SCIFI AND TV TALK: Catching Up With Amanda Tapping
by Steve Eramo
09/11/2012
Known by her many fans as the Queen of Sci-Fi, actress Amanda Tapping spent 15 years of her career portraying two unforgettable and iconic female TV characters – Colonel Samantha Carter in Stargate SG-1 (as well as Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe) and Dr. Helen Magnus in Sanctuary. This year, however, some of her work has been much more down-to-Earth, but equally as challenging and fulfilling. One of these roles was in the recently aired Lifetime network made-for-TV movie Taken Back: Finding Haley, in which her character of Susan has a secret to hide when it comes to her teenage daughter.
“Susan had a little girl who died at the age of three, after which she lost her mind and abducted another little girl to raise her as her own,” says Tapping. “So it’s the story of two mothers – Moira Kelly plays the mother of the abducted child who never stops looking for her, while my character is now raising that missing child and has never stopped protecting her. Not surprisingly, Susan is always living in fear that her daughter will find out the truth.
“So she’s ‘crazy,’ and I got to do this The Shining-type of moment where I’m banging down the bathroom door,” notes the actress with a smile. “It was fantastic because this was a type of character I had never played before. She’s out of control and so tightly wound that she doesn’t see the humor in herself. To play someone who’s vibrating at that type of frequency is scary as hell but also fantastic and really fun. Moria Kelly did an amazing job, and Nicole Oliver, who’s an actress I had known from Toronto, is in the movie, too. We’ve been friends for 25 years but had sort of lost touch, and this project brought us back together again, which was wonderful...
Amanda Tapping from Random Acts of Romance
