Calgary Expo MacGyver Panel Transcript
May. 1st, 2013 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magnavox_23Appologies for any whoopies, did my bestest to decipher whisper and whimsy. Check out ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eilidh17 's transcript for the Stargate panel with Richard Dean Anderson & Michael Shanks, here.
MC: “Hello Calgary Expo fans, how are you? It’s lovely to see you all here this afternoon, you know we really wanted to end the show this year on a high note, and I really can’t think of a better way to do that, than having Richard Dean Anderson here. Please welcome him to the stage!
*RDA comes out in a half jog for a few steps before bending forward hands on knees, raising himself then going forward to take the MC’s hand and bow before her*
MC: “Aww, thank you!”
*MC hands RDA the mic*
RDA: “Why don’t you guys come down a little closer?” *laughs*
MC: “Come closer, we don’t bite.”
RDA: “If you don’t, I will!”
*RDA proceeds to push his chair forward to the front of the stage, the MC follows with her chair making a ‘fart-like’ sound as she pushed it forward*
RDA & MC: “EXCUSE ME!” *They both laugh*
MC: “How are you?”
RDA: “Well I’m a little sweaty, a little hot, slightly constipated… a little… a tad… but that’s a… yeah, more intimate.”
MC: “Have you been having a good time this weekend?”
RDA *clearly not paying attention*: “I’m sorry?”
MC *slowly*: “Have you been having a good time this weekend?”
RDA: “Yeah, I have actually, It’s um, I used to come play in Calgary er, a long time ago, I, friends of mine were um, the 80, the mid 80 Calgary Flames, and um, and the guys…”
*Cue cheers from the audience. RDA pumps his fist in their direction*
RDA: “Jim Peplinski, Paul Baxter, um, Danny Quinn, Lanny (sp?) Of course, they ah, they all befriended me for some reason, we ah, they’d come to LA, we’d misbehave, and I’d come up here and we’d… misbehave… but they were always skatin’ so… but they became idols and friends.”
MC: “So, I, I’m really curious about obviously you portrayed MacGyver, I… I can’t…”
*While the MC asks her question, RDA poses for photographs for people in the front row, leaning on one elbow and flashing a smile*
MC: “…It’s such an iconic, such an iconic character, I can’t imagine anybody else ever having that role, like it has to be you, and, do you find that people often confuse you with the character – they come up to you and they’re like ‘I have a paperclip, do something with it’.”
RDA: “I get that a lot, and… my response, the older I get, the *crankier* I get, so my response is starting to be like ‘Are you cracked?’ I mean *you* do something with it – I’m too old. Or ‘Can you fix this with you know, with a candy bar?’ or something. No, what are you mad? – I’m much nicer than that actually… a little bit. But no, I don’t get confused with ah, with my characters. People are bright enough to know that, do you know what I mean?”
MC *to the audience*: “I think you guys know, right? Yeah… yeah, no? err…”
*RDA waves his hand so-so*
MC: “I don’t know if they know…”
RDA *pointing to the MC*: “Is she famous… here?”
*Audience cheers*
RDA: “She wouldn’t tell me anything about her… self.”
MC: “Because, nobody wants to hear about me, Richard, it’s about you.”
RDA: “...Except me…” *looks away, pretending to be hurt, and then plays with the microphone*
*MC laughs*
MC: “So you first read the script for MacGyver…”
*RDA is distractedly waving at people in the audience again*
MC: “… What did you, what did you think? Were you reading through this going ‘he’s doing what with what now? What, what’s going on, I don’t get it’, or were you like ‘this is sooooo ingenious!’”
RDA: “Well nobody knew when we started… I had to audition for… what year? 1985 I guess, um, it was like I’d been on um, I’d been in California for some time and I was trying to make it as ‘a actor’, and I things were er, not rough, I’d done some commercials and such, but um, one summer day I got on my motorcycle and was riding up the coast and I got a… I stopped and checked in, checked my beeper - *deadpan* no phones back then… - and um, my agent called me to get over to Paramount ‘you have an audition for Henry Winkler’, so ah, I went over there and I was just wind-blown. The ah, the original MacGyver jacket that some of you may remember – that brown thing – I was wearing that, my hair was straight back, I looked like a crazed human, and ah I did a cold reading. But I had to ask them if they would mind if I wore my glasses, ‘cause, you know… I’m blind to read anything, and they ah, as the story goes, all the producers and writers looked at each other and kinda went… *RDA nods his head* ‘He’s the guy’, ‘cause I had no apprehensions to humanise the moment, and um, it proceeded from there, and they… what was the question? I forgot…”
MC: “Your thoughts on the script when you initially read it.”
RDA: “Oh! Yeah… ah well we didn’t really find out, it took some time to find out what the franchise was going to be, and um, the… the writers and producers and such kind of started observing me like I was in a petri dish to see if I brought anything to the party, and they… they felt as though they could start tapping into things that I liked to do – like car racing and hockey and skiing, and all these… things… and they started writing scripts around my… my stuff. Ah, which made it, you know, kinda fun, first of all for me, but also it gave us someplace to go, and it, me playing the character a lot easier, so they all kind of blended the ones … I still lost track of the question…”
MC: “Did you like the script when you first read it?”
MC & audience laugh*
RDA *deadpan*: “What script? No yeah, it was, again, it took some time… that’s what I started to say, is it took some time *laughing* It took some time for us to figure out what we had as far as a franchise goes, and once we got some, you know, it um, I think it went seven and a half years, and in about our, we’d get picked up for three episodes, three, then maybe six – which is a big celebration, and then another three, sad face. And then the next season they’d picked us up and um, it was at that point when we got picked up for a second season that we knew we were, we had to kind of solidify the concept, and make a commitment to what it was going to be ultimately, and um… we rolled the dice and went with what you, what you see, what you saw, and it became very successful, um, for my part, I just… I was working, I love it! It was great. But um, no, I wasn’t er, thrown, er, taken aback or anything, it wasn’t weird to me, the, I didn’t know that it was um, at the time I didn’t know it was a unique concept. You know, this guy that doesn’t use the gun to shoot people to solve the problem was ah, the norm back then – The A Team and those guys. So um, but I didn’t know, I hadn’t watched enough television to know that ah, what we were doing was different, it was a different approach to the, and then once I cleared my head about the whole thing, I realised that we had created something that we could be proud of if we really stood our ground in front of the NRA and the shark fin people, and we start doing more and more profound subjects and, so ultimately it all just kind of evolved the way that I was evolving as well, so I … in answer to your question… *laughs* no, I wasn’t taken aback.. You gotta stop me! You gotta… somebody’s gotta stop me… I feel asleep in the middle of that…”
MC: “How did it affect you or did it affect you on a more personal level, this idea of no guns and all that kind of thing, because you did some charity work as you say involving the anti-gun type of thing, do you, did that touch you in a more personal way, or?”
RDA: “ Wooo, I think so? Um, I’m trying to remember the moment, but ah, it was within my make up at the time to already in my veins to ah, not like guns in general, as a general statement – there’s no need for them on the face of the earth, hand guns I’m talking about, because that was the lobby that we came up against – as MacGyver’s best friend as a kid got killed because of a hand gun so that was that whole thing going on in MacGyver’s head and that became a big part of his personality, but yeah, I was a big proponent of gun control back then, and we, you know, I thought we were, you know, we were committed to the idea, but we, I thought we were kind of ‘respectful’ *RDA does air quotations with his fingers* … no, I guess not… we were… we didn’t… yeah, basically I didn’t care, I was proud to be on their hit list – the NRA’s, and ah, it was an honour actually, so… WHAT!?”
*MC and audience applaud*
RDA *inaudible to MC*: “Your sock is showing.” *audible* “I’m sorry…”
*They both laugh and she fixes her sock*
RDA: “But I, er… yeah.” *laughs*
MC: “So, at what point did you realise that MacGyver as the pop culture phenomenon would have such longevity, and I’ll give you a couple of examples, you know, people say the word ‘oh, just MacGyver it’, like you know, that, that’s a thing now. Another example, I have a roommate, in her 30’s, who has said she will not get married until she finds a guy that is equitable to MacGyver in both looks and intelligence.”
