scifi.com sciography interview | 26th August 2001 ::.::.:..

scifi.com sciography interview

26th August 2001

 

QUESTION: This was Don's creation, his vision. How did he come across when you first met him?

SCOTT BAKULA: Well, we always kid about the beginning because Don has always very careful with his material, and protective of it. When they sent the material to me, they sent two scenes from the pilot. And I said, what's this? One was the scene where I meet Dean for the first time and the second scene was with, I think the woman who was playing my wife in the pilot, where were driving down the road it's a chase scene or something and they said, well that's all there is. And I said, all right. So I went in and read the two scenes and they went well and I went home and the full script arrived like an hour and a half later. Whom they said oh it's done now. So then I get the full script and then I went back the next day and started getting to know Don a little bit but he was kind of business like, he didn't say very much in the meeting. He said it was great, I don't remember him particularly directing me a lot, just one of those moments that click in an audition process that worked for him and for me. I certainly loved the material from the get go, I mean I read these two scenes and I thought, I don't have a clue what this really is but it seems it's very well-written, these two scenes. So from that I was very happy to get an audition and then when I got the whole script I really started to get excited about it. When it was time to go to the network and then read with the guys to play Al, then it kinda just took off from there. But I don't remember early kind of contact, big contact with Don except he was very supportive and encouraging.

QUESTION: How do you explain this odd complicated concept to your loved ones?

SCOTT BAKULA: I don't think I ever successfully explained the show to anybody. That's always been the difficult challenging task that Don seems to be most successful at. People basically want to know, especially in this town, tell me what the show is in one sentence. And you can't do it with Quantum. I've tried to break it down for years and I usually just say, ask Don, he'll tell you. Or ask Dean and Dean will tell you it's all about him, so it works that way too.

QUESTION: Did you have any idea about shows he had done?

SCOTT BAKULA: I knew all about Don, I knew of had been a fan of those shows and certainly knew he was a big gun in this town, certainly at Universal. I was very much in awe of him and his success in the business and felt very fortunate to get the job at all, much less to be on NBC. I was very excited about it and at the same time nobody really knew what it was gonna be. I don't think anybody really knew what the show would evolve into because we had a big order, was something like the pilot, and then they were going to review the pilot and then decide if they were going to order nine more and it played out in a funny way. It was a pilot but then there was a kind of a look-see over the holidays. We didn't have a huge commitment or anything, everybody was curious. Brandon [Tartikoff, president of NBC at the time] certainly was. We all were. Everybody was kind of going out on a limb but it was, turned out to be a big sturdy branch.

QUESTION: Where did you come from, your childhood being perfect training.

SCOTT BAKULA: That worked out really well and it wasn't something that was planned. I grew up in St. Louis and I kind of did everything I could do when I was a kid, I played every sport I could. I had a rock 'n roll band, I sang, I studied a couple of other instruments, I was in a choir, I was in all kinds of extracurricular things. So I played the piano. When all of a sudden when this happened and they started looking for things that they could give back story to Sam Beckett, they just kept pulling on things that I did or could do. Fortunately I'm relatively athletic so they felt, basically, I used to say by years three or four that the writers were trying to kill me. They just sat around and said what can we give him that we could possibly get rid of him with. The worst thing was the trapeze, which I've talked before about. It just worked out that I could play the piano so we could do a blind pianist episode. I sang, so we could sit on the front porch and do [John Lennon's song] 'Imagine' in an episode. I played basketball, football, and baseball, I did all these different sports. So we could infuse the series with a lot of different looks while at the same time telling those same kind of simple human, emotional stories that worked really well for the show, in many ways the simpler the better but it just worked out that I had all this history, it wasn't like at the interview they said now, before we give you this part, guys, can you swim, can you hike, can you climb mountains, can you rope a cow, can you hang from a trapeze, they didn't ask any of those questions at the beginning it was just a baseball episode. It turned out for some reason that he wanted a guy, he had to be a left-handed batter in the pilot because it gave him a better chance to get to first base on a pass ball, I think it was because that's how last run happened, I bat right-handed so I just turned around and I kind of grimace every time I see my swing in slow motion, which is even worse in the title sequence because it's just, it's not my swing but we faked it and we faked a lot things and we faked them pretty well. My background really lent itself to this kind of a show and they certainly pulled out all of the stops to get me to do everything they could.

