We are privileged to welcome actor and author Lou Diamond Phillips LIVE to Dial the Gate to explore his experience aboard Destiny (and its seed ship) as “Colonel Telford” and to dig into the sequel to his TINDERBOX book series, “Underground Movement.”

Share This Video ► https://youtube.com/live/7ItPOlZBEjM

Visit DialtheGate ► http://www.dialthegate.com
on Facebook ► https://www.facebook.com/dialthegate
on Instagram ► https://instagram.com/dialthegateshow
on Twitter ► https://twitter.com/dial_the_gate
Visit Wormhole X-Tremists ► https://www.youtube.com/WormholeXTremists

MERCHANDISE!
http://www.dialthegate.com/merch

SUBSCRIBE!
https://youtube.com/dialthegate/

Timecodes
Coming Soon!

***

“Stargate” and all related materials are owned by MGM Studios and MGM Television.

#Stargate
#DialtheGate
#TurtleTimeline

TRANSCRIPT
Find an error? Submit it here.

David Read:
Welcome everyone to Episode 333 of Dial the Gate. The Stargate Oral History Project. I’m David Read. Welcome to the show. I have been looking forward to this one for a long time. Lou Diamond Phillips played Colonel David Telford in two seasons of Stargate Universe. He has an extensive list of credits which speak for themselves but more recently he has become an author as well. And his series, The Tinderbox, is available everywhere, in multiple forms, particularly audiobook, which is the version that I prefer. And last year, the second book in the series, Underground Movement, was released. I just finished it last week, and I’m really looking forward to talking with him about it. Mr. Phillips, hello, sir. Welcome to the show. I’ve really been looking forward to having you.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Thank you. And your last name certainly encapsulates your being. You are a person who reads.

David Read:
Listens. I actually don’t care to read very [much]. I’m an oral learner so if there’s ever an audiobook that comes along, I’m mostly a non-fiction reader, but this one grabbed me. I have to say, as soon as I heard that you were getting into writing your first novel, when it became available for pre-order on Amazon, I was one of the first who signed up.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Wow.

David Read:
And it’s been such a refreshing… How do I wanna put this? It’s been so refreshing to go in and watch, and read material that doesn’t take itself extremely seriously, that isn’t pounding it in, like, “I have something to say,” that I can go in and dip in and out of it. It’s like Star Wars where it’s almost like a high fantasy but with the sci-fi elements built into it. And I didn’t realize how long this has been brewing with you. This goes way back years.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Yeah. And you’re right. I’ve described it on occasion as Game of Thrones meets Star Wars. Because its roots certainly are in fantasy. And that’s also why we try to define it as sci-fi fantasy. What’s funny is that once it was being published and we were listening to other people, editors, agents, publishers, all of that, it’s, like, “This is a great YA novel.” I’m, like, “I didn’t really set out to write a YA novel,” much as I’m sure Shakespeare didn’t think Romeo and Juliet was a YA novel. But I just wrote it. And the funny thing is, is that it was 10 years in the making. The first book. Soldier of Indira was about 10 years in the making. When my wife, Yvonne, and I first got together, and we’ve been together 20 years now, you’re getting to know one another and… Thank you. I know that’s an accomplishment.

David Read:
It is in and of itself, these days especially. But she’s [an] amazing artist.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Unbelievable. I am gonna take a little bit of credit for getting her back into her drawing because she had abandoned it for a while. So, getting to know each other, I got to see her artwork and she got to read some of my writing. And all of a sudden, this is something that did not present itself immediately, at first blush so to speak. And I saw some frames that she had done. She was gonna do a graphic novel version in manga style of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Tinderbox. And I was, like, “This is a movie.” And she went, “Great. Go ahead. Write it.” So, this is prior to Game of Thrones. So, I decided to set it in space because if I’m gonna write a movie, I wanted to be somewhat commercial.

David Read:
Was this before Universe?

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Yes, actually. So, I started dabbling with it, and off and on, I thought, “Man, am I doing this?” Now, to back up even further, I wanted to be a writer in my early teens before I wanted to be an actor. I wrote a very, very, very bad Stephen King rip-off in high school, and I’m actually currently working on a third book, which is not in the Tinderbox series [but] something I wrote in college, which, as you said earlier, I was a know-it-all 20-year-old. I’ve learned a little humor to not be as pedantic and as really kind of, you know, trying to get my message across. So, I think that’s benefited a lot from the time. But, getting back into narrative writing after years of doing plays and screenplays and whatnot was a bit of a challenge. And so, I would write off and on because my day job kept getting in the way. And it wasn’t until Longmire, when I’d written, like, four or five chapters, that I turned to Craig Johnson, the author of the Longmire series, of mystery novels, of which there are like 20 now, and I said, “Would you mind reading something that I’m working on, and let me know if I’m wasting my time?”