*RDA’s eye go wide*
MC: “So… clearly, the role has been very influential for a number of years, at what point did it tweak with you that you know ‘this is a big thing’?”
RDA: “What was a big thing?”
MC: “You…”
RDA: “Oh!”
MC: “MacGyver, the series, the role, the concept…”
RDA: “Um, oh god… doctor… let me tell you… I don’t know what to say to that! I’ve just gone about life, basically, you know, jumping from a job to a job, and having the good fortune to be, to be able to be, to have longevity attached to my name as far as the two series I’ve done anyway… People noticed um, But um, I don’t know what to say that, I mean, I just, I was doing a job, and I’m not stupid to not know that some of the stuff that I’ve done has had an affect, and also I’d ah, during the mid-MacGyver days, I became aware of the fact that we were in a position to affect some… especially our younger audience, which is what our demographic was pretty much, and families – parents and ha, they liked MacGyver a lot as well, so that was, once that was realised and I was growing up, let’s face it, hopefully everybody does… My brain started to expand a little bit and realise that we are in a position to say, state some really, support some really great causes and say some fairly profound things, and ah, trying not to stand on a soapbox while we’re doing it, you know, the first thing we’re supposed to do is entertain, but ha, but it became more fun trying to get on the NRA’s bad list and etcetera…”
MC: “Fantastic… I think we have a few questions form the audience, yeah? Oh my, you guys are so quiet, why you so quiet?!”
RDA: “They’re just awed!”
MC: “Who wants to ask a question?”
*audience cheers, RDA is fiddling with his belt*
MC: “There ya go!”
RDA: “I gotta loosen my pants… excuse me…”
MC: “Alright, well start right here on the left.”
RDA: “I can barely breathe… ugh, sorry… excuse me…”
*RDA gets up from his chair, turning his back to the audience to loosen his belt. He makes a show of tugging at the top and sides of his pants, the audience laughs and RDA huffs out a breath in relief*
MC: “Oooh myyyy….”
*RDA goes to retake his seat*
RDA: “Truly, and you could tell right, I had a, while I was talking, I couldn’t breathe… it was me pants!”
*MC laughs*
RDA: “Thank you…”
*MC bends over in laughter*
RDA *to MC*: “Anything too tight on you?”
*The audience laughs, cheers and cat calls*
MC: “I hope my roommate’s here for this!”
RDA *innocently*: “What!?
MC *trying to play it cool*: “Nah, I’m alright, I’m breathing ok, yeah… does it look like something’s too tight on me?”
*RDA checks her over, shaking his head before pointing to her shoe, referring to the earlier showing sock*
RDA: “I mentioned your socks…”
MC: “I know, my sock is sticking out of my shoe a little bit… it’s a little bit embarrassing…”
RDA *in a grossed out voice*: “It’s disgusting! I’ll gag! …What was the question?!”
MC *pointing to a woman in the audience*: “I love New York”
Audience member: “Hi, so I’d just like to say that I really really love all of the shows that you’ve done, and ah, I really love your singing voice, I had an opportunity to…”
RDA: “WHAT!”
Audience member: “Yeah…”
MC: “Well, well, well…”
Audience member: “I just seen a couple of clips that I thought was really good, but um…”
RDA: “Where’d you hear my singing voice?”
Audience member: “Ahhh…”
RDA: “You Tube?!”
Audience member *nodding*: “You Tube, I was ah somewhere, just…”
RDA: “Doing what?”
Audience member: “Um, I think….:
RDA *loudly in a ‘stern’ voice*: “C’MON, WHAT!”
Audience member: “When ah, I think you were playing Adam?”
RDA: “Oh, god… busted…”
Audience member: “Just randomly... um, so my question is ‘what exactly drives you to be an actor, like what do you enjoy most about it?”
RDA: “Well it’s not my singing voice, that’s for sure… Uuuuummmmmm, um, well as the story goes, I got interested in acting when I went to, um, my father was a speech and English teacher in, and also developed a humanities course at a high school in Minneapolis, but he also directed the plays, and as a young boy I started to tag along for rehearsals to his school, he taught at a different school to ah, the one I would go to eventually, but I remember seeing the rehearsals of a play that they were doing and I was just fascinated, mind you I was very young, and ah… *laughs* … I’m just trying to think of how young… but ah, I was out of diapers, for sure. But, but I remember watching the rehearsals and being fascinated by, they were… I was envious, they… at once point in the script, they had ah, somebody had to come out on stage and deliver a ah, birthday cake, but for rehearsals, instead they had Hostess Twinkies, they brought out a tray of Hostess Twinkies, now… I was a young boy, and I virtually lived in Twinkies, and I swear to god, the thought was sewn in my head that as any job I could ever have I’d get free Twinkies is something I wanted to do!
*Audience applauds*
MC: “That’s… fair enough…”
RDA: “That’s well worth applause, yes… thank you…” *laughs*
MC: “And over here.”
Audience member: “Ah, first of all, I wanted to say this is very cool that you’re here in Calgary, um, and my question is: I think all of us who have grown up with MacGyver and watched MacGyver, um…”
MC: “How old are you?”
Audience member: “I’m thirty-six…”
MC: “Are you really? You look like you’re like thirteen from here!”
Audience member: “Thank you!”
MC: “Okay, go ahead.”
Audience member: “I ah, I’ve had moments over my life where I’ve thought I can do something because MacGyver could, and ah, most of the time they backfired. I’m wondering if you’ve ever had any moments like that, and if not, what have you taken from the character?”
MC: “Deep audience today…”
RDA: “Well, I’ve had back surgery, two knee surgeries, foot surg… ah, um, what did I take from the experience, well it was kind of a launching pad for a lot of things in my life, not the least of which was… I mean, I dunno if I made it clear when I was on my motorcycle and I had to ride over and do the audition, at that point in time I was ready to just ehhh acting business, it’s too much of a phony laced business and I like riding my motorcycle, and living in California, and la di da, um, but, it became apparent that it was something that I liked doing, and um, *sighs* short of going into the um, going deep into the type of therapy acting can be, um, I realised that, I mean despite what you see today, I was kinda… not shy… but, observant, reticent to get immediately involved conversation or anything like that, um, so it was good to be able to be forced to have to actually say some words to another human being. Um, that sounds like a crock, doesn’t it? It just really does, but it’s... some of that is true, and so what I’ve … you figure out what it is and get back to me, okay? … But um, well anyway, I was never fooled by the fact that I was um, it was a job, it meant something in that afterwards I was able to get another job, and it was like I was building something… and I was still too young and dumb to realise that hey, this is pretty cool, maybe I should stick with this and be serious, because during hiatus on MacGyver I would jump on a plane and fly to Amsterdam or England or wherever I started doing my travelling around the world, um, instead of you know, hustling up and getting a TV movie or something, and, or taking classes, bettering my craft. To me, I wanted to you know, go see what San Tropez was like in the summer. And it’s pretty cool! … If you have money, by the way… But um, so anyway, I, I, it was kind of a spring board, I had more confidence after that to do things, ‘cause what I, oh everything I’d learned in school – this is the point – everything I’d learned in school… not everything, but… most of the stuff that I’d… some of the stuff… Nothing I’d learned in school, did I use in getting another job… that’s not true, I did learn some things and um… well not too many things… but…”
Audience member: “Please tell that you learned some things ‘cause I’m a teacher too!” *laughs*
*Audience and MC laugh*
RDA: “Wish you’d started with that! …Well truly I ah, I did, no really… *mouths ‘it’s not true, it’s true’*
MC: “Stay in school, kids.”
RDA: “It was, it was a really great experience for me, I was young, I was ah… drinking, ah… what else? *laughs* Anyway, I survived, and here I am today – talking to a 14 year old teacher!” *shakes head at himself*
*Audience applauds*
MC: “And over here we have a question.”
