow I wound up on stage. How did I get up on stage? I was up on stage in front of eight hundred people in San Diego. I must have been there in some official capacity. I remember the laughter was so big, not that I’m funny, but there’s so many people that there’d be a delay of the laughter.

David Read:
There’s four thousand people in that room.

Dan Shea:
Yeah! So it was like, it felt like, Louis [CK] before he fell in to disfavor [inaudible]. Me doing the conventions is, plus I got to bring back the old stand up thing too.

David Read:
Absolutely.

Dan Shea:
You know, it’s, back in the stand up day, you were always scared crapless being up on stage. For Stargate, because the fans are so nice, and you didn’t technically have to be funny. There’s not real pressure on you being funny. You could just [inaudible].

David Read:
Well they already love you. They’re there because you’ve won them over already.

Dan Shea:
Well, I’m not sure about that. But in any event, totally relaxed and I was a thousand times funnier. Like the way I was when we were at the table at lunch for ten years of Stargate and eight years of MacGyver. We were laughing all the time. But when you put a microphone in someone’s hand and put them in front of eight hundred people, even though I did stand up for ten years, it changes it. For the conventions, I was actually funnier because I was relaxed, because I knew they sort of liked me and there was no real pressure, and the laughter was just icing on the cake.

David Read:
It’s absolutely true.

Dan Shea:
Did I answer your question? You asked me about sci-fi.

David Read:
Yeah. A roundabout way of getting to it. You were there from day one of SG-1. I didn’t know, the last time that we talked, that you were one of the Jaffa guards in the prison, marching down on Teal’c, before he turns.

Dan Shea:
I was. Yeah, but I was the stunt coordinator and I was Richard Dean Anderson’s stunt double from the very beginning. I remember the scene because Brad Kelly, who became the one Jaffa who worked the most of any Jaffa. Because they put the heads on them so we could basically use the same guy over and over again. It was his first naphthalene hit. We were all lined up and he said “What do I do? How will I know? How will I know when to fall over?” And I said “You’ll know.’ And then [makes sound of explosion]! Back in the day, in the beginning, we did these little naphthalene hits, the [inaudible] of special effects. They were nasty because they would just come up and just burn your chin. We had to put on all those fire retardant gel on. Later on we did what was called flash cotton. They’d put a hole in your Jaffa suit, put in flash cotton. It would be bright but it wouldn’t burn you.

David Read:
OK.

Dan Shea:
But I was here, and Brad Kelly was beside me, and then he said “How am I going to know?” And I said “You’ll know”, and then boom! And he went “ahhh!” And down he went, and [explosion sound] down I went. We were both killing ourselves. But when you say, “there from the very beginning”, at the very end of Stargate they wound up giving us a soft copy book. There was a hard copy book of all the people that were there…

David Read:
A Celebration of Ten Years.

Dan Shea:
Yeah! I get a soft one given to me, and I wound up stealing another one. I remember, I went to a convention in, oh gosh, [who] was the woman who did the writing? It was…

David Read:
Thomasina Gibson?

Dan Shea:
Yeah, yeah! The convention was at an old town.

David Read:
I know what you’re talking about, yes. It was in…

Dan Shea:
There was a castle.

David Read:
Yes.

Dan Shea:
We were at this big castle. I remember I was supposed to work in this movie in Vancouver but they kept pushing it back. Who’s the dude from Godfather?

David Read:
I mean, Marlon Brando?

Dan Shea:
No, his son.

David Read:
Al Pacino?

Dan Shea:
Al Pacino, was doing a movie and I was supposed to be on it but the [inaudible] kept pushing it back. So I said to the promoter “well OK, I’m going”. I got on a plane and I went to, um, wish I could remember the name of the place. It will come to me. So I went there and I brought all my stuff from down in the basement. All my Stargate stuff. I’m thinking people may want to buy this stuff.

David Read:
Was the wrench there?

Dan Shea:
Pardon me?

David Read:
Was the wrench there?

Dan Shea:
No, I didn’t have a wrench. I couldn’t, I wasn’t going to bring the wrench on the plane. It was more, its actually the books. This is going to end with the books.

David Read:
OK. The memorabilia.

Dan Shea:
And I remember I got on the plane, and my wife’s a flight attendant, I got bumped up to biz, which was great. Then they shut down the plane because one of the toilets weren’t working. And it looks like I wasn’t going to get there. I phoned the coordinator “Can I get back in the Al Pacino movie? It looks like I won’t be going to England”. “Nah, it’s too late”. So we go to England and…

David Read:
Oh no.

Dan Shea:
Took a bus, and, what are some, there’s a place that’s outside of England, it’s close, where they speak a different language. I almost wound up going there because of the accent. I said “take me to such and such”. The place where I was going to sounded like.. Wales!

David Read:
Wales.

Dan Shea:
OK, so the place where I was going was Wells. That’s where the convention was, in Wells. I got to England, and I’m all jet lagged, and I’m trying to get on the bus, because the promoters weren’t, they weren’t, I was going on my own dime. It was Richard Dean Anderson and Amanda [Tapping]. I thought, they didn’t have any money for me so I thought I’m going to go anyways and I’ll just make some dough on signage. And maybe I’ll sell some of the stuff. So I got there, and I remember phoning my wife and saying “god I’m such a loser. I’ve flown all the way to England and no one is going to like me and no one is going to buy my stuff. I’m such an idiot. What have I done?” So I went to Wells. That morning, at eight thirty, half an hour before the convention even started, I very sheepishly started setting up my stuff out on the table, thinking they might laugh at me. You know, ‘cause they had real cool stuff. I’m thinking this was legitimate Stargate stuff but I was new at this stuff. I took out the two books, and I sat the two books down. And all of a sudden, whooo, the vendors, it wasn’t, the fans weren’t allowed in for another half an hour. All of the vendors came and they said “that’s the such-and-such book”. And I’m like “yeah yeah yeah, that’s the book they gave me”. And they’re like “well, what do you want for it?” And I’m like, “ahhh”. And then I was thinking, OK, so I sold it to the one guy for such-and-such, and he did it so quickly that another guy came for the other one and I tripled the price for the other one. He didn’t even blink. And he took that one. I’m thinking I could have charged them ten times as much. And all of my stuff, everything, was sold before the doors even opened at nine o’clock.

David Read:
Oh my god! The vendors took it all!

Dan Shea:
From the vendors! Took it all. All I had left was pictures to be signed, but now instead of being a loser, I’m not a loser. I’ve got my pocket full of cash and now I’m not a loser. So now the doors open and I’ve got a big smile on my face because I’m no longer a loser. Because it was only Richard and Amanda, I had eight million people. What was that Jim Carrey show where he was in a town, and there were shooting him on camera and he didn’t realize he was on camera?

David Read:
The Truman Show.

Dan Shea:
The what?

David Read:
The Truman Show.

Dan Shea:
Yeah, I felt like The Truman Show. Everywhere I went in Wells for that weekend, there’s a thousand Stargate fans there, and a very small town, they were everywhere. I’d walk in to a Starbucks for a coffee and there’d be forty Stargate people going “hey, Siler!”

David Read:
“Siler!”

Dan Shea:
Then I’d go in to a pub for a beer and they’d be “hey, Siler!” And for a weekend I was like Truman. I was Jim Carrey. Kind of like a celebrity but actually, total, not loser, I was a loser but now I’m not a loser. It was like that for the whole weekend, it was like being a superstar. And then it ended and I was a loser again.

