It’s a sunny day in Brisbane, Australia where
Peter Wingfield is currently making a rare convention appearance at Highlander
Downunder 5. He comes into the room with a cup of coffee clutched in one hand,
a bit bleary eyed after the X-Men 2 Brisbane premiere and
subsequent cocktail party the night before, but before we start he holds up a
hand to quiet me and leans over to yell into the microphone of my tape
recorder, “Excuse me, I just want to say Welcome Back, Daniel!” I
have to laugh; Wingfield has been teasing me about my “Welcome Back, Daniel” Stargate
badge.
Born in Cardiff, Wales, Peter trained as a
doctor at Brasenose College, Oxford and St. Bartholomew's Hospital Medical
College. His drama training was at the National Youth Theatre in Wales and at
the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Wingfield has had a long,
successful and varied career, in England as well as Canada and the United
States, stretching back to 1990, when Wingfield made his television debut in
Beeban Kidron's Screen Two production of Antonia and Jane (1991)
before going on to play lead roles in several British television drama series:
"Alex" in Granada TV's Medics; "Lt. Nick
Pasco" in Soldier, Soldier for Central TV; “Tom Kirby” in Noah’s
Ark, and many others. His voice is instantly recognizable to British
fans of the long running radio show, The Archers, as the evil
Simon Pemberton. After moving to Canada several years ago, Wingfield did a
season on the Canadian show, Cold Squad, and then moved on to
guest star in a string of American produced shows such as Strange World,
Cold Feet, and a season as a recurring character on Queen
of Swords. He also starred in The Miracle of the Cards, a
TV movie which earned him nominations as Best Actor from Christian Excellence
in TV and the Canadian Gemini awards. He is perhaps best known and beloved
among science fiction fans for his portrayal of Methos, the world’s oldest
Immortal, on the long-running Highlander TV series and the
follow-up movie, Highlander: Endgame.
Wingfield smiles and agrees with me that his
convention appearances and interviews do tend to focus on his days portraying
Methos. Well, we’re going to talk about Tanith, I say, the sexy, suave,
mysterious Goa’uld who first appeared in the 4th season Stargate
episode, “Crossroads” and quickly intrigued Stargate audiences.
There was an immediate chemistry between Wingfield’s character of Tanith and
Chris Judge, who plays Teal’c, and Wingfield appeared in two subsequent
episodes: “Exodus,” the 4th season finale, where Tanith shoots
Teal’c in the back and takes him prisoner, and “Between Two Fires,” where
Tanith is part of a plot to destroy Earth and does manage to destroy Tollana.
Wingfield has nothing but good things to impart about
his time working on Stargate. “Yeah. I had a really good time on
it. I enjoyed it a lot. Peter DeLuise directed the first one (“Crossroads”)
that I appeared in. My wife actually worked with him years ago when he did 21
Jump Street, so she knows him really well. He’s a great guy. He was a
lot of fun. But he does have this obsession with the pronunciation of
‘Goa’uld.’ ” Wingfield draws out the word and really emphasizes it to
demonstrate Peter DeLuise’s “obsession.” “During the audition he kept trying to
help me with the pronunciation and he’s the same on set, all the time – he’s
just constantly correcting people’s pronunciation. And in the end it all gets
kinds of bwahawa (Wingfield tries to imitate the flanging of the Goa’uld
voices) stuck on it afterwards in the edit suite and it sounds weird anyway.
So, however you pronounce anything, it all gets a bit mashed up. But he’s a
very funny guy. I enjoyed working with him.”
I comment that Peter DeLuise is a very big favorite with the fans and very
beloved as a director. Wingfield nods in quick agreement. “He loves the show. I
mean, you can see that in the work that he does.”
A lot of people really enjoyed “Crossroads”
and the intensity between Tanith and Teal’c, I tell Wingfield and he smiles
broadly. “Yeah. I think Chris (Judge) got a kick out of that, too. He and I
really had fun playing those scenes. That intensity and the stillness between
the two of them and trying to show nothing on the surface and yet still have
that sense that they both have this history, that there was a lot going on
underneath but neither of them wanted to reveal it, because that would kind of
take away their power.”
I wonder if Wingfield and Judge spent a lot
of time rehearsing that final scene, but Wingfield insists, “No, not a great
deal at all. We talked about it a little and then we just played it. And we
just had a very natural kind of empathy between the two of us. Some people you
just spark with.” I point out that Peter DeLuise, in his director’s commentary
on “Crossroads,” talks about the end of the episode, that the moment between
Tanith and Teal’c actually wasn’t supposed to be the last scene, and they
changed it because it was so intense. “Is that right?” Wingfield says. “I don’t
remember. There was no question. You could feel that when we did – just when we
rehearsed the scene before they brought in the crew – you could just feel that
there was going to be something exciting in the air. It just felt like, yeah,
this is going to be cool.”