Audience member: “Hi, ah, I was just wondering on the MacGyver series what was your favourite task that you accomplished, or ah, machine that you built with like… nothing… pretty much…”
RDA *sighing*: “Let me think… Well, honestly, I have very few brain cells left to be able to recall the specifics of things, but I do remember, in fact, um, ah… Mythbusters did a thing on… yeah, it was kinda cool, but they ah, they busted a myth that we tried to create by building a hang glider out of bamboo, and… which, but the way weighs a lot! It’s not a real lofty… well the materials, well they proved us wrong, but it was fun to shoot the pieces… *gestures ‘MacGyvering’ wildly* …and putting it together, that we did it in a kind of montage of things, but ah, it was kind of fun. And it flew! *Slaps his own face in ‘amazement’* … No it didn’t – it crashed! That’s all I can really remember ‘cause it was a big one, and course the first one was taking a candy bar and jamming it into a crack of ah, acid, er, a crack in a vat that was leaking acid, which, one could actually do with chocolate, the components of which would stop the flow of this particular acid we were using, however you’d need 3 tonnes of it – not a candy bar… So theoretically, spot on!”
*Audience laughs then applauds*
MC: “And over to this side.”
Audience member: “Hi Richard, I just want to start off with a comment on my personal life, like er, I always carry a Swiss army knife on me, and it just happens sometimes that I gotta repair something or you know, just for a friend or something, and a lot of times when I’m done they say ‘thanks a lot, MacGyver’ and to me, that is the highest compliment I could ever get in life.”
*Audience applauds*
RDA: “That’s niiiice…” *laughs*
Audience member: “Well almost, ah, my question for you is when you look at MacGyver in all the shows, all the different skills that he has and all the knowledge that he has, I was just wondering, like where would he have acquired that knowledge? Like, in what field of education or what kind of training prepares somebody to become MacGyver?”
RDA: “Just… innate skill, I don’t… just, didn’t study, didn’t, no, he went to…”
MC: “He was a chemist, wasn’t he? I thought, wasn’t he a chemist? Physicist, yeah, he was…”
RDA *jokingly*: “Yeah, he was a chemist… chemist.”
Audience member: “Yeah, but like he had a lot of knowledge on mechanics, you know he used too jimmy a car while it was careening out of control, and I know some chemists and they don’t know how to fix a car…”
*Audience laughs*
RDA *shrugging sarcastically*: “Maybe he wasn’t… maybe he was a phhhhhh physics major or something? No, I think what we did was use – it wasn’t general science, I know it was something pacifically (yes he meant specifically) that um… endocrinologist possibly? But um, we took his, we eluded to his basic science education, and um, coupled it with some kind of secret past… military… thing… that he did that we didn’t speak about too much, I dunno why… but ah, yes I do, but I’m not going to tell you, but um, no I really don’t know, I just said that… But um, you know there’s… I get asked a lot ‘are you a lot like MacGyver? Are you, can you do all those things?’ And it’s not so much a matter of being able to do those specific things that MacGyver did, but it’s a mode of thought – it’s how you look at things – it’s observing… and I’ve tried to teach this to my daughter right now, but she’s a 14 year old teenager – teenage girl, hitting hormones and boys and mmrrrr *mumbles into the mic* Oh you know!”
MC: “How does a boy…”
RDA to the MC: “You’re 14, right?”
MC: “Yup! Yes.”
RDA: “Well done god!”
*Audience laughs and cat calls*
MC: “How does a guy ask out MacGyver’s daughter? How, how would you do that?”
RDA: “Well, he had a son, first of all… so… *laughs* Hmm, what do ya mean, who ah…”
MC: “Well ah, if I was a guy, and I wanted to ask out a girl, and I found that her dad was MacGyver, I would be a little bit… concerned…”
RDA: “Oh my god, you know, he’d have so many bases covered… like I will… Right now it’s great, the real life of me is dealing with – I don’t mean to change the subject, but… I will *cards a lock of hair from his eyes* - Dealing with that, those aspects of real life… who asked that question by the way? Was it over here?”
MC: “He’s sitting down, where’d he go?”
RDA: “You’re up there?” *laughs*
MC: “How’d you move so fast?”
RDA: “Well, um, well what is your question is what I want to know – what was it out here? The question, the original question? IT’ A TEST, C’MON! … Skill sets thank you! …Stay close.”
*Audience laughs*
RDA: “Um, it, it was um, I’m going backwards now, so I… innately, or innately, grew up with that particular, you know, not as sharp and as clean as MacGyver had because he had a bank of writers to fix things for him, but I’ve gone through life kind of like, well most of the guys in here I would imagine have that kind of knack of looking like, a problem that, like a dog that might be slightly… *tosses his head side to side* you know, inquisitive, it’s like ‘hmm… how do I fix that? *Whimpers like a puppy* … Most guys’ll do that… Um, no? There’s not…?”
*someone in the audience cheers*
RDA: “Yeah! See! It’s in solving a problem it’s looking at the pieces, getting down into it, um, we just happen to take that concept and blow it up a little bit, or personify it into a character that could fix anything, you know, well, almost anything…”
MC: “And over here, yeah?”
Audience member: “I wanted to ask, um, we were in your Stargate panel yesterday and you said that you didn’t like the words too much and improvised a lot, and I was curious what was it like in MacGyver? Um, did you put a lot of yourself into it, did you mind a lot what your script writers were… *inaudible*”
RDA: “Well, you’ll notice that MacGyver didn’t a lot, um, my input was, mostly during MacGyver my input was ‘I can do that! I can ride that motorcycle, I can jump out of that aeroplane, I can go have back surgery while, whilst the summer passes… um…” *swipes the microphone under his chin while thinking so that it makes a swishing noise* What’s that? Um… what was the question?”
MC: “I, I don’t even know anymore…”
Audience member: “How much did you improvise?”
RDA: “Oh! No, yeah, I’m sorry …I was just improvising there, see?”
*audience laughs*
RDA: “No, I, MacGyver was a different animal altogether, I couldn’t doooo, because so many things had to go, had to fit, it’s like, in shooting MacGyver you have to see MacGyver going along life if stoping, looking, seeing the problem, cut back, looking around to find the solution to the problem, back to the problem, back to MacGyver running to get the… solutions and stuff together, back to the problem, as the fuse goes slowly towards that bomb, aaaand then you see MacGyver putting it together and sweating, looking at his watch, over to the beautiful lady that’s to his right, and um, then you see the solution to it, so things had to fit properly, and you couldn’t really… except within the eh, the framework of a cut, you couldn’t really improvise, it had to be pretty specific because out credibility was stretched to the max as it was, so… for me to be foolin’ around wasn’t very healthy or productive… Jack O’Neill however… totally different animal!
*Audience cheers*
RDA: “We’ll enter into that, next chapter…”
MC *laughing*: “And over here.”
Audience member: “What was your favourite invention or escape in the MacGyver series?”
RDA: “I can actually remember um, ah, what I thought was the funniest escape, what happened in the first year, ahhhhhh first year? Yep! First year episode, because in the very beginning, we did these openers, these escape things, that took forever to shoot and it’d just undermine our abilities to shoot an entire episode without going into overtime, so, this was an episode where I had… *I* …MacGyver had gone into East Germany, apparently… are there any East Germans here? … Sorry… *laughs* Not a political crowd I guess. MacGyver had gone into East Germany, he had saved the day, um, but now he needed to get back across the border, and how does he do that? But, he somehow… ah, gets himself into a… oh you cut to MacGyver inside a casket, right… do you know what a casket is? …He’s lost interest…” (The question was from a small boy)
Small boy: “A, a coffin?”
RDA: “Right! Better, coffin… ok. Sarcophagus!”
