Morgan
Weisser reveals how he decided to go West with the cast of Space: Above
and Beyond... When it came to the character of Lieutenant Nathan
West, Randy Stone, Fox Television's vice president of talent and casting
chose Morgan Weisser, whom Stone envisioned as a young Montgomery Clift.
Although he felt the actor was perfect for the role it took a bit of convincing
to bring Weisser around. "Randy knew me from the television movies I'd done and some of my other work, so he wanted me to come in and read for the show," recalls Weisser. "I thought the pilot script was good but I wasn't crazy about the character of Nathan West. I actually wanted the part of Cooper Hawkes, the In-Vitro, but Rodney Rowland had already been cast. Randy said, 'Look, the script is being worked on. The Nathan West character is going to be different. He'll have more of an edge. I can't take no for an answer. Come in and read.'
"So I met with him and Glen Morgan, one of the producers and creators of the show, and he really thought I was right for the part. After Glen saw me I had to then read in front of the network executives, which is always an interesting experience. It's almost like you're doing a stage play in front of all these suits," laughs the actor.
"Glen and Jim Wong, his fellow creator-producer, and Randy were pushing for me to get the part. After I auditioned I started to walk out and Randy called after me to stick around. Unfortunately, all I heard was, 'Good job' and I left. Another executive was coming to join the group and to see us all audition again but I didn't catch that bit, so I went home. They were scrambling around and Randy was yelling, 'Where is he?' I had to come in the next morning, after having barely slept, and read for them again. That was that. I got the part and we left for Australia to begin filming the pilot."
Training School
In the show's pilot Nathan West is prevented at the last minute from joining his girlfriend Kylen on one of the first missions to colonize a planet. When the colony is destroyed in an alien attack West decides the only way to find Kylen is to join the space academy. Along with a group of new cadets, he is sent into battle against this unknown adversary. From the start Weisser found that life in Space is not all that it is cracked up to be.
"There's a scene in the pilot where the 58th Squadron is at a bar and we have a fight with another group known as The Angry Angels. They filled the set with this smoke which we had to work in for two days. There was a lot of physical activity, so we were breathing in this stuff even more. At the end of the first day I was pretty worn out and by the next day I felt plain lousy," he says. "I don't know what that smoke was but in general I don't think it's good to breathe in anything like that for very long. I got a lung infection which turned into an eye infection and finally an ear infection. I woke up one day and my eyes were sealed shut. Luckily, I didn't have to work for a few days and it got better but it was tough trying to get through that and do my job as well as living in a different country.
Total Nutter
Despite his war wounds filming the pilot, Weisser enjoyed his Down Under experience, and in particular working with David Nutter, who directed thia dn other episodes. "He's a funny guy and a real character. David has a rare talent for setting a mood and sticking to it," explains Weisser. "He's done some of the best episodes of The X-Files. He has a wonderful sense of creepiness and is very imaginative when it comes to the placing of the camera. You can really see this creativity bursting forth when you watch him at work.
"I remember we kept making jokes about all these hero shots David was taking of the three of us - Rodney, Kristen Cloke [Shane Vansen] and myself," laughs the actor. "He'd have us look up into the sky and then do these fancy camera movements around us. We'd kid him about this all the time. David's a great guy to work with. He's always up-beat and has lots of good ideas."
Teething Troubles
When Space: Above & Beyond first came on the air critics and audiences were especially hard on Weisser, whose character was hardly the dish of the day.
"Part of the reason why I wasn't attracted to my character early on was that he was a little soft for my taste," says Weisser. "Really what West represented was one side of Glen Morgan, which is the idealistic man with a lot of heart who really wants to believe in something. On the flip side I feel Rodney Rowland's character of Hawkes was the punk rebel, which is also a side of Glen. He has all these traits in him but they were split between the two characters.
"So I was playing this squeaky clean young guy who had to deliver a lot of this flowery writing. It made things tricky because your'e not playing a whole character. You're playing a cliché.
"After the first couple of episodes the feedback I think they were getting from the test screenings, which I don't place much faith in but the studios do because they're selling something, was that my character was not well liked at all. From what I could understand they thought West was too wimpy or sensitive. So Glen and Jim, I feel, made a concerted effort to turn things around and give West more of an edge and come up with storylines other than, 'Oh, I miss my girlfriend. Woe, is me.'
"As the series went on my character developed a good story arc and, as far as I was concerned, by the end I'd redeemed the character and felt good about my work."
Episodic Revival
One episode Weisser credits for helping to change the direction of his character is Stay With the Dead in which West is brought back to his mothership, the Saratoga, having apparently been the lone survivor of an attack on the 58th. This provided him with the chance to get down to some serious acting.
"There was a shake-up with the crew just before we began filming this episode and they let some of the camera operators go," says Weisser. "It was sad because I liked the people that left but I also understood why this happened. It was getting a little too relaxed on the set. There's nothing wrong with having fun but when you're spending two million dollars per story the network needed all of us to really focus our attention on the show. So some changes were made. We all had to get a bit more serious and this helped me to fully concentrate on the job at hand. Stay With the Dead was a great experience and a big turning point for the show as well as for myself.
"Another episode that really stands out for me is Who Monitors the Birds. Early on Glen and Jim had talked about doing a story without any dialogue so they finally decided to just go for it. They took a chance and were able to pull it off. These two episodes helped to break some of the misconceptions surrounding the show. First it was, 'It's Space:90210,' then 'Melrose Space' or other assorted jokes where people would say, "Oh, here are the pretty boys and girls playing at being Marines.' We were always fighting against that image by trying to do something a bit different and often we did."