QUESTION: Tell us about your family.

SCOTT BAKULA: My parents married, still married, still alive, doing great and I have a younger brother and sister. Grew up in the Midwest, kind of conservative, Midwestern upbringing in a public high school. Very simple kind of uncomplicated life. Certainly could relate to Sam Beckett in terms of his love of his family and a love of tradition and holidays and his love for his brother and having siblings. So again, it was very easy to transfer some of my own Midwestern ideals and certainly understand where Sam Beckett came from in terms of farm country and because my grandmother's family were farm people in middle Missouri, near Jeff City. So I understood that kind of stock, that country stock and that kind of loyalty and deep commitment to not only to each other but to the land and to furthering and doing the best they can for themselves and for the people around them. So it was nice to be able to not have to think that much about what made this guy up. Of course I'm not a prodigy or a genius or anything like Sam's IQ certainly, but I could certainly relate to his roots and I think that was something else that, it's just, these things, they're not tangible, you can't say this, get this and this and it mean something. But they kinda just infuse a series and you'll see this in any series that last a long time, the people will tune in week after week because they invest in those characters and there's something about those characters that is real enough that make people want to invite them into their home every week. And certainly my portrayal of Sam was based in a nice firm reality in a very way out, far out premise. I think that struck a chord with the viewers and that's again the only reason we survived was because of the viewers.

QUESTION: There was some parallels between you and Sam. Because you came from a smaller conservative town coming to a show that tackles completely non-conservative subject matter, was there any kind of growing up, did you ever witness some of the things you discussed or the things you tackled?

SCOTT BAKULA: Again, I will say I had a relatively sheltered non-confrontational, conservative upbringing. I knew people that were doing things. I knew people that were having certain kinds of problems but they weren't, I wasn't in those circles and I wasn't involved in the same kind of issues and problems. I think I had a certain naiveté going, certainly until I moved to New York when I was 21, and it wasn't intentional. It wasn't like I didn't want to look at the world it's just that the situations I ran into and the way my life played out in high school, which can be a volatile time, it just was pretty simple and easy. And I wasn't involved in racial issues or, teen pregnancy or drug abuse or anything like that. So I wasn't really schooled in a lot of issues that were happening around the world at the time, which blossomed a lot more through the '70s and '80s. And so again, because I kind of, I was in this little niche of time really from high school I think I was a freshman in '69, no I guess '70 and there was kind of like a lull a little bit in terms of the '60s, there was resting a little bit. Vietnam was winding up, I had just missed the draft thing, so I was just, but I had friends who two years ahead of me, their brothers got drafted. So that was around but it was kind of muffled a little bit. So I had this window of time where I kind of crept through.

QUESTION: Your aspirations weren't to be an actor, they were to be a lawyer?

SCOTT BAKULA: I don't know what I really thought I was ever due to be but it never was intention to, I never thought was going to be an actor, you just didn't think about that in St. Louis. It wasn't like out here in L.A. or New York where every other person you meet is part in the business in some way. So that wasn't a reality at all. I grew up my dad was a lawyer and his friends were other lawyers and doctors and people, professional people and people in advertising and teachers and all kinds, so that was the people that I bumped heads with, and their families in kids. I never really thought about acting, I just knew that I loved it and I had a great time doing it and wasn't, it really was one of those twists of fate where had I been having a better time in college I would have stayed where I was in terms of educationally, I was having a fine time in college, I just wasn't having a great time in the educational end of it. But it's just a twist of fate that I kind of fell in some other things and the theater kept coming around and I kept bumping into people and doing productions of things in the summer that were wonderful and expansive to me as a human being, and as a performer. I kept getting encouragement, you should do this, this is great. So I kept fooling around but again, but it wasn't a reality until I kind of threw the school thing away and thought I should try this and get to New York while I was young and if it didn't work I could always come back and try something else. It was just really, we make these little choices in our life, 20, 30 years later you look back and say wow, it was a big choice.