*Audience laughs*
RDA: “No! *laughing* No, he’s in a casket, or coffin, and he’s being carried across towards the ah, border between East and West Germany. Well, somehow the bad guys from back on the East German shoreline or whatever *laughs* Um, start blowing their whistles, like they always do and saying stop that… that coffin! And um, so MacGyver knows something’s wrong, and, the next move I’m not real sure of… but, anyway, he ends up somehow, well, I guess they, the people, they ditch the coffin into the river, so MacGyver’s gonna die, except, somehow he’s fashioned this coffin into a jet ski!”
*Audience laughs, RDA’s wipes his face in his hands like it’s all too much*
RDA: “And off he went *pretending to ride a jet ski* la di da! Jet spray in the back. I mean, I’m surprised I stuck with the show that… after that, I was… but you know… in retrospect it was… funny. At the time – embarrassing.”
MC: “We’ve got time for one more question, so…”
RDA: “Aww!”
MC: “Yeah, it went quick, didn’t it?”
*RDA mouths ‘two more’ and nods to the MC*
MC *under her breath*: “Two more, yep. Well it’s quarter to, so yeah…”
Audience member: “Thanks very much for coming, big fan of pretty much everything you’ve done that I can remember, ah, the question I wanted to ask was – you’ve had the iconic role of MacGyver, Jack O’Neill… what’s next for Richard Dean Anderson? Other than raising a 14 year old girl, because I have a 15 year old girl and I know what it’s like!”
RDA: “Are you bragging that your daughter is older than mine?”
*Audience laughs*
RDA: “Is that what you’re doin’?”
Audience member: “I got an 18 year old son!”
RDA *coolly*: “Step outside…”
*Audience laughs*
RDA: “No, I mean it, get out! Um….I, you know what I been doing is, I’d never thought of this until somebody said ‘whoa you’re a philanthropist!’ and I said ‘No, I don’t think so… I like women, you know, it’s a…’”
*Audience laughs*
RDA: “But, it was one of those deals where um, raising a daughter as a single dad is um, I just want to be available for her, I don’t want to be off somewhere, because she’s an only child, although she now has a step sister, her mum takes *murmuring* relatively good care of her… I suppose… But um, I like being around for her when she needs me, the last text I got from her was ‘Dad, I miss you, I really wish I could come over right now.’ Of course, I’m in Calgary, and the time, so it’s safe for her to say that *smirking* … kids… Um, but, ah… the philanthropy part of it, I’ve been working with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society for many years…”
*Audience applauds and cheers*
RDA: “…And a lot of stuff, thank you! And a lot of things have been happening in the Antarctic-a. Um, we’re trying to eh, most of you are probably here the other day, but um, hopefully you all know that um, ah, we’ve been trying to um, protect the marine mammals, but especially the whales of the ah, Australian eh…. I forget it, I wanna be so cool and know…
*inaudible shouting from somewhere*
RDA: “Thank you! Thank you, Paul! Yes, that, the arctic reserve of …Australian arctic reserve, where a lot of species of whales are… floating around down there and they consider that their home, their habitat basically, and the Japanese whaling industry um, goes down there annually and um, just slaughters them, just takes them back under the phoney ah, idea of ah *hand quotations* ‘scientific research’, right, well they, for years and years, decades, they were shooting, they were killing far more than they needed for any quota to be met, and ah, it was at that time that Paul, Captain Paul Watson and the conservation society, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society started going down there and chasing them around and trying to block their way, tangle their engines, you know, whatever it would take to save the whales and not let them take anywhere near their quota. And we’ve come to the point this year, this year, this last campaign where… well hopefully you guys will go home and Google it and take a look at what’s been happening, but ah, we were able to stop the whalers this year, virtually dead in the water, um, they had to abandon – relatively so – abandon one of their ships… Paul was it a um, I dunno, the ship that um, carries all the whales and stuff, where they, the transfer is just a bloody horrific thing to watch, but um, they, had to abandon that ship because it was running out of gas from us chasing it and blocking its… impeding its way. So in other words…”
*Audience applauds*
RDA: “They didn’t get any whales.” *RDA gestures up with raised arms mouthing ‘thank god!*”Sweet. So, um, we’re starting to feel successful-ish, but we’ll never be able to not, well hopefully we do, because it’d be nice if the world whaling association would take some action and tell the Japanese to stop it! But everybody’s afraid of… you know, the import, the export… the money, deep pockets in Japan. So anyway, it goes on… I could go on? Somebody say no! Say no! *laughs* NO, NO RICK!”
MC: “I’m sure every single one of us would love to hear more, but we’re out of time, I’m afraid…”
RDA: “I’m not!”
*Audience cheers and applauds*
MC: “Oh… Marisa, can we go 5 more minutes? Yes?”
*Audience cheers*
MC: “Was that Marisa? *laughs* Can we go, yeah, we can go 5 more minutes. I got permission!”
*RDA looks off stage copying the hand movement for ‘wind it up’*
MC: “That’s the signal for 5 more minutes, we got it…”
*RDA mimes kissing a gun then firing it*
RDA: “He’s down!”
*RDA and MC laugh*
RDA: “So we went through all that and there’s no questions? Great!”
Audience member: “Hi there, Richard! Um, my question is what are your thoughts about Facebook, Twitter… I know as a fan, it’s great to see people that I admire just interacting with us on that kind of personal basis…”
RDA: “Well I think it’s just fine!
*Audience laughs*
RDA: “I don’t know if anybody’s seen my Twitters, but, I got…”
*Audience cheers*
RDA: “Yeah right! I got accused of making absolutely no sense a couple of times, people wondering ‘what is he smokin’?’ He’s like, um, I, er, half the time I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m just being impulsive, and/or there’s a thought and I *mimes tweeting on a phone*… mostly around the elections, I was being real mouthy despising the Republican Party, and especially the candidate they were running for president.”
*Audience cheers*
RDA: “It was imperative we got Obama back in though, but anyway, um… what? Ah…”
MC: “You alright?”
RDA: “You asked me what I’m doing next?” *He realises that was not the last question and hangs his face in his hand*
MC: “The question, ohhhhh. Are you a Facebook guy? Do you use Facebook?”
RDA: “Do I what?”
MC: “Do you use Facebook?”
RDA: “Well again, Facebook and Twitter, I don’t know! I have a, I might have a …does anybody know, do I have a Facebook? ‘Cause I think I was on my computer on time *mines typing on a computer* I, eh, Facebook *gestures wildly* eh, years ago, and I was ‘oh, Facebook, well…’ type type type, send, and ah, suddenly the next morning, actually the story was, there was a friend of mine who was … you will see why I was lightning it up, was dying of brain cancer, and he asked me if I would join Facebook so we could share stuff, and I said ‘eh, yeah, sure!’ and I joined and we started texting or, what do ya say? ‘Foicebooking’?”
*Audience laughs*
RDA: “Foice, Facebooking? And um, and I was all well and fine and ah, virtually the next morning I had, well I woke up to having like 10,000 friends that I… didn’t even know… I mean, c’mon! And I obviously didn’t know how things like that ran, and I had left myself open for my blood type and urine samples and address, phone numbers… and everything, so I had to, you know, have somebody teach me. But, so I settled on um, Twit? Tweeter… what is it? Twitter! *to MC* Am I impressing you? *nods to himself* I got her right here! She’s *groaning as he straightens himself up in his chair* impressed by my intellect! So ah, once in a while I’ll Tweet.”
MC: “Beautiful…”
*RDA bursts out laughing*
MC: “Alright, that’s it guys, we gotta wrap it up, we gotta wrap it up. Thank you very much *to RDA* Thank you very much for coming, it was a pleasure…” *laughs*
RDA: “Thank you everybody! It’s been a great weekend for me!”
*RDA gives a twisty hand wave and wraps his arm around the MC*
*Applause*
Fin.
You can watch this panel and all of the Calgary Expo panels (around 40-ish?) here for $14.95
eilidh17 's transcript for the Stargate panel with Richard Dean Anderson & Michael Shanks, here.MC: “Hello Calgary Expo fans, how are you? It’s lovely to see you all here this afternoon, you know we really wanted to end the show this year on a high note, and I really can’t think of a better way to do that, than having Richard Dean Anderson here. Please welcome him to the stage!
