Dan Shea has worked as the stunt
co-ordinator and Richard Dean Anderson’s stunt double on Stargate SG-1 since the series began
and became known to fans when he also took on the role of Sergeant Siler, of
the infamous wrench! At the Wolf SG-10 convention in London in November, Dan
has been entertaining a capacity crowd with a steady stream of anecdotes and
stunt demonstrations that turned one of the younger members of the audience
into “the young Michael Shanks”!
After his appearance, Dan explains to Carole
Gordon that, while he might appear not to take things seriously on stage, doing
stunts was of course a serious business.
“Every day is serious,” he says. “When there
is fire you are responsible for no-one getting hurt, you are responsible for
the illusion of somebody potentially being unsafe, you are open to extras
claiming they were put in danger. There’s constant pressure all the time but
the effects guys are so great they make everyone’s job so much easier.”
© Jillie – All Rights Reserved
Prior to stunt work, Dan was a stand-up
comedian for ten years. He finds that going on stage now he can still flip the
switch into stand-up mode but, he says with a self-deprecating smile, he went
into stunt work because he wasn’t that funny.
“I started working on MacGyver.
I had three things going – I was teaching fitness, I was doing stand-up comedy
and then I got into standing-in on MacGyver. I first did a show
called Unsub [starring David Soul]. There was a day
where they needed a stand-in. I had done a hockey episode and Rick had
remembered me. I had to report to work the very next day at 6 in the morning
after being wrapped from Unsub
and there was a wrap party that night! Luckily three days later MacGyver
had a week off, so then I got to recuperate and I stayed with them for
three years. Then I slowly got rid of the stand-up because that’s no way to
make a living unless you have your own series or doing feature films or
something. The other thing became 14-15 hours a day and I sort of slid over
into stunts because I kind of liked what Steve Blalock, Rick’s stunt double was
doing; it seemed pretty cool.”
He won the role of Siler on Stargate SG-1 as the result of an
audition but, he explains, he nearly didn’t get the part.
“Martin Wood was doing an episode and they
were reading for this guy Siler and said I should read for him. So I went
upstairs and Tasha, the extras girl on set, and I did my lines over and over
again -- and it wasn’t happening. I don’t know why. Sometimes it feels right
and sometimes it doesn’t. So I went up to the room and there’s Brad Wright and
Martin Wood and I just went back to my old stand-by of joking around, so I made
everybody laugh. I thought, ‘This is pretty cool, if they need somebody funny
they’ll hire me.’ Unfortunately they didn’t want anyone funny, they wanted
Siler. So I went down on the set and Greenburg grabbed me. ‘Why did you do
that? You made yourself look like a fool. They wanted to cast you if you were
even half-way decent so get up and do it again.’ So I had to get the sides back
and memorize it, because the words, the techno-stuff wasn’t happening for me,
sometimes it flows, other times it doesn’t. So I went up and I did it straight.
A couple of hours later then I got hired and then it just kept going and going.
“Then Win Mickleson and Sally Rolfe opened a
website for Siler a couple of years later, before anyone had a website, before
websites were cool or anyone thought about doing it and all the producers
started looking at this thinking, ‘What’s this? They think Siler’s cool?’ So
they started writing more stuff and then they started realizing I could do
action stuff, I could fall down and get shot and whatever and then we also had
the foil with Rick, the funny stuff with Rick, and so it just kept returning.”
The infamous wrench was apparently Martin
Wood’s idea, but Dan wasn’t convinced that Siler would use an old-fashioned
tool in such a highly technically advanced environment. It was, though, a
running joke that became a favorite of the fans.
“I remember being up on top of the lift with
the wrench and everywhere we had this big wrench. That became the gag that we
would just have the wrench appearing. It’s like that thing where you find,
what’s his name, all over the world? It became ‘Find the wrench,’ so every
episode they would say we’re going to have a man with Siler and with the wrench
and Martin would go and put on his jumpsuit as Major Wood [Martin Wood’s cameo
role on SG-1] and it just kept going from there.”
Martin Wood wasn’t the only producer finding
comedy potential in Siler. In Season 7, poor Siler was almost constantly in the
infirmary, courtesy of Peter DeLuise!
“That was DeLuise’s gag where we would have
old Sly-man [Siler] in the bed beside everybody, all beat up, his nose smashed,
a black eye and broken arm. It just became another sight gag. Every year they
came up with something goofy to do.”
Dan has also been busy on other work and has
recently shot the new Pink Panther movie with Steve Martin. Dan talks
enthusiastically about some of the stunts he was asked to do.
“One gag was the French actor [Jean Reno]
walks into a room, he looks around and all of a sudden he looks up at Steve
Martin, pretending to be like a cat burglar. He dives and he goes “Boom!” onto
the ground. We’d rehearsed it with wires on a ‘descender’ where I fall down and
it looks like I’m actually falling but it breaks my fall just before I actually
hit. Well, I knew it was coming, the director said, ‘It looks like a stunt guy
on a wire, we’re trying to do something different, do you think he’, meaning
the idiot,” – Dan indicates himself! -- “‘would actually jump?’ I knew it was
coming because the coordinator, JJ Makaro, who is one of the best coordinators,
he kind of warned me this may happen.