QUESTION: Was there a moment when you finally said this is what I'm going to do.

SCOTT BAKULA: No, not really. Again, I kind of backed into it because I was offered a of Godspell, a national tour that was from St. Louis. I thought that sounded great and I went to my parents and I said I want to do this tour and they said go ahead, maybe it will get it out of your system. And you come back to school a year or two, you come back. The tour was gonna start in August and the tour never started and school did, and then the tour fell apart and there I was sitting at home. So I was left holding the bag basically and then had to decide where to go from there. And I applied, was applying to other schools, I was gonna go to a Mormon theatrical kind of school and the more I looked at it more I spent time examining the school side of it. I just realized what I really needed to do was just pick up, pack up and go to New York.

QUESTION: So your parents were pretty supportive?

SCOTT BAKULA: They weren't supportive of me going to New York, they were supportive of me trying to do this national tour. When that fell apart it wasn't pretty at home for awhile. But they didn't stop me and as I started to have some success and they realized, I think being a parent myself it's easier for me to look back and say, what I believe the biggest thing that was going on for them, they didn't know, they were afraid of the unknown. They didn't know anything about my business, my dad said to me, look, if you want to be a lawyer I can help you. I can tell you where to go school, I can introduce you to people. If you want to be a doctor I know people who do that. If you wanted to be a teacher, whatever, you want to be there's lots of things I can help you with. But I have no way of giving any kind of insight or input into this world. And I think as a parent that's the ultimate letting go and it's hard enough to let go of your kids, much less saying 'And now, we're gonna go to a strange city, New York City.' When you lived in the Midwest, New York is a strange city. And you're gonna go off and try to pursue a business that nobody knows anything about in my family. And we don't know if you'll ever come back or what will happen. So there was a lot of fear I think on their part and justifiably so. And I was charged with the knowledge and all the energy of being young and stupid. So I didn't think a lot about what I was doing except that I knew that's what I wanted to do and you don't make those decisions when you're in your 40s because there's, you have too much life behind you and too much knowledge. And at the time it seemed like that was the thing to do and I'm glad, I'm thrilled I went to New York and made the choice. But I could never do it today. And fortunately I don't have to.

QUESTION: So in New York you get involved in theater. Pretty successful, what makes you decide to go to L.A.?

SCOTT BAKULA: I went to L.A. because I had agents that I had for a very long time, Maggie Henderson who is no longer with us and Jerry Hogan. Maggie was out here in L.A. and Jerry was in New York and every year Maggie would come, she would make her pilgrimage to New York to see who is in the New York office and who was maybe somebody that could work in L.A. She would come out and I'd sit down with her and she'd say, don't come to L.A. unless you have something to do. You have a piece of theater to do, if you've got an offer, if you have something because L.A. will eat you up, it's really hard to stay focused, it's hard to stay in the business, it's an entirely different industry out in L.A. which I didn't know anything about them. So I just took her word for it and never went. And finally I got, I did a musical out here called Nightclub Confidential. Started in New York then came out to L.A.. So I call her up and said I got a show, I'm gonna be out there, I'm coming out in January so it'll work out because it's time for pilot season and I'll be doing something so people can come and see me. I'd been in a very popular show in New York the season before that everybody knew about on both coasts, 'Three Guys Naked From the Waist Down.' So I had a little bit of whatever. And then I coincidentally had done a Disney Sunday night ABC movie that was gonna come out in some time in the winter. It was the time to go. Came out here on New Year's Day, 1986. The show I did turned out to be a big hit out here. It got me a lot of attention out here and I jumped onto Designing Women in the beginning and was able to do that pilot, a couple of recurring on that and things kind of took off. But I waited and waited and waited to come out and it just, it happened that I got this show.

QUESTION: How about some of the obstacles you faced. You did a couple of pilots, Gung Ho and Eisenhower Lutz. How did coming out, trying new things and they weren't ultimately successful, how did that feel? Did you ever question going back?