*RDA comes out in a half jog for a few steps before bending forward hands on knees, raising himself then going forward to take the MC’s hand and bow before her*
MC: “Aww, thank you!”
*MC hands RDA the mic*
RDA: “Why don’t you guys come down a little closer?” *laughs*
MC: “Come closer, we don’t bite.”
RDA: “If you don’t, I will!”
*RDA proceeds to push his chair forward to the front of the stage, the MC follows with her chair making a ‘fart-like’ sound as she pushed it forward*
RDA & MC: “EXCUSE ME!” *They both laugh*
MC: “How are you?”
RDA: “Well I’m a little sweaty, a little hot, slightly constipated… a little… a tad… but that’s a… yeah, more intimate.”
MC: “Have you been having a good time this weekend?”
RDA *clearly not paying attention*: “I’m sorry?”
MC *slowly*: “Have you been having a good time this weekend?”
RDA: “Yeah, I have actually, It’s um, I used to come play in Calgary er, a long time ago, I, friends of mine were um, the 80, the mid 80 Calgary Flames, and um, and the guys…”
*Cue cheers from the audience. RDA pumps his fist in their direction*
RDA: “Jim Peplinski, Paul Baxter, um, Danny Quinn, Lanny (sp?) Of course, they ah, they all befriended me for some reason, we ah, they’d come to LA, we’d misbehave, and I’d come up here and we’d… misbehave… but they were always skatin’ so… but they became idols and friends.”
MC: “So, I, I’m really curious about obviously you portrayed MacGyver, I… I can’t…”
*While the MC asks her question, RDA poses for photographs for people in the front row, leaning on one elbow and flashing a smile*
MC: “…It’s such an iconic, such an iconic character, I can’t imagine anybody else ever having that role, like it has to be you, and, do you find that people often confuse you with the character – they come up to you and they’re like ‘I have a paperclip, do something with it’.”
RDA: “I get that a lot, and… my response, the older I get, the *crankier* I get, so my response is starting to be like ‘Are you cracked?’ I mean *you* do something with it – I’m too old. Or ‘Can you fix this with you know, with a candy bar?’ or something. No, what are you mad? – I’m much nicer than that actually… a little bit. But no, I don’t get confused with ah, with my characters. People are bright enough to know that, do you know what I mean?”
MC *to the audience*: “I think you guys know, right? Yeah… yeah, no? err…”
*RDA waves his hand so-so*
MC: “I don’t know if they know…”
RDA *pointing to the MC*: “Is she famous… here?”
*Audience cheers*
RDA: “She wouldn’t tell me anything about her… self.”
MC: “Because, nobody wants to hear about me, Richard, it’s about you.”
RDA: “...Except me…” *looks away, pretending to be hurt, and then plays with the microphone*
*MC laughs*
MC: “So you first read the script for MacGyver…”
*RDA is distractedly waving at people in the audience again*
MC: “… What did you, what did you think? Were you reading through this going ‘he’s doing what with what now? What, what’s going on, I don’t get it’, or were you like ‘this is sooooo ingenious!’”
RDA: “Well nobody knew when we started… I had to audition for… what year? 1985 I guess, um, it was like I’d been on um, I’d been in California for some time and I was trying to make it as ‘a actor’, and I things were er, not rough, I’d done some commercials and such, but um, one summer day I got on my motorcycle and was riding up the coast and I got a… I stopped and checked in, checked my beeper - *deadpan* no phones back then… - and um, my agent called me to get over to Paramount ‘you have an audition for Henry Winkler’, so ah, I went over there and I was just wind-blown. The ah, the original MacGyver jacket that some of you may remember – that brown thing – I was wearing that, my hair was straight back, I looked like a crazed human, and ah I did a cold reading. But I had to ask them if they would mind if I wore my glasses, ‘cause, you know… I’m blind to read anything, and they ah, as the story goes, all the producers and writers looked at each other and kinda went… *RDA nods his head* ‘He’s the guy’, ‘cause I had no apprehensions to humanise the moment, and um, it proceeded from there, and they… what was the question? I forgot…”
MC: “Your thoughts on the script when you initially read it.”
RDA: “Oh! Yeah… ah well we didn’t really find out, it took some time to find out what the franchise was going to be, and um, the… the writers and producers and such kind of started observing me like I was in a petri dish to see if I brought anything to the party, and they… they felt as though they could start tapping into things that I liked to do – like car racing and hockey and skiing, and all these… things… and they started writing scripts around my… my stuff. Ah, which made it, you know, kinda fun, first of all for me, but also it gave us someplace to go, and it, me playing the character a lot easier, so they all kind of blended the ones … I still lost track of the question…”
MC: “Did you like the script when you first read it?”
MC & audience laugh*
RDA *deadpan*: “What script? No yeah, it was, again, it took some time… that’s what I started to say, is it took some time *laughing* It took some time for us to figure out what we had as far as a franchise goes, and once we got some, you know, it um, I think it went seven and a half years, and in about our, we’d get picked up for three episodes, three, then maybe six – which is a big celebration, and then another three, sad face. And then the next season they’d picked us up and um, it was at that point when we got picked up for a second season that we knew we were, we had to kind of solidify the concept, and make a commitment to what it was going to be ultimately, and um… we rolled the dice and went with what you, what you see, what you saw, and it became very successful, um, for my part, I just… I was working, I love it! It was great. But um, no, I wasn’t er, thrown, er, taken aback or anything, it wasn’t weird to me, the, I didn’t know that it was um, at the time I didn’t know it was a unique concept. You know, this guy that doesn’t use the gun to shoot people to solve the problem was ah, the norm back then – The A Team and those guys. So um, but I didn’t know, I hadn’t watched enough television to know that ah, what we were doing was different, it was a different approach to the, and then once I cleared my head about the whole thing, I realised that we had created something that we could be proud of if we really stood our ground in front of the NRA and the shark fin people, and we start doing more and more profound subjects and, so ultimately it all just kind of evolved the way that I was evolving as well, so I … in answer to your question… *laughs* no, I wasn’t taken aback.. You gotta stop me! You gotta… somebody’s gotta stop me… I feel asleep in the middle of that…”
MC: “How did it affect you or did it affect you on a more personal level, this idea of no guns and all that kind of thing, because you did some charity work as you say involving the anti-gun type of thing, do you, did that touch you in a more personal way, or?”
RDA: “ Wooo, I think so? Um, I’m trying to remember the moment, but ah, it was within my make up at the time to already in my veins to ah, not like guns in general, as a general statement – there’s no need for them on the face of the earth, hand guns I’m talking about, because that was the lobby that we came up against – as MacGyver’s best friend as a kid got killed because of a hand gun so that was that whole thing going on in MacGyver’s head and that became a big part of his personality, but yeah, I was a big proponent of gun control back then, and we, you know, I thought we were, you know, we were committed to the idea, but we, I thought we were kind of ‘respectful’ *RDA does air quotations with his fingers* … no, I guess not… we were… we didn’t… yeah, basically I didn’t care, I was proud to be on their hit list – the NRA’s, and ah, it was an honour actually, so… WHAT!?”
*MC and audience applaud*
RDA *inaudible to MC*: “Your sock is showing.” *audible* “I’m sorry…”
*They both laugh and she fixes her sock*
RDA: “But I, er… yeah.” *laughs*
MC: “So, at what point did you realise that MacGyver as the pop culture phenomenon would have such longevity, and I’ll give you a couple of examples, you know, people say the word ‘oh, just MacGyver it’, like you know, that, that’s a thing now. Another example, I have a roommate, in her 30’s, who has said she will not get married until she finds a guy that is equitable to MacGyver in both looks and intelligence.”
*RDA’s eye go wide*
MC: “So… clearly, the role has been very influential for a number of years, at what point did it tweak with you that you know ‘this is a big thing’?”
RDA: “What was a big thing?”
MC: “You…”
RDA: “Oh!”