A lot of fans were disappointed with the way
the wonderful build-up between Tanith and Teal’c played out in the end, with
Tanith summarily killed off in a brief scene at the beginning of “48 Hours.”
Wingfield didn’t even appear in the episode; his face – appearing through the
use of computer graphics -- was seen through the window of a ship as Teal’c
fired a weapon at him. Wingfield sits forward with a thoughtful expression.
“Yeah, you felt like there was a lot of possibility in that story. I know there
was this idea that Tanith was a servant for some even worse bad guy. But I
always had the feeling that what they would do with the story is that you would
find ultimately that he was the person that he was pretending to
work for, that he was the bad guy himself. And I thought there was a great
possibility for that as a storyline, that there was always this other person
that you thought you were going to discover and that ultimately you suddenly
found that, no, it was him who was pulling all the strings. That would have
been fun, I think, to have played with that idea and to kind of have the
storyline continuing over a long period. He wasn’t often around, but there was
that sense that he was still out there somewhere and that every now and again
he would appear and – when I came back to do the third episode (“Between Two
Fires”), nobody was expecting him and just suddenly there he was and I thought
that was kind of a cool thing to have, this guy that was out there, this
malevolent force.”
I prompt Wingfield to tell us a little bit
about the Stargate actors, hoping, like many fans, to get some
good gossip. “I had a lot of fun with them; they’re terrific guys,” he says.
“Amanda Tapping actually lives quite close to me so I see her around the place.
I saw her at the garden center picking out flowers. Great girl. And Chris, I
saw him at the local mall one time driving his open top sports car, just
leaning one arm out across the seat, kind of taking in the rays. I’m not good
on American cars, but it looked like a classic 60’s sort of open top roadster.
Pretty cool car.” Wingfield looks suitably impressed.
Currently, Wingfield can be seen on the big
screen in X2: X-Men United, as Lyman, the leader of Stryker’s hit
squad, and in a string of American series produced in Vancouver such as Just
Cause, The Dead Zone and John Doe. “Dead
Zone…that was a giggle,” Wingfield says. “David Ogden Stiers, who I did
some stuff with on that… terrific guy. Very entertaining. Very loquacious and
erudite; very interesting man. That was a lot of fun. The final montage scenes
in that when the plane is going down and me and Johnny are sitting there trying
to hold onto the plane … that was about fifteen or sixteen different scenes all
stuck together as one piece and both of us have our lines kind of pasted up on
the dashboard when they’re shooting the other direction. And we’re both saying
‘you can’t see that we’ve got our pages here, can you?’ and they’re telling us
‘no no no, it looks great’ and actually when I watched the final edits of it,
it does look like we’re looking down at the flashing lights and things.”
Wingfield has also just finished filming a new
show for USA Network, a TV movie that will be used as a kind of back door pilot
for a series called Touching Evil – a remake of a British show
that originally starred Robson Green. Wingfield is very enthused about his role
and explains, “It’s a cop show. I play one of the team, one of the regulars.
They will take a look at it when they finish the edit and make a decision on
whether to make a series, in which case they would shoot 13 episodes the first
year, probably starting sometime around September. And whether they make the
series or not, the plan is to have the one that we’ve done as a TV movie to air
in, I think, January. It’s directed by Alan Hughes, who did Menace II
Society and Dead Presidents and From Hell,
and shot in Vancouver.” When asked what we might look forward to seeing from
Wingfield in the future, he says, “They have to decide if they’re going to make
a series by mid-June. Technically, until they make the call and say whether I’m
doing it or whether I’m not, I’m kind of in limbo because I’m not actually
available for work. If the phone rings, I’m under contract to them, so I’m not
available for anything else. If the phone rings and they say it’s not going to
happen, suddenly I’m looking for work again.”
Alas, the most recent word is that although
the series is probably going to happen, Wingfield’s character was not picked up
to be a regular. USA Network decided they didn’t want a British cop on the
series.
As a last little treat for the Stargate fans
and Stargate Solutions, Peter laughs, pins a “Welcome Back, Daniel” badge on
his chest and swears he’ll wear it “right next to my heart.” Of course, I
snapped some photos!
For more information about Peter Wingfield
and his career, past, present and future, check out the Peter Wingfield Fan
Club (PWFC) (http://pwfc.org/). For more photos
from Wingfield’s appearance at the Highlander Downunder convention, check out http://photos.ashtonpress.net/hldu.htm.
Thank you to Peter Wingfield for his time,
and Sonja, Carmel and the good folks at Highlander Downunder (http://www.hldu.org/), for arranging the
interview.
© Ann Wortham, All Rights Reserved
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