SCOTT BAKULA: Well, I was a little bit like a kid in a candy store. I think when people come out of New York the first thing that happens besides just the fact that you're in California, which is so stunningly different from New York and the weather is unbelievable and I'm an outdoor person so I was, it was wonderful to get used to the weather out here. The next thing was, the money is so much more when than when you would work in New York. And I had done Broadway in New York and I had done commercials in New York and off Broadway in New York and traveled around the country. There was just no comparison financially to what you could do. So it even with some things that I did that weren't successful, still the money end of it was kind of astonishing to me. And I kept getting reinforced because I had done another job or people that I worked with were very positive in terms of what my future might hold. So I continued to be encouraged, I didn't come out and sit for a year or have like my one shot and it not work and then sit for a year, thinking, oh my gosh this is never going to happen for me. Because I came out in '86 and I did a bunch of things between 1986 and 1988 and then I left during the writers strike and went back to New York and did a Broadway musical, 'Romance, Romance' and then I came back and got Quantum. So I felt like I was in the right place and that the business was going to find me because I had so much early encouragement when I got out here. I'm glad I didn't come out when I was 21 or 22, I'm glad I went from St. Louis to New York because I was from theater, I understood the theater and I had a lot to learn in the theater, as I still do. I knew nothing about the film world and I know I would have been frustrated and lost, at least in New York you really get to get into the business and participate in the business whether you have a job or not, you get to audition and go and perform and sit and do meetings in meetings and talk. So it's much more tangible in New York, and here it's very, very whimsical.

QUESTION: So when you went back to New York for the writers strike…

SCOTT BAKULA: Yeah, it was just luck. Again, the people that knew me in New York, did an industrial for the man who wrote the music for it, Keith Herman and, they brought the show they had done it off Broadway and they were moving it to Broadway. I guess I had enough success out here combined with what I had done in New York that they thought I would be a good person to plug into the show. And it just worked out that they were, the timing of them going into production and me finishing my season with Eisenhower Lutz and then the writers strike happened after that, when I went to New York I said look, I may only be able to work for 12 weeks because Eisenhower Lutz is going to come back and I'll be doing that this summer you're going to have to let me go which they agreed to do that which they never do. And of course, not only did the writers strike happen, but Eisenhower Lutz was canceled and I was in New York in a Broadway musical and feeling very, very fortunate.

QUESTION: Because of the fact you weren't known in television at the time you got the role, did it ever seem the overwhelming? Was there pressure?

SCOTT BAKULA: I was so well prepared, I had done so many theatre pieces where the show rested on my shoulders and there's no more pressure than on opening night and critics and new material, I had done a lot of new material in the last three or four years before I left New York. And that whole experience really got me feeling confident with new things, gave me an ability.. I didn't know that much about the business and I wasn't that into what the network is thinking and what are they're doing and they're testing it and how, my God, I wasn't into any of that. So I got this part and it seemed like a lot of fun to do. Dean and I hooked up really well, our confidence in each other and what we were doing kind of carried us, certainly carried me. And I was working with Dean Stockwell and I was a huge fan of his and we knew, we were pretty sure he was going to get an Academy award nomination for Married to the Mob. So that made you feel very good that you're working with one of the most successful producer/writers in television so you feel good about that. The script was great, so I went after it and did the best I could and made a few stands about what they wanted me to do with my character and not really just because I had confidence in my own abilities and my own choices that I had been making in the last four years prior to that with new material. Basically I said this is how I'm going to play the role and this is how I believe the role is going to work. And if you don't want me to play it this way then you need to find somebody else because I believe this is how the role should be. And if you wanted Bill Murray you should've hired Bill Murray. And it's worked.

QUESTION: Explain the rules.