MC: “MacGyver, the series, the role, the concept…”
RDA: “Um, oh god… doctor… let me tell you… I don’t know what to say to that! I’ve just gone about life, basically, you know, jumping from a job to a job, and having the good fortune to be, to be able to be, to have longevity attached to my name as far as the two series I’ve done anyway… People noticed um, But um, I don’t know what to say that, I mean, I just, I was doing a job, and I’m not stupid to not know that some of the stuff that I’ve done has had an affect, and also I’d ah, during the mid-MacGyver days, I became aware of the fact that we were in a position to affect some… especially our younger audience, which is what our demographic was pretty much, and families – parents and ha, they liked MacGyver a lot as well, so that was, once that was realised and I was growing up, let’s face it, hopefully everybody does… My brain started to expand a little bit and realise that we are in a position to say, state some really, support some really great causes and say some fairly profound things, and ah, trying not to stand on a soapbox while we’re doing it, you know, the first thing we’re supposed to do is entertain, but ha, but it became more fun trying to get on the NRA’s bad list and etcetera…”
MC: “Fantastic… I think we have a few questions form the audience, yeah? Oh my, you guys are so quiet, why you so quiet?!”
RDA: “They’re just awed!”
MC: “Who wants to ask a question?”
*audience cheers, RDA is fiddling with his belt*
MC: “There ya go!”
RDA: “I gotta loosen my pants… excuse me…”
MC: “Alright, well start right here on the left.”
RDA: “I can barely breathe… ugh, sorry… excuse me…”
*RDA gets up from his chair, turning his back to the audience to loosen his belt. He makes a show of tugging at the top and sides of his pants, the audience laughs and RDA huffs out a breath in relief*
MC: “Oooh myyyy….”
*RDA goes to retake his seat*
RDA: “Truly, and you could tell right, I had a, while I was talking, I couldn’t breathe… it was me pants!”
*MC laughs*
RDA: “Thank you…”
*MC bends over in laughter*
RDA *to MC*: “Anything too tight on you?”
*The audience laughs, cheers and cat calls*
MC: “I hope my roommate’s here for this!”
RDA *innocently*: “What!?
MC *trying to play it cool*: “Nah, I’m alright, I’m breathing ok, yeah… does it look like something’s too tight on me?”
*RDA checks her over, shaking his head before pointing to her shoe, referring to the earlier showing sock*
RDA: “I mentioned your socks…”
MC: “I know, my sock is sticking out of my shoe a little bit… it’s a little bit embarrassing…”
RDA *in a grossed out voice*: “It’s disgusting! I’ll gag! …What was the question?!”
MC *pointing to a woman in the audience*: “I love New York”
Audience member: “Hi, so I’d just like to say that I really really love all of the shows that you’ve done, and ah, I really love your singing voice, I had an opportunity to…”
RDA: “WHAT!”
Audience member: “Yeah…”
MC: “Well, well, well…”
Audience member: “I just seen a couple of clips that I thought was really good, but um…”
RDA: “Where’d you hear my singing voice?”
Audience member: “Ahhh…”
RDA: “You Tube?!”
Audience member *nodding*: “You Tube, I was ah somewhere, just…”
RDA: “Doing what?”
Audience member: “Um, I think….:
RDA *loudly in a ‘stern’ voice*: “C’MON, WHAT!”
Audience member: “When ah, I think you were playing Adam?”
RDA: “Oh, god… busted…”
Audience member: “Just randomly... um, so my question is ‘what exactly drives you to be an actor, like what do you enjoy most about it?”
RDA: “Well it’s not my singing voice, that’s for sure… Uuuuummmmmm, um, well as the story goes, I got interested in acting when I went to, um, my father was a speech and English teacher in, and also developed a humanities course at a high school in Minneapolis, but he also directed the plays, and as a young boy I started to tag along for rehearsals to his school, he taught at a different school to ah, the one I would go to eventually, but I remember seeing the rehearsals of a play that they were doing and I was just fascinated, mind you I was very young, and ah… *laughs* … I’m just trying to think of how young… but ah, I was out of diapers, for sure. But, but I remember watching the rehearsals and being fascinated by, they were… I was envious, they… at once point in the script, they had ah, somebody had to come out on stage and deliver a ah, birthday cake, but for rehearsals, instead they had Hostess Twinkies, they brought out a tray of Hostess Twinkies, now… I was a young boy, and I virtually lived in Twinkies, and I swear to god, the thought was sewn in my head that as any job I could ever have I’d get free Twinkies is something I wanted to do!
*Audience applauds*
MC: “That’s… fair enough…”
RDA: “That’s well worth applause, yes… thank you…” *laughs*
MC: “And over here.”
Audience member: “Ah, first of all, I wanted to say this is very cool that you’re here in Calgary, um, and my question is: I think all of us who have grown up with MacGyver and watched MacGyver, um…”
MC: “How old are you?”
Audience member: “I’m thirty-six…”
MC: “Are you really? You look like you’re like thirteen from here!”
Audience member: “Thank you!”
MC: “Okay, go ahead.”
Audience member: “I ah, I’ve had moments over my life where I’ve thought I can do something because MacGyver could, and ah, most of the time they backfired. I’m wondering if you’ve ever had any moments like that, and if not, what have you taken from the character?”
MC: “Deep audience today…”
RDA: “Well, I’ve had back surgery, two knee surgeries, foot surg… ah, um, what did I take from the experience, well it was kind of a launching pad for a lot of things in my life, not the least of which was… I mean, I dunno if I made it clear when I was on my motorcycle and I had to ride over and do the audition, at that point in time I was ready to just ehhh acting business, it’s too much of a phony laced business and I like riding my motorcycle, and living in California, and la di da, um, but, it became apparent that it was something that I liked doing, and um, *sighs* short of going into the um, going deep into the type of therapy acting can be, um, I realised that, I mean despite what you see today, I was kinda… not shy… but, observant, reticent to get immediately involved conversation or anything like that, um, so it was good to be able to be forced to have to actually say some words to another human being. Um, that sounds like a crock, doesn’t it? It just really does, but it’s... some of that is true, and so what I’ve … you figure out what it is and get back to me, okay? … But um, well anyway, I was never fooled by the fact that I was um, it was a job, it meant something in that afterwards I was able to get another job, and it was like I was building something… and I was still too young and dumb to realise that hey, this is pretty cool, maybe I should stick with this and be serious, because during hiatus on MacGyver I would jump on a plane and fly to Amsterdam or England or wherever I started doing my travelling around the world, um, instead of you know, hustling up and getting a TV movie or something, and, or taking classes, bettering my craft. To me, I wanted to you know, go see what San Tropez was like in the summer. And it’s pretty cool! … If you have money, by the way… But um, so anyway, I, I, it was kind of a spring board, I had more confidence after that to do things, ‘cause what I, oh everything I’d learned in school – this is the point – everything I’d learned in school… not everything, but… most of the stuff that I’d… some of the stuff… Nothing I’d learned in school, did I use in getting another job… that’s not true, I did learn some things and um… well not too many things… but…”
Audience member: “Please tell that you learned some things ‘cause I’m a teacher too!” *laughs*
*Audience and MC laugh*
RDA: “Wish you’d started with that! …Well truly I ah, I did, no really… *mouths ‘it’s not true, it’s true’*
MC: “Stay in school, kids.”
RDA: “It was, it was a really great experience for me, I was young, I was ah… drinking, ah… what else? *laughs* Anyway, I survived, and here I am today – talking to a 14 year old teacher!” *shakes head at himself*
*Audience applauds*
MC: “And over here we have a question.”