David Read:
Nooo! There is something, I mean obviously you were at a convention, but there is something about Stargate in Europe where, I mean, you tap every third or fourth person, they’re going to know exactly what it is, and I’ve seen it. What do you think it is that make this franchise so enduring? I know I’ve asked you the question before but I’d like to hear it again.

Dan Shea:
I don’t know if I’ve ever answered it properly. I literally have no idea. I jokingly said that a lot of people in England didn’t have cable and it was the only show that was on TV, and that’s the only reason they watched it. I hope that’s not the reason. Even if it was, who cares. The show got cancelled like how many years ago? Fifteen years ago? And we’re still doing this. We were supposed to have, I’m sure you were going to be there, last September we were supposed to have another big GateCon.

David Read:
GateCon was going to be Full Circle 2020.

Dan Shea:
Yeah, yeah! And that would have been great. Of course it didn’t happen because of Covid. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. But if they didn’t have the one in September maybe they’ll have one next September, who knows. So the why of it, I don’t know. I was watching one the other night, it’s actually a pretty good show. Some sci-fi folks I remember them telling me that some of the science was almost real. I know Brad Wright and [Jonathan] Glassner, they made sure that the science was fairly accurate. So that helps. I think of the movie Martian, written by, I worked on Cabin In The Woods, I played Pa Buckner. [inaudible]

David Read:
Good movie! Along with Jodelle Ferland.

Dan Shea:
Yeah yeah! And the director of that, what the hell was his name, he also wrote [inaudible] Martian.

David Read:
Joss Whedon.

Dan Shea:
No no. Joss Whedon was second unit director. No, it wasn’t him. [Phone dings]. It was a taller guy. Hold on, it’s SG [inaudible]. It’s Michael Greenburg, I’m gonna see. Oh, Greenburg’s asking me how Zoom is. I’ll tell him it’s still going.

David Read:
Still going!

Dan Shea:
Maybe he’ll [inaudible], still going. So Martian, the science of that, slinging me around Earth and slinging back was fairly bang on. I’m told that the science of Stargate, other than it’s impossible to go through a stargate and go to the other side of the universe, was pretty precise. The actual why, I don’t know. For me, I like watching it now because it’s nostalgic. I remember what it was like shooting it. I don’t care what was on camera. I care about what we were doing behind camera, how we were joking and laughing. I remember the stunt guy Randy Lee wound up breaking one of the effect’s guy’s, one of the Jaffa weapons, back in the beginning.

David Read:
Staff weapons.

Dan Shea:
Yeah, staff weapon. Back in the beginning, there were two or three functioning staff weapons and they’re very fragile, and they actually shot. But the thing is, we were all getting shot carrying them. So when we died, we had to die really lame and set the weapon down. That didn’t work for the producers so then they wound up making a bunch of rubbers, and then they’d just CGI the shot in so we could chuck the weaponry. That’s the stuff that I think of when I’m watching a scene. There’s this, that happened. We were leaving right after to go to [Las] Vegas for a fight. Michael Greenburg’s brother is Ross Greenburg and he was president of HBO. So we, oh my god, for twenty years myself and Michael Greenburg. And Rick wouldn’t go. Richard Dean wouldn’t go. He said the boxing is fixed, he wouldn’t go.

David Read:
Christopher Judge would.

Dan Shea:
Christopher Judge came with us. He was with us two or three times. I remember one time Christopher Judge had a hit on him and they did what’s actually called A and B smoke. The effects guys put on A and B smoke, is what it was called. But if you didn’t take your t-shirt off right afterwards, it would burn you. It was acidic. I remember, it was actually my fault as the coordinator, not telling them “make sure he gets that t-shirt off as soon as we’re done”. Because we were running off to go to Vegas to go to the fight and Chris Judge, it was myself, and Michael Greenburg, and Chris Judge. All of a sudden I hear “there’s something wrong with Chris Judge”. What the hell? He had left his t-shirt on and the A and B smoke had burnt his skin. Now craft service is putting ice on it. And we were like “come on, we have to get to Vegas. What’s wrong? What’s wrong with you?” “I don’t know, I’ve got…”. I looked at it and he’s got bubbles, you know, from his skin being burnt because of me.

David Read:
Reacting.

Dan Shea:
From then on we didn’t use A and B smoke. But we got on the plane, we got to Vegas, we were ringside. We would get HBO credentials. We would go, we would be at Wolfgang Puck for the pre-bash. Actual Wolfgang was actually there, serving us pizza.

David Read:
Wow!

Dan Shea:
And all the people from HBO, because we used to watch this show call Oz, and all the people from Oz were always there. And Desperate Housewives, was that another one from HBO?

David Read:
My mom has that on another network.

Dan Shea:
No, it wasn’t HBO, it wasn’t HBO but a couple of the Desperate Housewives stars were there.

David Read:
Wow!

Dan Shea:
I remember, who’s the rapper with ten thousand different names. He always changed his name every three seconds.

David Read:
I’m not good with hip hop.

Dan Shea:
Yeah, I know, hmm, oh god.

David Read:
So it was a lot of people.

Dan Shea:
It was the biggest hip hop guy of all time. Anyways, so he was there, and he didn’t come to the pre-bash, but I knew where his seat was. I remember for the preliminaries of the fight not even looking at that, the fight, because I want to get his autograph. Sure enough he’s walking in, and he was walking in slow motion just like the guys in Reservoir Dogs. He was walking so cool [inaudible]. I said “please Mr. Such-and-Such, would you mind”, how come I can’t have his name? Anyway, he signed it, and got that for my daughter Joey, the one who is in Egypt. P. Diddy!

David Read:
P. Diddy! OK!

Dan Shea:
I got P. Diddy’s autograph, the only guy in the whole place, there’s twenty thousand people in there but no one can get to him because we’re ringside, right.

David Read:
Right, you had access, they didn’t.

Dan Shea:
Plus I had the HBO thing, plus I was wearing, the year before, Evander Holyfield was heavyweight champ, and he was not fighting but he was standing ring side. He had a really cool mock turtleneck t-shirt on.

David Read:
OK.

Dan Shea:
I thought, next year I’m going to wear that same mock turtleneck and I’m going to look like Evander Holyfield. It didn’t quite hang on me the way it hung on him. But I had the mock turtle on, I had the HBO credentials, so P. Diddy didn’t realize that I was just a loser. He gave me the autograph and the rest is history.

David Read:
How did you get Siler? Was Siler written for you in Solitudes or was it written for a guest and you’re like “I’m going to audition for that”? Was he for you from the beginning?

Dan Shea:
No, was not for me from the beginning. It was for anybody who auditioned. Michael Greenburg got me the audition, so I went upstairs. We’re working downstairs on set and I run up and there’s Brad Wright, and Robert Cooper, and Martin Wood. We all know each other, so I go in to the room and start joking around like I’m kind of doing now-ish. They all, I made them all laugh. Brad Wright, for a funny guy he’s really easy to make laugh, which is amazing. He was just laughing his ass off. I’m thinking, wow I’m going to get this part because they really like me. Turns out it wasn’t a comedy part. It was a guy who spews out all the techno stuff, and then I spew out the techno stuff joking around. Martin Wood, they’re all laughing their asses off and I’m thinking this is great, I’m going to get this recurring role. So I went back downstairs and Greenburg was on set and he got this call and he said “you asshole, what did you just do?” “I don’t know, why?” And he said “you made a fool of yourself. You didn’t audition, you were just joking around and they were embarrassed, they were embarrassed for you. That’s the reason they were laughing. It was supposed to be a serious audition and you pissed it away by being an idiot.” So he said “get back up there now and audition properly”. I ran back up and I had a straight face. I did the lines, and there was no joking around. I left and I’m thinking wow, so that’s how showbiz works. And then I got the part. And then he wanted me to joke anyways because whenever I did a line I’d get shot in the head, or ratcheted, or kicked in the face, or something.