SCOTT BAKULA: Well, we always called them the rules, the rules according to Don Bellisario, which meant that the rules could change whenever Don wanted them to change. So the rules that began got bent and twisted and worked whenever he felt. But the basic, the big rule change in time travel was that you could change things. And we'd been taught by Back to the Future and other movies that that was the whole point of it, you couldn't change anything and if you did change anything that you wouldn't exist or etc. etc. Don's thing was no, we're going back in time it and we're going to fix things that went wrong and we are going to change the outcome but it's not going to be in a negative way, which again is what the Don is so great at. He has such a positive overall view of humanity and goodness and things like that. So that was the big deal, I could only travel within my own lifetime supposedly until we worked out that I could genetically jump into my grandfather's body and stuff like that. So those where the big rules and we worked it out so that I could jump back and Dean could be me and I could be a hologram. He bent things but the great thing was he always made it work. I got the odd letters and books from people saying, "How dare you, you've broken the rules of time travel. And read this book and you'll understand it." It made me laugh because obviously until someone's done it successfully we don't know.

My response was always look, "How do you know if maybe I went back and I changed something and this is how it is, how do know that I went back and changed it for the wrong." Because all we know is we have our own existence and that's all we know. So you don't know that Sam Beckett isn't back there right now fixing something that happened that allows you to be who you are today, and changing something. So, we have a lot of fun debating and talking about it, but they really were according to Don and whichever the way the wind blew, you couldn't change them, but Don could.

QUESTION: At the end of the first season, you guys didn't know if you're going to get picked up. What was going through your mind at that point?

SCOTT BAKULA: Again, I was working so hard that I didn't have a lot of time to spend wondering and worrying. We felt so good about the show and the product that were putting out. At the same time we were so overwhelmed by the show and how hard it was to make and how challenging the hours were that we, didn't have a lot of time to sit around and wonder about, "Oh, I wonder what's going to happen." But we had the one episode that it all rested on. Again, just one of those twists of fate where it was on the right night, not during Sweeps, when some other big huge show would've knocked it out and everybody got a lot of press and everybody tuned into it. One episode sold Brandon [Tartikoff] plus the fact that we had gotten so many nice notices in terms of the kind of show we were in the quality of television that we were putting out. It was the right time for NBC to say yeah, we want the show because it looks like its got this. So again, it was a quirky twist of fate and a bunch of diehard fans who had already grabbed onto the show in the beginning were curious and ready to go to bat for the show already by episode. I think it was our 6th and 9th episodes that kept us.

QUESTION: The one show that everyone speaks of as being the standard is [the Quantum Leap episode] 'The Color of Truth.' How did that feel?

SCOTT BAKULA: Well, it was one of those things oddly enough where I was very excited about it. And talking about the rules, it was a situation where we still were new in the rules and we really hadn't done a lot of things. And I got all excited about playing this old black man. So the first day of the episode we were out in Pasadena shooting in a cemetery. And I was doing my whole actors thing and I had a walk, I was working on this thing, this kind of shuffle thing with my shoulders and then I was working this whole kind of arthritic posturing, I was so excited about this thing I was gonna get to do. After two or three hours of shooting, I don't know if Don showed up or somebody, we said we better talk to Don about this. We called Don up and he said no, no, no, no. You're in the old man's arthritic body but you're not him, we see you, you're your age, don't do anything. Everybody else will see the old man in his arthritis, you don't have to do anything. So we're like, oh no. So we went back and shot it all over again and I walked, I got out of the car and I wasn't stooped over and I helped her, we had to start all over again. And that was like the first time where we were trying to figure out what the rules were and we're running fast on the set and it cost us, in fact it cost.

QUESTION: What about the subject matter that was covered, civil rights movement.
Dealing with racism and things like that, what did you do to prepare yourself for that?