On-Set Friction
A third episode that remains memorable for the actor but for an entirely different reason is Sugar Dirt in which the Chigs get the upper hand. "There's a scene where we think we've taken over the planet and suddenly the aliens attack," recalls Weisser. "There are planes cartwheeling and exploding all over the tarmac and then this huge gasoline explosion goes off behind us and we have to dive into this hole.
"The first time we did this there was too much direct around and you couldn't really see a lot. On the second take the squibs [fireworks] went off too quickly and blew up in our faces, so we were blinded as we jumped into the pit. All of a sudden the wind shifted and blew the heat wave of the explosion directly over the pit. So we were basically in a frying pan. I thought I was on fire. Joel de la Fuente [Paul Wang] was hitting my back because I was screaming and I actually got the least of it. Joel's ear or neck was burned and so was Kristen's ear. It was scary but it's scenes like this that made the show all the more real."
Comradeship
Something else that lent a further sense of realism was the strong camaraderie that held the 58th Squadron together and which helped them function as an efficient fighting force. This friendship was present off-screen as well.
"I think going on location to Australia to film the pilot was good for us," says the actor. "We all lived together in this apartment/condo complex and took trips together when we got time off. So we really knew each other very well by the time we came home to do the series. There's wasn't any ego crap going on around the set. Of course, we'd have spats every now and then but it was more like fighting with your brother or sister than anything serious."
Spaced Out
Space: Above and Beyond became a casualty of low ratings. After spending a year shuffled in and out of time slots and being pre-empted more than once, the series was taken off the air in the spring of 1996. Weisser was in Europe when he heard of the show's demise.
"First of all to put the series on Sunday nights at seven, I think, was a horrible choice," says Weisser. "It wasn't that type of show for that time of night, at least after the pilot. I think why Fox loved the pilot so much is because it really was like Top Gun but in Space, which is what they wanted it to be. Glen and Jim were not going to do a show like that. This was obvious after the first couple of stories. It had a much darker feel to it, similar to The X-Files. The problem you deal with in this type of situation is you have the studio and its executives who are always trying to mould the programme into what they want it to be.
"So when marketing the show they never gave people a sense of what Space: Above and Beyond was really about. By the end of the season they were trying to drum up more viewers by doing cheesy almost Melrose Place-type of things to sell the sex and youth of the programme. Anyone who's going to be attracted to that will tune in out of curiosity to watch. Hopefully, they'd be drawn in by something they saw but in the end they wouldn't find what they were actually looking for.
"If you don't start off big ang et the ball rolling early on it's going to be a struggle and we struggled all along," he says. "I mean, we did better than any other show in that time slot with the football lead-ins, which were a blessing as well as a curse, but in the end it was seven o'clock on a Sunday night. Who the hell is going to be sitting at home watching television, especially this time of show?
"Of course, we were also moved around a great deal towards the end of the season. If your own fans can't find you that's a serious problem. What I've now heard is that a lot of people at Fox are scratching their heads because the series has made a pile of money for them overseas. I still get fan mail from all over the world. Space: Above & Beyond seems to have been successful everywhere but here," notes the actor.
"There was a lot of politics going on too," he adds. "Peter Roth, who is now the head of broadcasting, did a lot to get our show started. I think he was put in his new position a few months after we were cancelled. If he had been in that job a bit earlier perhaps we might be working now. So it's just one of those things."
Setting Out
Long before travelling into Outer Space to battle extraterrestrials Weisser considered becoming a photo journalist or professional skateboarder. After spending a year in college he decided to take some time off to pursue his acting career and has not stopped working since. He made his television début in the NBC television movie-of-the-week Extreme Close-Up.
"This was one of the first of what has turned into many sensitive young man roles for me," recalls the actor. "I played a troubled kid trying to cope with his mother's insanity and eventual suicide. I'm in almost every scene so it was a real run through the washer and very challenging."
The actor has also guest-starred on popular television series China Beach, Crime and Punishment, Law & Order and in The X-Files he played Lee Harvey Oswald. Weisser has also appeared in the variety of feature films and stage productions including the starring role in Being at Home with Claude which won him a Los Angeles Critics Circle Award.
Although he occasionally experienced a bumpy ride on Space: Above and Beyond Weisser has fond memories of his work on the series and the time with his co-stars. He feels particularly satisfied that he received more than just a pay-cheque from the show. "I learned a lot," he says.
"At first I made some mistakes as did the writers. I won't take all the blame but I will take a good chunk of it. Because of the writing and my type of sensibility as an actor I may have gone too far in playing the sensitive, moral, upstanding hero. I could have taking it upon myself to give Nathan West more of an edge so as not to make him too wishy-washy." <
Wilder West?
"If I'd gone against the writing more perhaps it would have worked better but I didn't and I think that's what probably turned viewers off about my character in the beginning. Although I might not have succeeded in initially giving viewers a character whom they could relate to I think I was, however, able to later create for them someone with far more dimension. By the end Nathan West had finally become a solid, well-rounded, and interesting individual who, sadly, didn't get to live on.
"I have no regrets. Looking back on Space:Above and Beyond I'm pretty proud of the programme and what I did on it as well as everyone else who helped make it all happen," proclaims Weisser.
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