David Read:
Well, that’s the joke in 200, if you can share the line with us.

Dan Shea:
Yes. “Why does it always happen to me?!”

David Read:
That’s exactly right!

Dan Shea:
Yeah yeah.

David Read:
He was a gate technician originally, and he back talked General Hammond. “No sir, it’s x number of hours, I said x number of hours, this is all I can do”.

Dan Shea:
In fact, the first couple of episodes I looked a certain way, without glasses and they made my hair look kind of nice. And someone said “you look too much like you’re Richard Dean’s stunt double. You looking too much like Rick. I didn’t really look like Rick but I was too much in the ballpark. They said “we’re going to make you look different.” That’s when they came out with the glasses and they would put this crap, this Brylcreem in my hair. For ten years. No one ever puts product in their hair. That’s how Siler became, I would just wear my own glasses until they got broken, and they wanted to find me a new pair.

David Read:
You had some of the best lines. Across, opposite Jason Schombing as Robert Rothman in the Crystal Skull episode. “What do you think, Siler?” “I think you’re going to get fired”. This is fantastic!

Dan Shea:
No, it was, that was a lot of fun. For me Stargate was the best of all because it was three things: I was the stunt coordinator, I was Richard Dean Anderson’s, star of the show, stunt double, and then I had a recurring role. I remember doing a show called Paycheck with Ben Affleck.

David Read:
The time travel one.

Dan Shea:
Was it time travel?

David Read:
Mmm hmmm.

Dan Shea:
No, Paycheck was, not so much time travel. He was in the thing and he, and yeah, he came back.

David Read:
Right.

Dan Shea:
We were shooting that at the Vancouver Film Studio, which was across the street from the Bridge. At the Bridge was Stargate, and Vancouver Film Studio is across Boundary Road, was Ben Affleck’s Paycheck. I accepted a job for both shows on the same day. On camera. Which has never been done before. You could be a stunt coordinator. Let say I’m on Stargate and maybe I’m supposed to go over to Fringe that night to work. I’m not on camera today as a coordinator so if I have to leave someone can cover for me. I can go on camera. No one ever accepts a role on camera on two different shows on the same day but I told the Stargate people “yeah yeah, I’m available that day” even though I knew I wasn’t because I thought if all of a sudden Siler said he wasn’t available, they’d think I thought I was too cool, they’d stop writing in the Siler parts for me. So I accepted it. I showed up on the set of Paycheck in the morning and they did my hair a certain way. I remember the girl, my hat had fallen off the day before and they saw my hair. So she just put a ton of product in my hair and combed it so if the hat came off again, my hair would be good. Then I said to the first AD [assistant director] on Paycheck “hey, would you mind if I just ran across the street for a couple of hours? Would that be OK?” “Nah, we won’t need you for another eight hours”. So I ran across the street and I went in to hair and makeup, wardrobe. I took off my jumpsuit from Paycheck and put on my jumpsuit from Stargate and I went in to get my hair done. Patrick in hair said “what the hell has happened to your hair?” He took it all out, combed it the other way, like Siler.

David Read:
Oh oh,

Dan Shea:
I went to set and I’m crapping my pants because I’m basically, I’m on set for Stargate on camera and they could call me anytime over there and I’d be so totally fired. That would be insane. Usually, sometimes they do the coverage of the main actors and just leave the other guys for later in the day and do their coverage later. They don’t care. Sometimes we like that because then you get overtime. But this time I wanted to get this thing over with and get back over there. I’m crapping my pants. Sure enough they turn around on me. I got a phone call just about as we were about to roll and “hello, it’s Dan”. I’m thinking, oh my god they need me. But it wasn’t Dan the AD who wanted me for Paycheck, it was Dan Resuto the stunt guy just asking if there’s any work. I hung up, I did my line, and they wrapped me and I ran across the street, back to Paycheck. I changed my wardrobe and the hair woman looked at my hair.

David Read:
Right!

Dan Shea:
“What the hell!” She got me in to the room and she was just , again, just digging it in as hard as she could to get the hair back the other way. And then she emptied a whole thing of spray on it so it would never come out again.

David Read:
How do you keep all of that straight? I mean, wearing multiple hats, quite possibly Siler, Richard Dean Anderson’s stunt double, and stunt coordinator, all in the same day. How do you keep it all straight and not, you know, spend eighteen hours days on it?

Dan Shea:
It’s easy if you’re on one set. You’re just there.

David Read:
That’s true.

Dan Shea:
It’s when you have to, if you don’t tell the Stargate people that you’re working across the street on Paycheck, and you don’t tell the Paycheck people, the feature that you’re working across the street, on Stargate, that’s when it gets tense. If you’re there on Stargate as the coordinator you’ve basically already done your work. You’ve done your budgets, you’ve hired everybody, and you’re there to make safe. So if someone has to fall over, you have to throw a pad down. If I’m there as Richard Dean’s stunt double I can easily still do my work as a coordinator. They frown upon it, and some companies don’t let you do that anymore. I understand from a safety standpoint it’s better for the coordinator to just focus on coordinating. In the old days we were all greedy. We would be coordinator and we’d also be doubling somebody. We’d be double contracted. Then we could do it. But productions tend not to love it anymore. If you’re Siler, you just go over there and say your line. I remember too they sometimes would mess with me. I remember one time my phone went off accidentally, when it was Rick’s closeup, and they thought, oh god, who is the guy that’s fired? They couldn’t really fire me because I was his buddy so they, from then on all of our phones were on vibrate for the next ten years. But I remember it was my close up about four months later and usually the principal cast wouldn’t show up for me. They’d put an x on the thing.

David Read:
Right.

Dan Shea:
This x would be such-and-such and that x would be so-and-so. This day they’re all there. Rick’s there, Amanda’s there, Chris Judge is there, [Michael] Shanks is there. And I go, “what the hell. I’ve just got one line. Why are they all there?” So Brad Turner, the director, said “action” and as soon as I was about to do my line, I heard a phone ring. It was Rick. Rick was purposely off camera making his phone ring every time I had to do my line to get back at me for my phone going off from his coverage eight months earlier. Every time I tried to do my line he would, of course I couldn’t flinch, the little thing of sweat was coming down here. I kept it together because I couldn’t fall apart because otherwise, I’m such a jerk being sarcastic with everybody else, making fun of everybody else. I can’t suddenly become sensitive and say, sensitive actor guy, and say “could you stop making noise, in my eye line?” So I had to keep it together and I did my line, and we had a laugh, and that was the end of that.

David Read:
How much input would you have in terms of, OK the script says for this stunt to be done this way. So Rick walks by, he’s enhanced with the Atanik arm bands, he pushes Siler over the stairs and Siler falls down. How often would be able to say “you know, I have a suggestion. I think for this set, this situation I think it would be better if it was done this way or this way”. Do they leave that to you to adjust that accordingly? How would something like that go about?