SCOTT BAKULA: What was interesting to me throughout about the show is that I'm obviously actor portraying a role in a script that was written by etc.. But there was a certain, there is a certain reality that creeps in when things are right that if you are open to it you receive, or you respond to it. Whenever I was in a show, and in this is one instance where there was a certain kind of negativity or anger or something that I strongly believe, I'm struggling against or strongly for, that I was emotionally involved with, the show would affect me in a different way. And obviously the whole notion of walking in somebody else's shoes, the man who was, was it 'Black Like Me' and he wrote the book and he dyed his skin for X amount out of time and lived that way and then wrote about what it was like to be treated that way. And obviously everyday I could step out of my shoes and my role whether it was at a woman or animal that I was playing. Remnants of it always stuck with me. I'm a relatively liberal person in terms of the how I deal with other people and how I feel about people's rights to be who they want to be and do what they want to be as long as it doesn't hurt somebody else. But this just constantly reinforced those feelings. It was always an emotional experience on some level. Often times I was dealing with somebody, my mirror image who was the real person, whether it was someone who had Downs Syndrome or somebody who was literally blind, or a person of color who had dealt with a lot of prejudice and racial issues in their life. I had that connection when it was the real person and not just another actor who happened to look like an FBI agent. I was able to connect with those people also, I was lucky to have those experiences. And they continued to just fill me up and I think everybody, the other people who were working on the shows with it got the energy of it and said lets go out and keep putting this kind of thing out there because these are all issues that aren't dead. Again the nice thing about the show was it was a period piece because I traveled in the past but so many of the issues were relevant and prevalent today. That makes the show timeless and gives it legs and lets it really stand up as being unique.

QUESTION: In a couple of the episodes there's almost foreshadowing, and episode about the Watts riots, L.A. riots. Talk about that episode.

SCOTT BAKULA: Well that episode was very intense because it was based in a certain way on reality and we were reenacting a moment in history in a very real way. I believe it was also the first time that Sam killed someone, if I'm not mistaken. He was killed in my arms I think, as I recall. So that was kind of a big step for the show, but it felt like, we kicked it around a lot about well maybe he shouldn't be killed or maybe. Again, it was the choice, the reality we can't touch the reality that we can give this episode a really grounded feeling and hopefully give it more impact because that's what happened and people died, and people died in the riots that were to come here in LA and people were dying in riots around the world. And those kinds of racial, tense moments in time where everything comes colliding together, that's something that most people can't relate to until it happens in your town. And then it leaves you with a feeling that you'll never forget. Whenever I drive through certain parts of downtown L.A. you think of well, this is the corner of where this happened, this is what this big store, remember everybody was running in and out looting it. You have those kinds of memories just like Westwood has a memory that will never go away. These are scars on the surface of the planet and then scars in our own psyches and humanity. So that episode had a great solid feeling, it was very solemn, it wasn't a lighthearted comedic kind of episode. I felt those were the hardest episodes for Don because he always wanted the show to be entertaining first. I used to want the shows to be more political. And Dean certainly wanted them to be more environmentally correct or whatever it was but I think Don was, at the end of the day was right, that you approach at first with entertainment in mind because that's what, we're not curing cancer on television as everybody always says but we're not. We're trying to entertain people and give them a moment in time where they can sit back and think something else. But at the same time he was then able to infuse episodes, and this is one where with a lot of power, and a lot of drama to do it successfully.

QUESTION: There was a lot of controversy, a lot of stations were pulling out of, a scene between an interracial couple. Any thoughts on that?

SCOTT BAKULA: Well we had a lot of different moments where people were pulling out different reasons, I don't particular remember it over that episode, then again maybe it's something that happened behind the scenes that I wasn't aware of. I do know had issues with the animal rights people and the gay episode that we did, there were a lot of people. And me, again in my naivete would sit there and say, what? Why are we having, why is this a problem, why are we still having people, but it happens today all the time, still that certain advertisers, if there's any mention of certain things, they are gone. It's their prerogative. It's just when they are controlling the material and the content, to the extent that the network is calling you and saying, don't do that, don't write that episode. Then it gets out of hand. But Don pretty much stood up and did what he wanted to do.

QUESTION: The gay episode, 'Running For Honor'… talk about that one.