David Read:
Yeah. “Don’t BS me. Be serious about this.”

Lou Diamond Phillips:
100 percent. Because I’m taking… I’ve been pursuing this. And he read it, and he goes, “No, no, no. You have to finish this. You really have to finish this.” And I think in the acknowledgements I also point out that it was Craig’s idea to magnetize the broadswords. He goes, “I’ve never seen this. Let’s do this.” I went, “Hey, that’s great.” And it also becomes a really good plot device in the sequel as well.

David Read:
Right, exactly.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
So, I went along with finishing it. It took me a couple more years after that. And then, I have to say that once I finished it, really the other great piece of advice and help I got was from a dear friend Chris Bohjalian, who was the author of The Flight Attendant, and he has The Jackal’s Mistress out right now. And once again, multiple, multiple New York Times Best Selling author. And he read it and loved it and gave it to his agent because I didn’t have a literary agent at the time. And, interestingly enough, Deborah Schneider had tried to sell my original book that I wrote almost 30 years ago. I actually wrote it 40 years ago in college and then did a brush up on it when I got to Hollywood, and now I’m brushing up on it yet again for years.

David Read:
OK. So, this is the one you’re cleaning up a little bit.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Yeah.

David Read:
Is this… For people who have enjoyed these books, is this something they’ll find accessible or are you going 90 degrees?

Lou Diamond Phillips:
90. It is an absolute 90. It is not sci-fi; it is not fantasy. It is… I could be fantastical to a certain extent but it’s very pantheistic and it’s very philosophical, and once again, my literary touchstones reveal themselves, very obviously, many times. And this book is most definitely a stab at Richard Bach, who I loved when I was in college, and even prior to that. So, Illusions… God, what’s the full title? Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. Jonathan Livingston Seagull. That sort of thing that is unabashedly philosophical and self-reflective. I am, as I said, a lot more entertaining when I was 20. I was as, “Brother, you’re a hot man, shouting in the street, going to make a big noise someday.”

David Read:
There’s nothing wrong with that. But you benefit from having found more facets within your own voice and sharpening your perspective, as it were, and then sending this out into the world a little bit later in your life as opposed to some people who start really early, and, like, “Well, it’s published but it’s not that great. But at least it’s something. Now I have to work on it even…” You’ve had a chance to… You’ve been refining through your various arts that you have been working through.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
I think that’s a great point David. People always ask me, “What do you like better?” And my stock answer is always, “My favorite genre is the genre of employment.” But I’m also somebody that I can’t sit around and do nothing. But being an actor and being a writer and a director and to a certain extent a producer, I look at them as all branches of the same creative tree. And if I was to pick one moniker, it would be storyteller. And how do I channel that? What is the avenue by which I’m gonna tell you these stories. Am I interpreting as an actor? Am I creating it as a director or a writer? It’s very exciting. And it’s very exciting that I’ve been able to, at this point in my life, really embrace each one of those different platforms.