Dan Shea:
Safety was a hundred percent the coordinator’s responsibility. No one would never question it. In terms of the creative part, that’s the director. You can give him or her some ideas and they may or may not. Usually they’ll listen to you if it’s stunt related, then you know what you’re talking about and it will be cooler and safe. Anything action-wise, safety-wise is a hundred percent the coordinator’s call. No one will question it. Back in the old days sometimes directors would get a little bit pissy but not anymore. It’s a hundred percent the stunt coordinators’s call.

David Read:
Wow. How did you pull that off? Did you have, that particular situation, did you have pads laying down across those spiral stairs?

Dan Shea:
The one where [inaudible] pushed me over?

David Read:
Pushed you over the stairs. That looks so scary. I’ve been on those stairs. They are steep and they are metal. Even if you put something down, it’s still at a slope. That’s going to hurt!

Dan Shea:
I remember Martin [Wood] thinking: are you OK to do flip and land? I’m like, “no”. So he did it in two parts. I had a couple of guys who played Jaffa. It might have been Brad Kelly and Shawn Stewart, down there. They’re huge guys, like six [foot] two and a half [inches], two seventy [pounds]. They are actually holding the pad in place.

David Read:
Oh, OK.

Dan Shea:
That I landed on. They actually kept it level. I didn’t even have to go on an angle. Even trying to go and land on a pad on an angle would be a little bit…

David Read:
Yeah.

Dan Shea:
…tiny bit sketchy. It was actually quite easy. I landed flat.

David Read:
So you have people there holding it for you.

Dan Shea:
They were holding it. They’re strong enough. Ordinarily you wouldn’t have people holding pads, it would be too sketchy.

David Read:
They’re big.

Dan Shea:
You can spill off the side and fall down the side of the step. They’re so strong I totally trusted them, and it worked.

David Read:
The one that blew me away, talking about the last time that we were together, with Christopher Judge. I didn’t even realize it was done this way, and I had seen the episode for years, was Message In A Bottle. It was a ratchet pull stunt. It was Rick, is basically being crucified, for all intents and purposes, right here. It’s a face transposition. You’re being pulled back, and his face has been superimposed over yours. And you’re being pulled back against this wall. Tell us about this whole sequence.

Dan Shea:
That was like the worst ratchet I’ve ever done. Kirk Vaughn was the special effects rigger, the stunt rigger. I actually went back, when we were rehearsing that, usually the ratchets are really fast. And you fly back, you slam against the wall and you go down to the ground. The way they do that is, when you go flying through the air, they shut the thing off a little bit before you hit the wall so you’re actually decelerating but the human eye can’t see that. You’re just sort of dropping so you don’t actually hit square. You’re sort of slowing down and dropping and you deflect. It looks cool, and it doesn’t hurt nearly as much. This thing however, I had to stick to the wall.

David Read:
You were being pinned.

Dan Shea:
[Inaudible] shoulder, and I had to stick. So sticking is no good because all your energy, you go right [slapping sound] in to the wall. I remember doing the rehearsal and they did it quite, the first couple you always do slower. They wound up doing it and I hit, boom! It was the hardest hit I’ve ever, actually the second hardest hit, if we get a second we can talk about the other one.

David Read:
Yeah.

Dan Shea:
Because I didn’t bounce, I stuck, that hurt. So then they had to decelerate me, because on camera I had to explode backwards with energy. Then they had to slow me down and then stick me to the wall. But that was one of the nastier ones. It’s when you stick, not good. Bouncing, good. Sticking, not good.

David Read:
And this other time, that happened.

Dan Shea:
Oh, the other one. The other time.

David Read:
The worst for you.

Dan Shea:
Oh my god, it was like the worst. It was actually worse than this one. I was supposed to be working on Fantastic Four, with the Silver Surfer that night in the Cassiar tunnel. I was only there on Stargate for just a couple of hours to do this little hand pull, standing beside this hospital bed. We had set up this gag three days earlier in the hospital bed was like ten feet away from the wall. I had to go back in to the wall. Ten feet, that means the angle of the wire is like that. So if it pulls you back, and same thing, they decelerate you a couple of feet before the wall. You start to decelerate, you hit, you bounce off. When we got there on the day, the bed had been moved ten feet that way. Now instead of being just a six foot pull on this kind of an angle, if you pull it back further all of a sudden it becomes this angle. Now instead of six feet, it’s like thirty feet.

David Read:
Oh my gosh!

Dan Shea:
On episodic [TV], you don’t have time to be changing pick points and stuff, but I didn’t want to anyway because even if we did, I would have been late for Fantastic Four. I had to, I’m like holy crap. They said “are you ready?” I’m thinking “oh yeah”. DQ, Darryl Quon, was the puller. He’s a six foot five, three hundred pound Asian dude, and he was on a ladder and I said “DQ don’t be a pussy, give me a good one”. Because I could only do it once and I had to get out of there. It was the hardest hit I’ve ever done in my life. I went straight back. Instead of going up, and wooooo and like this, and it was boom! I remember my leg twitching when I was on the ground. I’m thinking holy crap, but luckily I could feel my legs. Then I get up, and I wanted to leave but John Lenic, who was the production manager, said “well you can’t leave because we don’t think you’re OK”. And I’m like “whaaa, I’m in charge of safety, I know when I’m OK”. My heads like, I’m totally not OK. But I had to get to Fantastic Four. If I wasn’t established that night, if I didn’t show up, I would be fired.

David Read:
Right!

Dan Shea:
And Mitch would never hire me again. If I didn’t show up for that one night then I wouldn’t get the five other days that were coming. I needed to be established, driving this Hummer. I said to the production at Stargate “I’m going to drive home to Kits, my wife will take care of me”. Back then they had this number you could call and it would know it was your number or something. It was old-fashioned technology. So I remember I drove all the way home and I phoned them and said “‘I’m at home, here’s my wife, she’s going to take care of me”. They said “fine”. So then I drive all the way back to the Bridge, because the studio for Fantastic Four was right there. I drove to the Cassiar tunnel and I had six ice packs and a big box of Coke Classics to keep myself awake.

David Read:
Yeah.

Dan Shea:
The night before…

David Read:
It’s a long day.

Dan Shea:
It was a night shoot.

David Read:
Oh gosh, so you hadn’t rest[ed].

Dan Shea:
… fallen asleep and they fired him. Not only, I got in the Hummer, I had all the [ice] packs down my back and I was drinking Coke Classics to stay awake. Then of course we all had to go to the bathroom. I remember everyone running to the bathrooms at the end of the tunnel and then the coordinator yelled “get back to your cars! We’re about to start driving!” So they all run back. Nobody was allowed to go to the bathroom for the rest of the night.

David Read:
Oh god!

Dan Shea:
We were all peeing in the Cassiar tunnel at four in the morning.

David Read:
Always take a cup.

Dan Shea:
Exactly. We had a hundred stunt guys all going to the bathroom and then we were driving our cars through this for eight hours. Then the next morning the Vancouver, of course they wrapped us and we get out of there, and all the Vancouver people were driving to work. It was a sunny day. Ordinarily it’s kind of rainy, so you have the windshield wipers off, on, and then you go through the tunnel and you turn the windshield wipers off because you’re going in a tunnel. Well, this day it was sunny outside and they went in to the tunnel and all of a sudden the windshield wipers went on. Ho ho! That was because of us.

David Read:
That’s just, your world has always been one of amazement to me because you never know when that new script is going to come in. What’s going to be called for? You may be setting someone on fire. You may be doing a two or three story drop. You may be having a ratchet pull. Or you may be, you know, Siler. Do you find, as you get older, that you’re not as nimble as you used to be?