SCOTT BAKULA: Again, that was an episode that got a lot of attention before we did it, which again, is always interesting to me because how do you know how you're going to like something or dislike something until you've seen it. And the way the world is nowadays, to stop it before it goes anywhere. I love that episode because ultimately the message of the episode was, for me anyway, was trying to figure out if someone is gay or not, it shouldn't be an issue, it wasn't an issue in this episode and shouldn't matter. And the whole message of the series always was, let people be who they are going to be and Sam was just interacting with them for a brief moment in time in a very nonjudgmental way. He carried that into this particular episode. And at the same time, because of who he was, growing up in the Midwest, not having a lot of interaction with the gay community, kind of not sure about how he really felt about it. Which again, was great because it made him more human because there were times where Sam was so perfect and such a great guy. He was understanding and a great shoulder to cry on that you needed some humanity, you needed him to be able to not be this perfect guy and that was a good episode where he was kind of caught up in the questioning, well is this character gay? And the whole thing was does it matter? Who cares? And why are you and I, Sam and Al spending all this energy wondering, trying to figure it out why all this other stuff is going on directed toward this person which was just bad, human beings being mean to each other which is what we're still surrounded with all over the planet. The guy got shot on the freeway last night or the night before by people running around. He got run over and shot at, whatever. It's part of our society right now and it's really ugly. I felt fortunate that we would get, we were able to do an episode about it.

QUESTION: The success of Quantum Leap, how did it change your life?

SCOTT BAKULA: Well, I feel that the years of playing this character cemented for me a lot of my emotional feelings about issues that I come in contact with every day. It cemented a lot of my character that was still forming at the time and it allowed me certainly by being associated with Dean because he had a lot of very strong opinions about things, allowed me to stand back and look at where he was coming from. Other people really start to kind of understand a little about the kind of man that I wanted to be as I grew older. So it had a profound impact I think on me just considering all these different issues that came across my door every seven days, all these different characters reinforced what I wanted to be. Certainly the same, Quantum Leap was not a big hit by any means in terms of television standards, I don't know where we ended up in the numbers game. Certainly by today's standards we would not have been a hit, but the fan base and the kind of magical connection that the show had with people all over the planet is what kept it alive, and made it successful, all over the world. And made these fans so caring and so intent upon the show, the future of the show, the history, everything they can and want to know about the show, it just found a place and it's still there. And that's been, that's the bad part of it for me which is that in days past when you did a TV series, the TV series went off the air and you were famous for doing that series or whatever for awhile and that kind of went away. I'm not off the air, I'm still Sam Beckett going through time and to this day, now I've been doing it for 11 or somebody years and we stopped shooting six years ago or however long ago. So I don't have the distance I'm still the same person to a lot of people. That's great, we have lots of new fans, there's lots of still wonderful energy about the show that keeps going, but it has still kept me as Sam Beckett to a certain extent. That's just the nature of the times we live in and that's true of anybody on a series that comes out, that gets put on cable or moved around the world and people need things to put on their channels so we are on still. It certainly gave me an opportunity to do almost everything I've done since then because it's given me a certain amount of fame that's transferred into being offered things and getting a chance to do other shows and movies and things. Who knows how that would have ever happened if Quantum Leap hadn't kind of catapulted me up there as someone who can do a lot of different things and has a pretty good reputation as an actor. So I am eternally grateful to it and to Don and to Brandon for giving me the shot because it's offered me a whole career really.

QUESTION: If the show was on today, it probably wouldn't have been canceled because it has a kinda been X-Files.

SCOTT BAKULA: That was the huge thing for us, the advertisers loved us. At the time NBC was having trouble with certain demographics and we were huge for them in terms of demographics, but not in terms of volume and again, moving around didn't help us at all. So I think it would have been, we could've been around a while but we got moved, we got moved, we got moved. Warren [Littlefield, Tartikoff's successor as president of NBC] was one of the people that moved us, he said, don't worry, if you don't work out on Tuesdays we'll put you back. But that's the nature of television and we were lucky to get the four and a half years that we got because by all rights we should have been canceled after the first six.

QUESTION: The last day of shooting, you were clearing the set and it was Dean's birthday.
Everyone on the set was very emotional and he said he wished he had one more year. Bring us back to that.