Audience member: “Hi, ah, I was just wondering on the MacGyver series what was your favourite task that you accomplished, or ah, machine that you built with like… nothing… pretty much…”
RDA *sighing*: “Let me think… Well, honestly, I have very few brain cells left to be able to recall the specifics of things, but I do remember, in fact, um, ah… Mythbusters did a thing on… yeah, it was kinda cool, but they ah, they busted a myth that we tried to create by building a hang glider out of bamboo, and… which, but the way weighs a lot! It’s not a real lofty… well the materials, well they proved us wrong, but it was fun to shoot the pieces… *gestures ‘MacGyvering’ wildly* …and putting it together, that we did it in a kind of montage of things, but ah, it was kind of fun. And it flew! *Slaps his own face in ‘amazement’* … No it didn’t – it crashed! That’s all I can really remember ‘cause it was a big one, and course the first one was taking a candy bar and jamming it into a crack of ah, acid, er, a crack in a vat that was leaking acid, which, one could actually do with chocolate, the components of which would stop the flow of this particular acid we were using, however you’d need 3 tonnes of it – not a candy bar… So theoretically, spot on!”
*Audience laughs then applauds*
MC: “And over to this side.”
Audience member: “Hi Richard, I just want to start off with a comment on my personal life, like er, I always carry a Swiss army knife on me, and it just happens sometimes that I gotta repair something or you know, just for a friend or something, and a lot of times when I’m done they say ‘thanks a lot, MacGyver’ and to me, that is the highest compliment I could ever get in life.”
*Audience applauds*
RDA: “That’s niiiice…” *laughs*
Audience member: “Well almost, ah, my question for you is when you look at MacGyver in all the shows, all the different skills that he has and all the knowledge that he has, I was just wondering, like where would he have acquired that knowledge? Like, in what field of education or what kind of training prepares somebody to become MacGyver?”
RDA: “Just… innate skill, I don’t… just, didn’t study, didn’t, no, he went to…”
MC: “He was a chemist, wasn’t he? I thought, wasn’t he a chemist? Physicist, yeah, he was…”
RDA *jokingly*: “Yeah, he was a chemist… chemist.”
Audience member: “Yeah, but like he had a lot of knowledge on mechanics, you know he used too jimmy a car while it was careening out of control, and I know some chemists and they don’t know how to fix a car…”
*Audience laughs*
RDA *shrugging sarcastically*: “Maybe he wasn’t… maybe he was a phhhhhh physics major or something? No, I think what we did was use – it wasn’t general science, I know it was something pacifically (yes he meant specifically) that um… endocrinologist possibly? But um, we took his, we eluded to his basic science education, and um, coupled it with some kind of secret past… military… thing… that he did that we didn’t speak about too much, I dunno why… but ah, yes I do, but I’m not going to tell you, but um, no I really don’t know, I just said that… But um, you know there’s… I get asked a lot ‘are you a lot like MacGyver? Are you, can you do all those things?’ And it’s not so much a matter of being able to do those specific things that MacGyver did, but it’s a mode of thought – it’s how you look at things – it’s observing… and I’ve tried to teach this to my daughter right now, but she’s a 14 year old teenager – teenage girl, hitting hormones and boys and mmrrrr *mumbles into the mic* Oh you know!”
MC: “How does a boy…”
RDA to the MC: “You’re 14, right?”
MC: “Yup! Yes.”
RDA: “Well done god!”
*Audience laughs and cat calls*
MC: “How does a guy ask out MacGyver’s daughter? How, how would you do that?”
RDA: “Well, he had a son, first of all… so… *laughs* Hmm, what do ya mean, who ah…”
MC: “Well ah, if I was a guy, and I wanted to ask out a girl, and I found that her dad was MacGyver, I would be a little bit… concerned…”
RDA: “Oh my god, you know, he’d have so many bases covered… like I will… Right now it’s great, the real life of me is dealing with – I don’t mean to change the subject, but… I will *cards a lock of hair from his eyes* - Dealing with that, those aspects of real life… who asked that question by the way? Was it over here?”
MC: “He’s sitting down, where’d he go?”
RDA: “You’re up there?” *laughs*
MC: “How’d you move so fast?”
RDA: “Well, um, well what is your question is what I want to know – what was it out here? The question, the original question? IT’ A TEST, C’MON! … Skill sets thank you! …Stay close.”
*Audience laughs*
RDA: “Um, it, it was um, I’m going backwards now, so I… innately, or innately, grew up with that particular, you know, not as sharp and as clean as MacGyver had because he had a bank of writers to fix things for him, but I’ve gone through life kind of like, well most of the guys in here I would imagine have that kind of knack of looking like, a problem that, like a dog that might be slightly… *tosses his head side to side* you know, inquisitive, it’s like ‘hmm… how do I fix that? *Whimpers like a puppy* … Most guys’ll do that… Um, no? There’s not…?”
*someone in the audience cheers*
RDA: “Yeah! See! It’s in solving a problem it’s looking at the pieces, getting down into it, um, we just happen to take that concept and blow it up a little bit, or personify it into a character that could fix anything, you know, well, almost anything…”
MC: “And over here, yeah?”
Audience member: “I wanted to ask, um, we were in your Stargate panel yesterday and you said that you didn’t like the words too much and improvised a lot, and I was curious what was it like in MacGyver? Um, did you put a lot of yourself into it, did you mind a lot what your script writers were… *inaudible*”
RDA: “Well, you’ll notice that MacGyver didn’t a lot, um, my input was, mostly during MacGyver my input was ‘I can do that! I can ride that motorcycle, I can jump out of that aeroplane, I can go have back surgery while, whilst the summer passes… um…” *swipes the microphone under his chin while thinking so that it makes a swishing noise* What’s that? Um… what was the question?”
MC: “I, I don’t even know anymore…”
Audience member: “How much did you improvise?”
RDA: “Oh! No, yeah, I’m sorry …I was just improvising there, see?”
*audience laughs*
RDA: “No, I, MacGyver was a different animal altogether, I couldn’t doooo, because so many things had to go, had to fit, it’s like, in shooting MacGyver you have to see MacGyver going along life if stoping, looking, seeing the problem, cut back, looking around to find the solution to the problem, back to the problem, back to MacGyver running to get the… solutions and stuff together, back to the problem, as the fuse goes slowly towards that bomb, aaaand then you see MacGyver putting it together and sweating, looking at his watch, over to the beautiful lady that’s to his right, and um, then you see the solution to it, so things had to fit properly, and you couldn’t really… except within the eh, the framework of a cut, you couldn’t really improvise, it had to be pretty specific because out credibility was stretched to the max as it was, so… for me to be foolin’ around wasn’t very healthy or productive… Jack O’Neill however… totally different animal!
*Audience cheers*
RDA: “We’ll enter into that, next chapter…”
MC *laughing*: “And over here.”
Audience member: “What was your favourite invention or escape in the MacGyver series?”
RDA: “I can actually remember um, ah, what I thought was the funniest escape, what happened in the first year, ahhhhhh first year? Yep! First year episode, because in the very beginning, we did these openers, these escape things, that took forever to shoot and it’d just undermine our abilities to shoot an entire episode without going into overtime, so, this was an episode where I had… *I* …MacGyver had gone into East Germany, apparently… are there any East Germans here? … Sorry… *laughs* Not a political crowd I guess. MacGyver had gone into East Germany, he had saved the day, um, but now he needed to get back across the border, and how does he do that? But, he somehow… ah, gets himself into a… oh you cut to MacGyver inside a casket, right… do you know what a casket is? …He’s lost interest…” (The question was from a small boy)
Small boy: “A, a coffin?”
RDA: “Right! Better, coffin… ok. Sarcophagus!”
*Audience laughs*
RDA: “No! *laughing* No, he’s in a casket, or coffin, and he’s being carried across towards the ah, border between East and West Germany. Well, somehow the bad guys from back on the East German shoreline or whatever *laughs* Um, start blowing their whistles, like they always do and saying stop that… that coffin! And um, so MacGyver knows something’s wrong, and, the next move I’m not real sure of… but, anyway, he ends up somehow, well, I guess they, the people, they ditch the coffin into the river, so MacGyver’s gonna die, except, somehow he’s fashioned this coffin into a jet ski!”
*Audience laughs, RDA’s wipes his face in his hands like it’s all too much*
RDA: “And off he went *pretending to ride a jet ski* la di da! Jet spray in the back. I mean, I’m surprised I stuck with the show that… after that, I was… but you know… in retrospect it was… funny. At the time – embarrassing.”