Dan Shea:
I hope ageism isn’t creeping in to this interview.

David Read:
No! I’m just curious. Is it…

Dan Shea:
Now that you’re an old bugger with a cane, how can you still fall over.

David Read:
Gosh, OK.

Dan Shea:
A lot of them don’t want to fall over, or hit the ground when they’re older. I do. I kind of like it. I’ve kept in pretty good shape so it doesn’t bother me. I still like doing the ratchets too, actually. But a lot of them don’t. A lot of them just do driving when they get older. They just like to drive. But I don’t really like, I’d rather run around and fall down than drive unless it’s freezing cold, and you just want to sit in the car all night.

David Read:
Makes sense. Absolutely.

Dan Shea:
It doesn’t affect me. Nothing has changed really with age. Yet.

David Read:
You just have stay in shape and make sure you’re in peak physical condition so that when you do get that call you can pull it off.

Dan Shea:
You don’t get hired as much because if you have a scene of ten ND [nondescript] people, you can’t have ten geezers and ten biddies. Back in the old days we’d have all ten of us would show up. But all ten of us can’t show up anymore because ten of us look like old geezers. They may only have two geezers in the scene. Like me and some other geezer. The chances of you getting work lessen somewhat. Unless it’s driving and they can’t see you. That’s something that happens with age, is that you don’t work as much. Not because they hate geezers, it’s just you can’t have, what is this, a movie about an old age home? You can’t have ten old people in the shot. What would the point of that be.

David Read:
Right, that makes sense. We have fans who have submitted questions to you from the live audience here. I’d like to invite them, ask them to you now. Ian wanted to know, when there is a stunt that is face-planting on a hard surface, concrete or a road, on camera from a height, how do you execute that? It seems so simple but so painful.

Dan Shea:
I had to do that for Scott Nicholson. I call him Tower Jaffa. He was one of the Jaffas on Stargate. I’d like to do my Tower Jaffa thing later. But in that, I forget the name of the show, there’s a prison riot and I had to come out of, this one guy grabbed me and threw me and I had to go over this railing and drop on to some pads. But the last little bit was hitting the deck. They wanted to actually see that but I was only on my knees but they wanted to see the head hit the thing. So usually if they have tons of time they would have made the surface softer so that you can literally hit, and they play with film speed so they can see your skin going like that. But this was true hard concrete so it’s like holy crap. Either you use a ton of skill of trying to make the impact, just making the impact an eighth of an inch before you hit it, and then hit it. Or you sometimes you can cheat and land and use your arm or something. That’s what a lot of us do, instead of your face actually planting. It looks like you’re face planting but you’re cheating, using your arm to do it. That’s how a lot of times we’ll cheat that. Unless we can have a cheated surface that’s made of high dense which looks like concrete but isn’t. And then you can literally slam your face against it.

David Read:
What’s the…

Dan Shea:
Oh sorry, one other way is, John Badham is the director, and his thing was, if you had a car driving and another car, and you went rrrrwwww right in to the license plate, you couldn’t do that because it was too dangerous. You’d actually slam into us. So what he would do, he would start on the license plate and then whoosh, back up, and then reverse the film. So that’s another thing that we do. You could be here like this and pretend your little bounce thing, and then go like that. And they’ll reverse the film and it looks like you’re actually slammed on to it.

David Read:
That makes sense. Have you, what’s the most serious, I haven’t imagined you’ve been on the set during a death. What’s the most serious accident that you’ve witnessed?

Dan Shea:
Actually there was, on Deadpool. But anyways, let’s not talk about that.

David Read:
OK.

Dan Shea:
Yeah, that’s the thing. Stunts can go wrong. You can do a hundred, or two hundred, or a thousand of them, and people get all relaxed, thinking, you know. In fact, they sometimes think did that guy get money for that? It seems so easy. But if something goes wrong, it’s not so easy. As I remember, the first time I was Rick’s stunt double, after MacGyver, it was MOW movie of the week in Toronto. And the gag was, he had grabbed this thing of cash and something wraps around his ankles and pulls him in to these rollers in a factory. They had a release on me earlier, in the wide shot. It would pulling me towards the thing. If I wanted to get away from the rollers I could pull my leg out at any time. But for the close up, they were seeing the wire so they just said,”can you just sort of come and put your foot to the rollers and we’ll stop it”. That was my first stunt action and I stupidly said “yeah, OK, sure”. What happen was, they pulled me to the rollers and all of a sudden my foot got caught in the rollers, and instead of stopping, the button guy freaked out so either he didn’t press stop, he didn’t press stop fast enough, or he pressed something else and it sucked me in to it just a little bit. So my foot actually got pulled in to these rollers for maybe two or three or four inches. I was just screaming and it was awful. Then it spit me out and then they took me to the hospital. I remember the director was really upset that I had gotten hurt. Michel Uno was the director’s name. And then they were doing a thing for Ricky Shroder. Klondike. What was that Klondike thing that has been repeated a bunch of times.

David Read:
“What would you do for a Klondike bar?”

Dan Shea:
Huh?

David Read:
“What would you do for a Klondike bar?”

Dan Shea:
No, it was a movie about the Klondike.

David Read:
Oh, about the Klondike. OK.

Dan Shea:
Yeah, and Ricky Shroder was the star of this particular one. I remember my foot had totally healed, that was eight months earlier. Michael Uno, the same director, was directing this Klondike, something about the Klondike. Goldrush, I think it was called.

David Read:
OK.

Dan Shea:
It’s the same book, and they’ve done a million movies about it. Different actors have starred in it. I remember walking into the audition and I brought my old crutches and I was hobbling on my foot pretending like my foot was still mangled from eight months ago. He said, but he knew it was a joke, he said “get out of here asshole, you’ve got the part”.

David Read:
This last one here, that was for you.

Dan Shea:
Exactly.

David Read:
My gosh. Jeez. You were talking, you mentioned about a Tower Jaffa. Is there a story there?

Dan Shea:
So he…

David Read:
It was a high fall.

Dan Shea:
Well no, there was a tower, and I remember Jonathan Glassner coming in to the stunt office and saying “we’ve hid this guy up in the tower. Should he be a stunt guy?” Yeah, of course. Right away I said “yeah.” I wasn’t really sure what it was but yeah, make him a stunt guy.

David Read:
Is that the weapons turrets? The guy that’s…

Dan Shea:
It was high up, and you may remember this, as I start rambling on about this.

David Read:
I’m trying to think.

Dan Shea:
We got there and Tower Jaffa put on all the stuff. Scott, he’s a handsome guy. It was freezing rain, he didn’t want to go outside. He said “would you mind me just leaving some of the stuff off until they need me, then I’ll come out.” And they said “OK fine.” Well it turns out, unfortunately it was a twenty minute drive to set and we were using Jason Calder, who was Michael Shanks’ stunt double.

David Read:
OK.