SCOTT BAKULA: That last episode was such a hodgepodge because Don had, I've said this many times the unenviable task of writing a show that had to satisfy about five different needs. It had to be the last episode of the year, somewhat of a cliff-hanger in case we came back, it had to serve as the ending of the series if we didn't come back. It had to not close the door so much that if somebody want to make a movie somewhere down the line that we could still make the movie. So, he was trying to serve all those masters. In doing so he wrote the bar that he grew up in, in the mountains in Pennsylvania that he built to scale so that it had this very strange surreal quality, down to the pigs knuckles on the counter in a jar. And we had [actor] Bruce [McGill] playing God behind the bar and people from all the other episodes who were filling in different parts. So it was a great way to end. It was also infused with this kind of surreal, unknown tentative kind of message. Dean and I were in the middle of its saying, we had grown so close to each other and not knowing what was going to happen. It was very much like a closing night. The last day in the theater when you're out there saying your lines for the last time and even though you've said them for eight months in a row, they are the last time and you're choked up having trouble saying something and tears are flowing. I've done the scene a hundred times but in this case we were just on the set, take three, take four, but everything was coming out. It was very, very challenging and very cleansing at the same time but we got through it and made this very bizarre INTERRUPTION episode that people constantly to this day are saying what was that last episode about, or I missed the last episode, what happened, did you get back? No. There was so many things going on.

QUESTION: Dean because of the way his career went he was in and out of Hollywood, was searching for something, it was almost he found it.

SCOTT BAKULA: Dean to me is a great illustration of somebody who loves and hates what they do and have been up and down, in this town. He's been to the top and to the bottom and all over. He came to work every day infused with this great spirit and energy and you could hear him coming in the back of the stage and say, "all right, the fun starts now." And in comes the cigar and the hat and the funny clothes and the lights, all of his stuff. He just loved it and he loved the work. He loved being five minutes from Griffith Park so he could go play golf, and we'd call him, you've gotta come in now. I'm on the 15th hole can you please do something? No, you gotta come in now. So he loved that, it was the perfect set up for him, it was the best job in Hollywood he worked a couple of days, three days a week maybe and the other two days he played golf or half days he played golf which he had just fallen in love with that game. He was a happy guy. I was too. I was working so hard that it was hard sometimes to know. It was a great time and a great time of life to be with him and deal with where he was and ride that whole thing with the Academy Awards. We had a ball, we just had a ball the whole time.

QUESTION: When the show was canceled, how did you feel?

SCOTT BAKULA: It was kind of one of those typical Hollywood stories, I think we heard about it on the radio, Don heard about it on the radio first as he was driving in to work. It was on Entertainment Tonight before the network called us. People in this town have trouble picking up the phone when it's bad news. I think we were prepared for it, the show had always lived on the edge and we'd been close so many times, we'd been off the air and the fans got us back, we'd been through all these different phases with the show. I always felt a little cheated that we didn't do, everybody these days is doing the last episode. We had the wrap party and that year nobody knew if the rap party was the wrap party for the year or forever. So it was just kind of, it was a hard thing to grasp. There was a certain amount of relief because I likened the years always to running a marathon and you just hope to be standing by the end of them and it certainly took a toll on me. It took a huge amount of time from me and my wife and my family. But I was disappointed because I knew we weren't done, I knew we had plenty of good things to do, I was looking forward to another year and hoping that we would have another year. The last year was a very difficult year, more so than any other year just because lots of people around the show were going through a lot of emotional times and it added to the challenge of making the show. And so that was kind of slowly being put to bed in various different rooms. Nobody was sick of the show which you come on some sets after five years and its like, if we see one more courtroom scene, I'm going to puke. But we never had that. So if anything, people were tired but they were always tired at the end of year then we were going to start all over again. So it was bittersweet. Miss it? To this day, certainly missed it that year when everybody was starting to go back to work in July and we weren't. But the best thing I always feel about the shows that I'm so proud of it and I could catch an episode or piece of an episode or somebody will talk to me about it and I'm never like, can we talk about my last movie or whatever. Because I feel so good about what we did and the impact that it's had that it's a great huge chunk of my career that I'm proud of.

QUESTION: Will you ever do another…

SCOTT BAKULA: Oh yeah, we talk about it all the time. Everybody is always interested, it's just a question of figuring it out.