“So on the day, he came up to me and said,
‘Well, do you actually want to jump?’ I said ‘Sure.’ It was off about a twelve
foot ladder, standing on the very top. The timing was weird too, because it
wasn’t just jumping, which was bad enough. You had to wait for the guy to come
in and you had to trust the actor to do the timing right. You never want to do
anything with an actor if you are a stunt guy because they’ll punch you in the
head, or they’ll screw something up, and you’ll have to do it again. For them
it’s just saying the line again, and for us it’s like getting killed again!
“Luckily this guy did it perfect and I just
dove, literally and had to go straight up, because you couldn’t have any part
of your body down, I did not want to go in like a dive and do that and jar my
back and my neck. So what I did was I tried to come in as flat as possible, I
just lowered my left leg a little bit and then tried to break my fall. It was
actually on a carpet, and I slammed right down! There was a bunch of stunt guys
around, who are really top-notch stunt guys and they said, ‘Where’s the wire?’
These are the real top guys who do all the features, but the hardest thing to
do is just to lower yourself smack onto the ground.”
The impressive stunt also caught the
director’s attention. He went onto the set, banged the floor and asked “Where’s
the pad?!” Another stunt was staged at the airport, in a scene where Steve
Martin is trying to get through a metal detector. Having set it off, he is
frisked and pulls out a series of weapons, including a machine gun and
grenades. But it turns out that the thing that set off the alarm was a
cheeseburger which the character has in his pocket. As the airport security try
to take the cheeseburger, a huge Rottweiler with a head “the size of a bear”
jumps onto him. At which point, Dan was called in to take over.
“I had this little dog-protector thing
beneath my arm. We had tested it on a farm a week [earlier] with a huge
protector and this guy was crushing the old ulna and the radius and I’m
thinking ‘Oh my god, this is fun,’” he jokes. “And on the day when we put that
thing on it looked like Popeye, of course, and the director said, ‘Is there any
chance of not making his arm look like Popeye?’ So they put this little one on
me. ‘Are you okay with that?’ ‘Yeah right!’ So luckily, when he jumped on me, I
sort of jammed my arm in his mouth more before he could get me and then I
pulled back so he was more pinching than crushing. The next day they used it as
a promo on one of the posters. They have Steve Martin, and they took my arm and
superimposed it with the dog, horizontally.”
Dan was thrilled to be working with Steve
Martin.
“The last day when we wrapped, he pulled out
his banjo and started doing some old shtick, it was unbelievable. He was one of
my all-time favorite guys, Steve Martin.”
On stage earlier in Dan’s inimitable “stream
of consciousness” style, he had joked about everybody on Stargate SG-1.
He only does this, he says, to people he likes.
“I kid,” he insists, “because I love.”
Despite earlier commenting that Michael
Shanks is “serious and pouty – but very talented and has pretty blue eyes”, and
going into a long dialogue about Richard Dean Anderson’s hockey-playing
difficulties, Dan obviously has a sincere affection for the SG-1
cast.
“Shanks is a good boy,” he says seriously.
“He’s a good Canadian kid, Kamloops boy, plays hockey, plays with an edge. I
remember apparently he came to the MacGyver set once when he was
a teenager with his mum on the way to UBC to get into economics or some such.
He stopped at Spanish Banks and saw this thing shooting and it turns out it was
MacGyver. He stood and watched for a little bit and then of
course two years later he had his own series -- and I was still standing in.
Not that I was angry about that,”
he says deadpan.
“They’re all good. Chris Judge is hilarious.
We go and watch fights together with Michael Greenburg and his brother Ross.
Amanda’s great. Big Boy [Richard Dean Anderson] is obviously great – we’ve
played hockey together and hung together for fifteen years. I think the people
you cut up, the more you like them, because it’s okay to do so. The people you
don’t say anything about are generally, you know . . .”. He tails off, leaving
it up to the imagination what he feels about those he doesn’t mention!
Dan has had fun at the convention and enjoys
the opportunity to travel.
“I get a nice trip out of it, get to go on
stage and perform a little bit again like I used to in the old days without the
horrific pressure you had to do as a stand-up.”
© Ann Wortham – All Rights Reserved
But he almost didn’t attend due to some
stunt work he hopes to get on a new Al Pacino movie.
“The Shankster bailed to do his CSI:
Miami, but the day before I left I got a call to work on this thing
called 88 minutes with Al Pacino in downtown Vancouver, a
big stunt thing. The coordinator has assured me that I will still be able to
get something at the end of the month, because I didn’t want to phone Brian
[Cooney] and bail because we saw on the website that two guys had already
bailed and we didn’t even know about Shankster yet. So I should have
blackmailed him, and said, ‘Yeah, Al has offered me this much, and I’d like to
come, but how about if you sweeten the pot, baby!’ But I wasn’t that smart!”
With grateful thanks to Dan Shea for his
time, and to Katherine of Wolf Events for arranging the interview.
Biography: Dan Shea was born on 23 December 1954 in Ontario,
Canada. He has worked on stunts for movies such as I Robot, Fantastic
Four and The Pink Panther (2006) as well as being Richard Dean
Anderson’s stunt double and playing Sergeant Siler on Stargate SG-1. He
previously worked as Richard Dean Anderson’s stand-in on MacGyver.
Further information from: http://www.danshea.org/
and http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0790264/
Wolf Events organize conventions and events around the UK and in other European countries. Full details of their current program of events can be found at: http://www.wolfevents.com/php/
Interview
© Carole Gordon March 2006 / Website copyright © Our Stargate, March 2006, All
Rights Reserved. Our Stargate thanks Graculus for the use of her graphic
creations and Jillie and Ann Wortham for their photos.
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