Dan Shea:
Wound up putting up on all the Jaffa stuff. He was standing in, he put the stuff in, a couple of shots, he just went up the tower. He just stood there, just in the background, because it was pounding rain and they were losing the light and they wanted to get the shot right away. They didn’t have time to bring in the real guy, and he was a stunt actor, and was a contract [inaudible], four days, sat in his room for four days. Jason [inaudible] Calder, who was a stand-in, was standing in for him in the background, freezing his ass off, wearing his Jaffa suit, for four days straight, making peanuts. So finally it came time for his big moment to get shot at, because there was supposed to be a bunch of squibs. He’s shooting his gun and squibs are going off. That was the reason it was a stunt. Turns out they changed it from squibs to detcord. It wasn’t actually a squib. They were actually going to just blow it up, just destroy it. We couldn’t even have any humans up there at all. They put a dummy up there. We all pulled the cameras back and just [explosion sound] blew the hell out of this thing. Tower Jaffa, he showed up on the first day for the blocking, looking great in his chain mail, and he held up a gun and he looked great. Someone from the sci-fi, I forget which sci-fi magazine, had taken a picture of him. He never actually showed up on camera on set. He got paid for four days work as a stunt actor. And then he wound up being the centrefold of season two, or whatever, of this…

David Read:
It sounds like season three. It sounds like Into The Fire.

Dan Shea:
Was that…

David Read:
With the turrets at the beginning. The turrets they come out of the ground and they were shooting at people. That’s at least what it sounded like.

Dan Shea:
This particular one was just one tower out in a gravel field, shooting.

David Read:
Yeah, they were running from it.

Dan Shea:
Yeah, yeah yeah! And I think it was season one. But anyways.

David Read:
OK.

Dan Shea:
The point is, he got this incredibly handsome shot of him in the sci-fi magazine.

David Read:
And it was never used.

Dan Shea:
And he was never, ever used. So I called him Tower Jaffa ever since, as a joke.

David Read:
I wonder if fandom can find it for us. I’ll sic them on it.

Dan Shea:
It might not have actually been a centrefold but it was a big nice color picture of him.

David Read:
OK.

Dan Shea:
Holding on to this weapon.

David Read:
Oh my god. Jeez, man. The wrench prop, it disappeared after awhile. It wasn’t used through the end of SG-1. You and Martin Wood. Did someone confiscate it? Did it disappear? Did you grab it, Dan? What was the story of the wrench.

Dan Shea:
It’s down in my basement. I can probably run down. I don’t know if I can find it quick enough to bring it back up. I have it in my basement. The reason why we weren’t allowed to use it as much is because I was upstaging the actors. Martin kept me having this stupid wrench in all the backgrounds of the shots. There’s one sequence where we were in the, I was in the bed from being injured, and Teryl Rothery, old Doc Fraiser, she was coming in to check me. Someone said, for a joke, “why don’t you have the wrench under the covers?” You know, ha ha.

David Read:
It’s probably Heroes, after you got your hit.

Dan Shea:
Whatever it was.

David Read:
You’re shirtless.

Dan Shea:
Yeah, yeah yeah! But under the covers was this hard steel, and Teryl touched it and went [gasp] like this, and “what the hell is that?” So big boy Richard Dean got pissed off, because I don’t think Teryl thought it was funny. But he didn’t think that that was very, we couldn’t do it now. Now it’s totally inappropriate. But twenty years ago it was less inappropriate.

David Read:
Exactly. I would love to see it. I can do a promo if you run and grab it.

Dan Shea:
Now, you mean?

David Read:
Is that OK?

Dan Shea:
I mean, I don’t know…

David Read:
You may not find it, I understand.

Dan Shea:
You can literally give me two minutes to run?

David Read:
I’ll give you two minutes. I was going to do a promo anyway.

Dan Shea:
For the Zoom, aren’t the people also on Zoom? Are we not going to see them and talk to them?

David Read:
No, they’re watching on YouTube live.

Dan Shea:
Oh, gotcha. OK, I’m going to run down and see…

David Read:
I’m just going to go ahead and do a promo.

Dan Shea:
See if I can find the wrench.

David Read:
Take your time. ‘Cause I want to see the wrench! All right. One of these communication stones is a screen-used prop. And one is a screen-accurate replica. For the month of January, Dial The Gate is giving away the replica. The replica is on the right, by the way. To enter to win, you need to use a desktop or laptop computer and visit DialTheGate.com. Scroll down to submit trivia questions. Your trivia may be used in a future episode of Dial The Gate, either for our monthly trivia night, or for a special guest to ask me in a round of trivia. There are three slots of trivia, one easy, one medium, and one hard. Only one needs other be filled in but you’re more than welcome to submit up to three. Please note the submission form does not currently work on mobile devices. Your trivia must be received before February the first, twenty twenty-one. If you’re the lucky winner, I will be notifying you via your email right after the start of the new year to get your address to mail you the prop. Congratulations to Batmol for winning the 3D printed
Stargate and Ancient keychain giveaway from the January contest on 3Dtech.pro. Dan is still missing so I am going to ask that if you are a Star[gate], obviously you’re here, you’re a Stargate fan. But if you know someone else who likes Stargate as well, I would appreciate it if you invite them to watch our show, Dial The Gate, by clicking the share button. Please consider sharing this with a Stargate friend. If you want to get notified about future episodes, click the subscribe icon. If you enjoy the content that we’re bringing you today, please consider giving us a like as well. It really means a great deal. I like Dan’s kitchen. Apologies earlier about Corin Nemec. We’re going to be rescheduling him for hopefully next week but I’m still waiting on communication from him. Did we manage to find it?

Dan Shea:
Nah, sorry.

David Read:
No, it’s OK.

Dan Shea:
There’s too much crap down there.

David Read:
No, it was worth it. It was still worth it. Let’s see here. Cpeltier2010. What was it, what is it like for you to know that your work is appreciated. He says the knows that stunt coordinators don’t get enough publicity and often not enough credit.

Dan Shea:
I have no idea what that feels like because no one ever has appreciated anything I’ve ever done. I’m the wrong person to ask.

David Read:
You are appreciated, Dan.

Dan Shea:
Well, thank you. That’s the first time. It feels good!

David Read:
There you go.

Dan Shea:
It’s a good feeling. It’s a warm feeling. Thank you for the warmth.

David Read:
Kyle…

Dan Shea:
We know our worth. People, actors, the one group of humans that actors actually like are stunt folks. Sometimes they can be not as nice to other folks, not always, but sometimes. They always seem to like stunt folks. And production likes, well they don’t like paying stunt folks so much, but they like the fact that when we do the stunts we do it safely, and no one gets hurt. No one gets sued. They like that. Generally speaking, people like stunts, so we actually are sort of appreciated. You’re not the star of the show but I don’t totally agree with your premise. I think we feel like we’re appreciated, anyways.

David Read:
Good. Absolutely. Kyle Guebert: what was the time you thought a stunt was going to go pear-shaped, but actually worked out just fine? Pear-shaped is English speech for wrong.

Dan Shea:
Pretty much every episode. When I thought was going to go wrong but it didn’t? Something I was really concerned about?

David Read:
Yeah, you were concerned about and then you know what? We pulled that off.

Dan Shea:
That was pretty much every time.

David Read:
There’s always a chance that something can go wrong.

Dan Shea:
For sure. I just had a flashback to Bates Motel when something did go wrong. Actually, you feel that all the time. You build up to it. You’ve got to be calm on the outside because you can’t have the coordinator going [scared gasps]. It doesn’t look good. But sometimes you’re feeling that a little bit on the inside. Fire stuff, you sort of feel that. You don’t really like fire stuff so much. But not a specific one. It’s a sort of a, kind of a, thing that sort of, kind of almost happens ish.

David Read:
Do you have a favorite, Jim Kite: do you have a favourite one liner from Siler?

Dan Shea:
I think the one we did, “why does this always happen to me?”

David Read:
Nice! Absolutely.

