KS: I’ve done enough television to know that Battlestar Galactica may not be a once in a lifetime opportunity, but it is an opportunity that doesn’t come along many times as an actor. I’ve come to rely on the writers and you know they’re going to deliver, that every episode will be spot on.

M: Do you ever get the script for an episode and say “What the frak!”

KS & GB (in unison): All the time. [laughing]

KS: Every script.

M: You don’t have an inkling of what’s coming down the line?

KS: We do know who the fifth [and final] Cylon is, but…

GB: Is that for real, though?

KS: With the writers’ strike, so much time has gone by that don’t tell me they’re not going to change that, because you know it’s going to get on the Internet? If all of us know…

GB: Patricia in makeup said it isn’t— it was to make us think that.

KS: But they’ve already brought that person. They have them contracted now.

GB: Really? No!!

M: So you’re not the final Cylon?

KS: No. I was told from day one: ‘the only thing we know is that you aren’t a Cylon.’

M: Grace, have you ever become confused with all your Cylon incarnations, as the show goes back and forth between them? There are so many now.

GB: Yes. And I have to write out their storylines to figure out what they’ve come through and then remember: this character hasn’t met Gaius Balter ever before, she’s not the same person that when they did the lottery and Helo [Agathon, now Athena’s husband] gave up his seat for Gaius. We have to constantly re-evaluate relationships and places. There is a lot of confusion.

M: What’s your favourite incarnation?

GB: I think it would definitely be Athena. She’s gone through a lot of stuff. But Boomer had a lot of fun stuff right off the top—she’s so dark and heavy.

KS: I think Athena is the most evolved, too.

M: Athena broke with the Cylons, joined with the humans, repeatedly confronted with the worst of humanity – the president stole her baby, humanity wanted to wipe out her race with a deadly virus – why does she stay loyal?

GB: For love and hope. She really does love Helo. It’s evolving with her experiences, and I don’t think she can really even explain it. It has to do with love and it also has to do with survival. She made a choice. She went in a direction. She knew she was in a very special position, she was the first and only Cylon to have a baby with a human, and then she didn’t want to give it up to science, to give it up to the Cylons. And so she went forward and I don’t think she re-evaluates it all the time. She is a robot, she is programmed, now she’s becoming a soldier. She’s not a scholar being presented with ideas, being asked to think.

M: Katee, what do you personally like the best and hate the worst about Starbuck?

KS: I love her vulnerability, that she’s so damaged, largely at her own hand, and that she’s comfortable in her own pain. It’s interesting to play a character that is good on her own. She’s so complicated yet she knows what she is.
The thing I dislike the most is her belief that she’s straightforward. She’s straightforward with everyone but herself, she’s so willing to tell other people what she thinks of them and what she thinks of the situation, but the last thing she would tell someone is how she’s been affected by something. If it was me, she would have been with Apollo a long time ago, but that’s not interesting.

M: Who should she end up with?

KS: None of them

GB: Oh!!

KS: I told [executive producer] Ron Moore a while ago ‘please God, do not wrap up her storyline, put it in a box, put a pretty little bow on it and hand it to me’ That’s not who she is. This is an extremely flawed woman who is not happy when things are easy, when things are good and she will never be the woman who sits at home with a baby and loves a husband. That’s not her. She’s better and happier when she has a struggle. And if she does walk off into the sunset, it needs to be on her own, still searching.