MC: “We’ve got time for one more question, so…”
RDA: “Aww!”
MC: “Yeah, it went quick, didn’t it?”
*RDA mouths ‘two more’ and nods to the MC*
MC *under her breath*: “Two more, yep. Well it’s quarter to, so yeah…”
Audience member: “Thanks very much for coming, big fan of pretty much everything you’ve done that I can remember, ah, the question I wanted to ask was – you’ve had the iconic role of MacGyver, Jack O’Neill… what’s next for Richard Dean Anderson? Other than raising a 14 year old girl, because I have a 15 year old girl and I know what it’s like!”
RDA: “Are you bragging that your daughter is older than mine?”
*Audience laughs*
RDA: “Is that what you’re doin’?”
Audience member: “I got an 18 year old son!”
RDA *coolly*: “Step outside…”
*Audience laughs*
RDA: “No, I mean it, get out! Um….I, you know what I been doing is, I’d never thought of this until somebody said ‘whoa you’re a philanthropist!’ and I said ‘No, I don’t think so… I like women, you know, it’s a…’”
*Audience laughs*
RDA: “But, it was one of those deals where um, raising a daughter as a single dad is um, I just want to be available for her, I don’t want to be off somewhere, because she’s an only child, although she now has a step sister, her mum takes *murmuring* relatively good care of her… I suppose… But um, I like being around for her when she needs me, the last text I got from her was ‘Dad, I miss you, I really wish I could come over right now.’ Of course, I’m in Calgary, and the time, so it’s safe for her to say that *smirking* … kids… Um, but, ah… the philanthropy part of it, I’ve been working with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society for many years…”
*Audience applauds and cheers*
RDA: “…And a lot of stuff, thank you! And a lot of things have been happening in the Antarctic-a. Um, we’re trying to eh, most of you are probably here the other day, but um, hopefully you all know that um, ah, we’ve been trying to um, protect the marine mammals, but especially the whales of the ah, Australian eh…. I forget it, I wanna be so cool and know…
*inaudible shouting from somewhere*
RDA: “Thank you! Thank you, Paul! Yes, that, the arctic reserve of …Australian arctic reserve, where a lot of species of whales are… floating around down there and they consider that their home, their habitat basically, and the Japanese whaling industry um, goes down there annually and um, just slaughters them, just takes them back under the phoney ah, idea of ah *hand quotations* ‘scientific research’, right, well they, for years and years, decades, they were shooting, they were killing far more than they needed for any quota to be met, and ah, it was at that time that Paul, Captain Paul Watson and the conservation society, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society started going down there and chasing them around and trying to block their way, tangle their engines, you know, whatever it would take to save the whales and not let them take anywhere near their quota. And we’ve come to the point this year, this year, this last campaign where… well hopefully you guys will go home and Google it and take a look at what’s been happening, but ah, we were able to stop the whalers this year, virtually dead in the water, um, they had to abandon – relatively so – abandon one of their ships… Paul was it a um, I dunno, the ship that um, carries all the whales and stuff, where they, the transfer is just a bloody horrific thing to watch, but um, they, had to abandon that ship because it was running out of gas from us chasing it and blocking its… impeding its way. So in other words…”
*Audience applauds*
RDA: “They didn’t get any whales.” *RDA gestures up with raised arms mouthing ‘thank god!*”Sweet. So, um, we’re starting to feel successful-ish, but we’ll never be able to not, well hopefully we do, because it’d be nice if the world whaling association would take some action and tell the Japanese to stop it! But everybody’s afraid of… you know, the import, the export… the money, deep pockets in Japan. So anyway, it goes on… I could go on? Somebody say no! Say no! *laughs* NO, NO RICK!”
MC: “I’m sure every single one of us would love to hear more, but we’re out of time, I’m afraid…”
RDA: “I’m not!”
*Audience cheers and applauds*
MC: “Oh… Marisa, can we go 5 more minutes? Yes?”
*Audience cheers*
MC: “Was that Marisa? *laughs* Can we go, yeah, we can go 5 more minutes. I got permission!”
*RDA looks off stage copying the hand movement for ‘wind it up’*
MC: “That’s the signal for 5 more minutes, we got it…”
*RDA mimes kissing a gun then firing it*
RDA: “He’s down!”
*RDA and MC laugh*
RDA: “So we went through all that and there’s no questions? Great!”
Audience member: “Hi there, Richard! Um, my question is what are your thoughts about Facebook, Twitter… I know as a fan, it’s great to see people that I admire just interacting with us on that kind of personal basis…”
RDA: “Well I think it’s just fine!
*Audience laughs*
RDA: “I don’t know if anybody’s seen my Twitters, but, I got…”
*Audience cheers*
RDA: “Yeah right! I got accused of making absolutely no sense a couple of times, people wondering ‘what is he smokin’?’ He’s like, um, I, er, half the time I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m just being impulsive, and/or there’s a thought and I *mimes tweeting on a phone*… mostly around the elections, I was being real mouthy despising the Republican Party, and especially the candidate they were running for president.”
*Audience cheers*
RDA: “It was imperative we got Obama back in though, but anyway, um… what? Ah…”
MC: “You alright?”
RDA: “You asked me what I’m doing next?” *He realises that was not the last question and hangs his face in his hand*
MC: “The question, ohhhhh. Are you a Facebook guy? Do you use Facebook?”
RDA: “Do I what?”
MC: “Do you use Facebook?”
RDA: “Well again, Facebook and Twitter, I don’t know! I have a, I might have a …does anybody know, do I have a Facebook? ‘Cause I think I was on my computer on time *mines typing on a computer* I, eh, Facebook *gestures wildly* eh, years ago, and I was ‘oh, Facebook, well…’ type type type, send, and ah, suddenly the next morning, actually the story was, there was a friend of mine who was … you will see why I was lightning it up, was dying of brain cancer, and he asked me if I would join Facebook so we could share stuff, and I said ‘eh, yeah, sure!’ and I joined and we started texting or, what do ya say? ‘Foicebooking’?”
*Audience laughs*
RDA: “Foice, Facebooking? And um, and I was all well and fine and ah, virtually the next morning I had, well I woke up to having like 10,000 friends that I… didn’t even know… I mean, c’mon! And I obviously didn’t know how things like that ran, and I had left myself open for my blood type and urine samples and address, phone numbers… and everything, so I had to, you know, have somebody teach me. But, so I settled on um, Twit? Tweeter… what is it? Twitter! *to MC* Am I impressing you? *nods to himself* I got her right here! She’s *groaning as he straightens himself up in his chair* impressed by my intellect! So ah, once in a while I’ll Tweet.”
MC: “Beautiful…”
*RDA bursts out laughing*
MC: “Alright, that’s it guys, we gotta wrap it up, we gotta wrap it up. Thank you very much *to RDA* Thank you very much for coming, it was a pleasure…” *laughs*
RDA: “Thank you everybody! It’s been a great weekend for me!”
*RDA gives a twisty hand wave and wraps his arm around the MC*
*Applause*
Fin.
You can watch this panel and all of the Calgary Expo panels (around 40-ish?) here for $14.95
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Date: April 30th, 2013 02:43 pm (UTC)Thank you so, so much for doing this for us.
Sorry you're buggered!!!! *g*
Chris xx
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Date: April 30th, 2013 02:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: April 30th, 2013 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: April 30th, 2013 03:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: April 30th, 2013 03:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: April 30th, 2013 09:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: May 1st, 2013 05:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: May 1st, 2013 10:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: May 1st, 2013 06:52 am (UTC)He sounds like he's smokin' something in the beginning :P... but I think he's just nervous because in MTM the longer he's in stage, the better his "performance" was.. *sigh* I wish he & Michael will do another Con soon...
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Date: May 1st, 2013 10:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: May 3rd, 2013 03:54 am (UTC)And you did a great job, too. :-D