Dan Shea:
Actually my favorite line from all of Stargate is “our scopes have spotted Goa’uld warships dropping in from hyperspace. They will be attacking through the gate and through the air, within the hour. Garshaw has ordered that we destroy the rest of the tunnels and transport the rest of the Tok’ra through the Chappa’ai”. That was a line, I’ve done that at conventions a lot of times. That was a line that one of the stand-in guys got as an upgrade. He had the hardest time spitting that line out. It was, he never quite got it. I remember he was reading it and he didn’t know how to pronounce Chappa’ai, and the sweat was pouring off of him.

David Read:
Awww!

Dan Shea:
They were doing all the principal cast first and he was just white-knuckling his sides. The sides of the script that you’re reading. “The scopes have spotted Goa’uld warships.” And then we kind of thought, this is kind of funny, or peculiar. Now the camera has turned around on him. He’s already had ten or twenty takes to do it off camera and he’s still reading it. We’re thinking “this doesn’t look good.” They had to pry the sides out of his hands. Now it’s his coverage, so he came around the corner. “Our scopes have, oh sorry, let me go again.” He came around again. “Our scropes, scopes have spotted Gould, Goa’uld…Let me go again.” Twenty takes later, he still didn’t have it. On the twenty-fifth take, he comes around the corner and he hits his staff weapon on the roof and hits himself in the head and he falls over. And we said “cut” and that was the end of it. He never did get the line. They wound up looping him and cutting around him, so he never even, no one ever knew he existed. But we wound up getting t-shirts made. The t-shirts were a crew gift for him. It was “our scopes have spotted Goa’uld warships dropping in from hyperspace, dot dot dot, Chappa’ai”. And then we had two little tombstones at the bottom saying “rest in peace. Your acting career.”

David Read:
Oh no!

Dan Shea:
So for the rest of Stargate, whenever any actor started to go off on their lines, one of the ADs would go on the radio and go “scopes”. And everybody would rush in because that was his line: “our scopes have spotted Goa’uld Goa’uld Goa’uld warships.” Because they wanted to see if this actor guy would get destroyed in front of everybody. That’s the kind of fun people we were on Stargate.

David Read:
Christopher said if you didn’t have a thick skin you wouldn’t last long on that show.

Dan Shea:
Judge?

David Read:
Yeah. Everyone had to be willing to have a good time because it’s long days, man. And some of those lines sucked. So that’s one from Tok’ra part two. Man, you gotta do what you can with what you’ve got.

Dan Shea:
Yeah.

David Read:
Elizabeth Lee: rather than a question, I want to say thank you for all your effort through the years. I hope you’re staying safe and healthy.

Dan Shea:
Thank you for very much! Appreciate that. Back at ya!

David Read:
Chronoss chiron, asked and answered, about how he got the part of Siler. Hyper Skyper: would you consider your SG-1 position as stunt coordinator, stunt double, and Siler as a trifecta of disaster?

Dan Shea:
I wouldn’t consider that but a lot of other people would.

David Read:
He’s continually getting beat up, for sure. I guess I don’t really understand the nature of the question. Kevin Leach: the most dangerous stunt that had that you actually regretted later on. Like you know what, I probably should have dialled this down or had this done a different way.

Dan Shea:
You know what, it’s the smaller ones that get you. I remember Carl…

David Read:
Really?

Dan Shea:
Carl Weathers on Street Justice, he said he almost broke his ankle jumping off an apple box. He did all the Rocky movies and never got hurt. It’s always the weird little nothing ones where you can get hurt. The big ones you’re totally focused. I mean, you’re focused on every one but it’s the little ones that can get you. I’m just kind go thinking, even that thing where I got my foot caught in the rollers, that was so stupid. To have taken away the safety, taken off the safety strap was idiotic. It’s the little ones that can get you.

David Read:
HonestypaysdividenDan Shea: do you ever still hang out with Rick?

Dan Shea:
Well I don’t, not physically. But we’re on this texting thing, texting thread, mostly for hockey. There’s Rick, there’s Michael Greenburg G-Money, and his brother Ross Greenburg. We’re always, now Michael is in Toronto now. He’s actually, he used to be the executive producer of Stargate. He’s working now for the NHL doing remotes of the hockey players. He’s working for, shooting the Toronto Maple Leafs. He’s in quarantine right now in Toronto for another week. What we do is, we will text back and forth generally about sports stuff and particularly about hockey stuff. There was one night, it was actually the playoffs last year, St. Louis were playing. I sent a text to them, I said “don’t tell me the score of the game because I’m watching Rachel.” Of course Rachel is one name for Rachel Maddow. We’ve given her one-name status. And then Rick texted back saying “I’m watching Rachel too.” And then Greenburg, both Greenburgs texted back and said “yeah, we’re all watching”. All four us who were hockey freaks were watching Rachel Maddow instead of watching the hockey game. Every single one of us. We had PVRed [inaudible]. I said I PVRed the game, I didn’t because I’m so non-technical I had no idea how to PVR a game. But I didn’t. They all said they PVRed it so I went along and said “yeah I PVRed it too”. But I had no idea how to do that. All of us were watching Rachel Maddow doing a rant on somebody. She’s so great. So basically now with Rick and I, it’s texting about hockey or Rachel Maddow.

David Read:
DR Essex: How does the Vancouver area of Buntzen, Sasamat, and other lakes benefit aquatic stunts?

Dan Shea:
They’re freezing cold, so that’s [inaudible]. I remember, oh gosh, having done a lot of dead bodies in freezing cold water gags, oh my god they’re just awful. Even you can wear a wet suit but you’ve got to put your face in the water and be still. Jumping off a cliff in to the water is bad enough, but at least when you hit and it just hits you, but you can flail around and get out of there. It’s the dead body ones that are just the worst. I’ve been in those lakes. I remember I was supposed to be on, it was another sci-fi show about witches. There were three witches. Three young, three girls who are witches. I had to be, I was a stunt double at the end of a pier. They were walking down the pier and had to look in the water at the dead body. I was the dead body. I remember I could keep my head up, watching them walking down the pier. As soon as they got close, the camera was going to switch over to me, then I had to put my head down. I remember they kept screwing up their lines over and over again, I had to stay longer and longer and longer in the water. Then I had to actually go under the water and I had, they had killed the guy. I had these big ropes. I had a rope around both my wrists, and ropes around both my ankles, that were hanging down in the water. When the witches did something, the water got all stirred up. It got stirred up by the effects guy having stuff under the water to churn it up. I was afraid one of my ropes were going to get caught in one of these things and I was going to get trapped under the water. Not only was I freezing but I had to peek to make sure they were coming. Then at a cue I had to go under water and then float up, and have my hands so they could see the ropes. That was how the guy had gotten killed. I remember I did that for six hours straight.

Dan Shea:
Man!

David Read:
Over lunch I didn’t eat, I just went to a hot shower. I just sat in the shower. Then it came time for the actor’s coverage. All he had to do, they gave him a huge wet suit. He was so bulky, he could barely, he was like a cork. He could barely get under the surface of the water. He put his face in and went “whaaa, I can’t do it!” So then I had to go back in again.

David Read:
Oh god!

Dan Shea:
They used the actors legs to block his face from the pier looking down. I was back in there for another five hours. That was one of those lakes. It was just one of my worst memories of all time.

David Read:
I hope you got overtime for that.

