Starfest 2007 — Kate Vernon

One of the guest I was interested in seeing was Kate Vernon from the series Battlestar Galactica. For those who don’t know, she played the wife of Colonel Saul Tigh — Ellen Tigh. The character of Ellen was never a favorite of mine as she was a drunk slut. Still, she served her purpose on the show. The character was killed at the beginning of the third season.

So if I didn’t care for the character of Ellen Tigh, why was I interested in seeing Kate? Well to be frank, I wanted to see what kind of person she is in real life. How much of herself was placed into the character of Ellen?

With that in mind, I found my seat. There was a decent crowd for her appearance, but there were still plenty of seats free. I guess it isn’t surprising. She’s not Tricia Helfer (who came last year) and BSG has slipped in the ratings. Kate arrived several minutes late (I believe she had been signing autographs). You could tell she was a bit nervous, but she soon settled down into the routine of things and folks came up to ask her questions.

While there were a few questions about BSG, I was surprised that the majority of the questions were on her other roles. For example, she played the character of Commander Valerie Archer on Star Trek: Voyager. I didn’t remember the character nor the episode, but after I looked it up online, I was surprised because I had seen it (Voyager wasn’t my favorite Star Trek series). She’s been in lots of other things over the years such as L.A. Law, Nash Bridges, CSI, and tons more. However, BSG is the one series she’s been in the most.

One item that did come up about BSG was the death of her character. She said she got a call one day and based on what was being said, she started getting a funny feeling in her stomach. But then they said they wanted to discuss where her character was going and she started feeling better. However, where her character was going was to be killed because they had decided to take the character of Colonel Tigh in a new direction and having her around would interfere with that. As you can imagine, this was pretty devastating news to Kate and she (half) jokingly asked the crowd to write Ron Moore (series creator) to bring her back. After all, in science fiction, is anyone really ever dead? Plus, if they made her a Cylon, you’d have the first Cylon married couple since it was recently revealed that Colonel Tigh is a Cylon.

Another thing she mentioned was that her character, Ellen, knew that the cup that Saul gave her was poisoned and that in her mind, she was hoping her husband would somehow see her through. Of course, that didn’t happen but it was an interesting insight on the part of the actress.

Yet another item of interest was her boffing the Cylon known as Brother Cavil (played by the then 70-year old Dean Stockwell) and how that scene was brought about. She didn’t want to be nude in it and neither did Dean. So they did what they did and Kate gave us more insight on how her character dealt with that and why. She referred to it as “sleeping with Hitler” in order to save her husband. That was an interesting way of putting it.

So, it was a lot of fun hearing her speak for the hour. I found her a lot more attractive in person than on screen for some reason. Weird.

BTW, thanks to Marc for the pics of Kate. Mine all were pretty bad.