This past Saturday I attended I-Con, one of the biggest science fiction conventions on the East Coast, which is renowned for snagging major guests from the world of film and TV. This year's big name was Jamie Bamber, aka Lee "Apollo" Adama on Battlestar Galactica. On the day before the long-awaited finale of Season Three, Jamie sat down with me and a handful of other entertainment journalists to talk about his character, his work on the show, and more.

On the season finale of Battlestar Galactica:

JB: I haven't seen it. I know what we shot, but what's in, I don't know. ... The writers and producers and the cast, we're all saying that this is the best thing that we've ever done and we're all deeply excited. ... From my character's point of view, it's definitely the most interesting thing I've ever shot, and my character's put in a very interesting predicament .... It was a lot of fun to shoot, and I had quite a lot of hand in the writing of it as well, so it's something that's interesting to me on that level. When I found out who [the Final Five Cylons] were, I was blown away. I actually knew there were four, not five ... there is a fifth, but it's still up for grabs.

On the challenges of playing Lee:

JB: The greatest challenge is to tread the line between appearing vaguely sanctimonious or priggish -- he's a character of conscience, he's very aware of his responsibility and how he's perceived, and I think in this day and age, that's not the kind of heroism that we respond to. We're much more into the cavalier, renegade hero than the self-effacing hero, which he is, and the challenge is to try and keep it interesting. To put an element of danger in there, or an element of his being on this conflicted journey that he's on. I do go on the [online] boards about once a week when the show's airing, and as long as there's a debate about whether he's admirable and you want to be like him, as well as a flip side with some people going, "No, he's a whiny freak, and he needs a good slapping, and he doesn't have balls," or whatever, then I know I've done my job, because that's sort of the realm in which our show works best, when characters polarize opinion. The challenge is to keep the hero interesting, and it's an old-fashioned heroism his character embodies.

You know, I think he's quite like me, to be honest.

There are times when it's tough. What's hardest is to not have him be a recurring record that just repeats himself all the time. A lot of his themes are the same kind of themes. Clashing with his dad, either being attracted to or getting exasperated with Starbuck, his difficult relationship with Tigh and the president ... they kind of repeat themselves. Which I think is true to life -- most people's relationships are like that, relationships with your parents or siblings tend to work in circles. We don't change that dramatically over our lives. But these people are living through extraordinary circumstances, and I think Lee, perhaps more than any character in the show, has really grown up during this arc of the story. It's one thing that I'm proudest of that we've done, he's sort of growing with me. He was quite an adolescent, I think, at the very beginning, and now I definitely think -- you can tell me what you think after Sunday -- but I think he's definitely got his own voice and he stands on his own two feet and he's a different, different creature, much more self-confident and much more comfortable in his skin.

On playing the tense relationship between Apollo and Adama:

JB: The thing about those two characters is that everything that they do is so full of love. Everything. So when they are horribly insensitive to each other, it's because of the love that they feel. Because they're not very good at expressing it, because they haven't had that kind of time. We've worked out more and more about their backstory and how problematic and difficult and awkward a place they actually come.

Last week's scene where Lee takes off his wings and sticks them down on the desk and says he's done, and he won't serve with someone he doesn't respect ... the writers were really expecting it to be really full of histrionics, they wanted me to really explode and to finally snap. And I was like, No, they've done that. This is Lee becoming a man again, this is a course of action that he has no choice but to follow. Eddie [Edward James Olmos] and I have a huge affection for each other -- he's kind of my dad in America, on many different levels. He's a mentor of mine, and I hope to be working with him for many, many years. And so I think we bring all that, and when we fall out it's quite awkward because we end up not talking to each other for most of the day, and it's quite weird. We always remember that these two characters love each other and that's the main thing -- and that's where the pain comes from when they're not talking to each other.

On the story arcs of Season Three:

JB: I was extremely proud of the work that the writers put in at the beginning of the season, because it was an area we hadn't been to before. [The characters] were building a town and a society, and the little insight that you got into the way the workers were treated, I thought it was a really bold move, and I remember being a bit worried about whether we could actually pull that off, because the image of the show that you have in your mind is the ragtag fleet floating on in space, desperately running from the Cylons. ... I was equally thrilled by the boldness with which [the writers] dealt with the suicide bombing, and the stuff like that, which is very controversial. But where our show does that and causes column inches to be written and people to be shocked, I think that's when we're all happy. When people are outraged at what we're doing then we're doing something right.

They're not particularly heavy episodes for [Apollo], but when I watched [the New Caprica episodes], I was blown away. They're some of my favorite episodes -- the New Caprica segment of the story was one of the strongest. And I really enjoyed what Eddie and I were doing on the battleships -- basically entropying and decaying, you know, up in space with nothing to do and feeling entirely emasculated and cut off, [dealing with] the purposelessness of being a military force without any teeth. Very, very interesting in today's world, where most of our militaries are hugely downsized and professional soldiers in the U.K. and the U.S., all over the world, feel very much like a bit of an anachronism a lot of the time. The last few years have changed that slightly but, you know, they haven't been a very successful few years in terms of the military, even when they were asked to go somewhere and do something, they haven't felt well used and they haven't felt really kept abreast by the politicians. It's very hard to find a good fight anymore, like there used to be. That whole Caprica thing reflected that kind of difficult, dark world, where your moral compass is thrown wobbling and you don't really know what's right anymore and people make strange decisions which they believe to be right at the time and then in hindsight .... "Collaborators" was one of my favorite episodes, dealing with the ramifications of what went on down there, and the confusion. The difficulty it is to find certainties in that kind of environment.

Tomorrow, in Part II, Jamie talks about the similarities between himself and Lee, working with Richard Hatch (the original Apollo), Lee's future romantic prospects, and more.

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