Dan Shea:
I got pretty good dough. The coordinator Mr. Rupp, Jacob Rupp, he wound up giving me a lot of money. I didn’t think he would care, or know, or give a crap. But he gave me, that was the most dough I think I ever got. Producers don’t realize, cold water. I remember on the show called Psyche, we had to have a girl, a red-headed girl doing a similar gag about going down in to the water and floating up. The producer didn’t want to pay stunt pay for that gag, and I couldn’t get a stunt person to do it. I got my younger daughter Joey, who is actually in Cairo, Egypt right now. She was a really, both my daughters were lifeguards, really good swimmers. She did the gag and she had to go down ten feet because the DP [director of photography] had lit the water so bright that we could see her when she was only five feet under. She had to go down ten feet. The diver was pulling her down. She was freezing cold. Then they had to let her up and James Roday [Rodriguez] and Dulé Hill, they were the two actors. I’m not sure if you know Dulé Hill from [The] West Wing and James Roday from Psyche. He’s now on A Million Little Things. They would stand there and see her come up. They thought I was such a bully, such a sadistic father to have put my own daughter in the freezing cold water but I couldn’t tell them that the producer was too cheap to pay [inaudible]

David Read:
And she could do it!

Dan Shea:
She did it for extra work. It was the worst gag you, like it was one of the worst thing I did for stunt pay and the most stunt pay I ever got. And I got my own daughter to so it for peanuts because the producer wouldn’t, or I didn’t have the balls to say to the producer “hey, we’re going to do this either way. Screw you.” So my own daughter did it. But I gave her a bunch of stunt days on Psyche. Easy ones.

David Read:
Ah, OK. There you go.

Dan Shea:
They both got residual cheques from Psyche just before Christmas.

David Read:
That’s fantastic!

Dan Shea:
And from Stargate. From ten, fifteen years ago.

David Read:
Wow.

Dan Shea:
It all worked out.

David Read:
The gift that keeps on giving.

Dan Shea:
Yes, exactly.

David Read:
Thgr8mello. I’ve got two questions left. Thgr8mello: how may times did the scene with Teal’c getting his face slammed on the door in Window of Opportunity, how may times did that have to be shot? How did you pull that off so that Chris just wouldn’t absolutely get clocked?

Dan Shea:
Well we…

David Read:
Because it looked real.

Dan Shea:
We use camera angles. If it’s the same thing I remember. The camera would be here, Chris’ face is here, and the door would not actually. As long as the fist or door or whatever breaks the plane of the camera, then you don’t know the depth. He could still be that far away from the door and not actually be hit. And then what he does is he snaps it with his head, he does a head snap.

David Read:
It looks like he actually gets clocked.

Dan Shea:
I hope not, because that would have been dumb of me to let our lead actors actually get hit in the face. I can’t specifically, I’m trying to think of that one. It would have been a door coming between the camera and his face.

David Read:
Right in to his face, every time the time loop resets.

Dan Shea:
Yeah. We’ve had things were we have hit people. But its all high-dense foamy. So then you can actually hit them. I don’t have a memory of making a foam door to actually hit him. If we had to actually see the impact, that’s what we would have done.

David Read:
Understood.

Dan Shea:
I don’t have a memory of that. I think we just used camera angles to sell it.

David Read:
And finally, Raj Luthra: when the fourth Stargate series hopefully gets greenlit, if they ask you to return, will you?

Dan Shea:
Yeah, of course! Why not?

David Read:
Absolutely.

Dan Shea:
I would love to do it. I did the first one, and Bam Bam [James Bamford], he’s directing now, he did the next one.

David Read:
He is. He was the fight coordinator. Was he stunt coordinator as well? He was the fight coordinator on SG-1 for the last couple of years.

Dan Shea:
Yes, but he became the stunt coordinator for sure for Atlantis. I’m pretty sure he hung around for Universe as well.

David Read:
Yes. Well, terrific. Dan, this has been such a pleasure.

Dan Shea:
For me also. I appreciate it.

David Read:
I don’t know if your daughter is still on.

Dan Shea:
How would we know?

David Read:
I can probably check. And, no, she’s gone.

Dan Shea:
She buggered off. I’ll have to WhatsApp her and see what happened.

David Read:
My friend, this has been such a treat. You have always been one of my favourites to talk to and you’ve always been so engaging, and terrific with the fans, and responsive to them online, on social media as well.

Dan Shea:
You said the same thing to Corin last week. Exact same words.

David Read:
Really?

Dan Shea:
Yeah, the exact same words. I want new words, my own specific nice words.

David Read:
I didn’t talk to Corin.

Dan Shea:
I’m kidding! I kid because I love you, you know that.

David Read:
And we do appreciate you. I seriously doubt that the Stargate saga is over. Once we get out of these couple, three years of weirdness I think, or sooner, we may be in full production again. I really have high hopes that Brad is going to make it happen.

Dan Shea:
[inaudbible]. It would be nice to get back.

David Read:
Absolutely. It needs to continue. This show is ever green and it needs more adventures.

Dan Shea:
Exactly. I hope to see you at the next convention if they do another one. I’m sure they will.

David Read:
Absolutely. It’s just a matter of time. My friend, thank you so much, and you take care of yourself, OK?

Dan Shea:
You too. Thanks a lot. See you later.

David Read:
Thanks so much, Dan.

Dan Shea:
Thank you to the fans too. Thanks guys.

David Read:
Thank you.

Dan Shea:
Bye bye.

David Read:
Dan Shea, everyone. Stunt coordinator for Stargate SG-1, and Sergeant Siler. I’ve already shared information with you about the communication stone giveaway, and that’s going on now through the month of January, as well as the call to action to please like, share, and subscribe if you’re enjoying the program. Next week at 11am Pacific time, on the seventeenth, next Sunday the seventeenth of January, Gary Jones will be interviewing more Stargate fans. Two hours later at 1pm Pacific time, on January the seventeenth, Stargate trivia round three. We’re doing it a little bit differently this time, and fan involvement will be the case. If you show up for that you are definitely going to be able to participate. And then at 3pm on the seventeenth, we’re going to start quarterly Stargate news updates. We’re going to talk a little bit about what’s going on with Brad’s SG-4. No breaking news per se, but we want to bring everyone up to speed on what is known. I also want to talk about merchandise with Blu-rays, and the move to Netflix, and everything that is going on there. There have been some interesting ripples. Netflix has labeled SG-1 as TV-MA [mature audience] and that has got to be fixed. I appreciate everyone for tuning in. I do have one more thing: I have fan art. I almost forgot. And that’s the wrong one. Here’s the right one. This is, it’s just called SG-1 Thank You, by JoannaJohnen. Sly Siler and Walter Davis Harriman. Bonus Stargate SG-1 chiblees, I guess that’s the cheebies. That’s the design of these characters. Created for someone by the name of Mary Sapp. I love this art. So cool. You can just tell. The Gary Jones one, that’s clearly Gary. The Siler one is pretty good too. JoannaJohnen, that’s it. If you have any original artwork of your own that you’d like to submit, or images of something Stargate that you’ve created, please feel free to email me to [email protected] and we’ll get them on the air as well. That’s all I have for you this week. I appreciate you tuning in. We’re going to see you next Sunday for three more episodes of Dial The Gate. We’ll be scheduling Corin as soon, rescheduling him as soon as I can, and once I connect with him and we get those announcements and I’ll be posting that information on the YouTube channel as well and the social media channels as well. I appreciate your patience. My name is David Read and you’ve been watching Dial The Gate. We’ll see you on the other side.