David Read:
I had a Canadian actor by the name of Shane Meyer a few weeks ago and we specifically talked about challenges that many actors who have come on this channel have expressed in terms of, they have their niche in television or film, maybe stage, but they’re kind of nervous and going off in other directions there. Whereas Shane, he started… He has a storefront and a clothing line. And he found the creativity within it. As long as he was creating something, he found that his passion as a storyteller could come in so many different forms. And here you are expressing yourself in the novels, which is great. And I’d like to insert here, to kind of wet people’s whistle, who haven’t explored it… My dad’s favorite novel is Dune. I found it much later after the sci-fi channel did an adaptation of it in 2000. And the book was very inaccessible, in terms of the language, and had I not seen the miniseries, I wouldn’t have jumped into it as I did. I’m brought back again and again to Dune in reading The Tinderbox, especially the first one, in terms of the imagery, a wasteland, as Yvonne talked about. Very dystopian. But the text, and I tried to bring this up in the post that I did yesterday online, the text is not inaccessible. What you’ve done is, [you] made something that when I’m reading this, I’m not reading young adult. I’m not reading like Harry Potter book four. I’m reading something that anyone can really just pick up and go with and read a couple of chapters here and there and set it down, if they can manage to sit it down, based on the schedule, and just keep going with it. You’ve, I think, bridged not just genres but age groups it terms of piece of entertainment that works in book form, and maybe could hopefully get adopted in some other form. That’s the next question that I wanted to ask.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Well, it’s funny because, as I said, I originally thought this was gonna be a movie. And so, I did… I wrote the screenplay, and I got to the end of the screenplay, and I went, “Holy shit, this is so expensive. Nobody’s giving me this much money to direct it.” It was… I would be a very, very expensive sci-fi movie. But my manager then said, “Well, write the book. Create the whole world, put your stamp on it, and then if James Cameron wants to buy it, you’re good.” So that’s how I set about writing the book. The funny thing is, now all of a sudden it is firmly in the sci-fantasy world. And the first thing Yvonne says, because she’s got to illustrate it, she goes, “I don’t do sci-fi. I don’t draw spaceships. I don’t draw weird animals.” And she really got out of her comfort zone. And what’s beautiful is that we always looked at Stardust, Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, with Charles Vess, or Alice in Wonderland with the amazing Tenniel drawings, and leaned toward that German woodcut which was her background. That was what she did growing up. Meets kind of a steampunk kind of a graphic novel flare. And that’s kind of describes or encapsulates the illustrations of the first book. In the second book, I was sort of amazed with where she went because she was using markers a lot more. And so, she did… She used markers but in a grayscale that may even be more graphic novel oriented than the first one. And it’s absolutely beautiful. But now that I’ve written both books, especially the first one where I took the screenplay and I expanded on it, and it was, like, “Oh, OK. He’s thinking this. Why don’t I write a scene about that?” And building up supporting characters and whatnot and building up the backstories of some of these people, getting into the different motivations of the supporting characters, all of whom I love. So now, I really do believe that if it ever gets filmed, the proper way to do that would be a series. I think a 10-part series, and right now I have two seasons of it.

David Read:
Wow. Yeah, exactly right. What is the Tinderbox in your estimation? We find out in the second book the nature of who created it, but I’ve read both of these and I’m still not entirely sure what it is. And part of me thinks that it could be sentient. You suggest that one line a little bit there that there may be something going on. I wonder if it’s conscious. It seems to appear to have a will of its own and alliances but I really gotta ask, Lou, does it ever run out of matches?

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Right? Exactly.

David Read:
Does it make more inside itself? It never ran out.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
That’s very funny. That’s some of the magic to it. The alchemy and the whole idea that there are other metaphysical forces going on.

David Read:
You’ve got a MacGuffin up there akin to the Ark of Covenant in palm size form.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Oh my God, I can’t believe you said that.

David Read:
It fits here.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
That’s exactly what I was thinking about.

David Read:
You open it up to your peril.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Exactly.

David Read:
You may get a warrior to come out. You may get some kind of probe device come out. You may get a Stargate to come out.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
And it’s judged you. It has prejudged you. And so, there’s more of that without giving too much away. But yeah, a major plot twist in the second one that reveals that it perhaps, like AI, can regenerate itself or generate other life force or whatever else, and a real, I think, reveal about Rex, the second dog.

David Read:
There’s some backstory reveal there that was, like, when I got to the end of it, I was, like, “I can’t leave it at that. We have to have a third.” Which is interesting because it says, again, “This is a standalone book,” which I really thought of it as, “This is a firm Part Two,” but evidently, I think you… Are you trying to say that you’re… In the future keeping it more open-ended in terms of, “I may tell a story if I come back to this way earlier. I’m gonna… I’m allowing myself to go other places.”

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Yeah. Once again, it was the publisher, and bless them, they’ve been fantastic. They’ve been absolutely wonderful, and I have to say, Rhett Bruno, who edited the first one, really, really helped bridge the disciplines of writing screenplays or stage plays to writing a narrative. He gave me some read fundamentals that I think really sharpened up the whole story. But it was, once again, the publishers, “We’re gonna call this a standalone,” even though a lot of the characters repeat and some of my favorites come back, in addition to introducing some new ones. But it can stand alone but it does build upon feelings and arcs from the first book. So, reading the second one certainly would benefit from having read the first.

David Read:
Oh, for sure.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
And, I’ll be honest, it’s, like, we always hoped that there would be a second book. And because of people like you, the first book did so well, it was so well received…

David Read:
And right at the perfect time with COVID and everything else. It could not come at a better time, man.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
And with sales and whatnot, and many people who said, “I would like to revisit this universe,” Yvonne and I really set out sights on doing a second one. But what was interesting, we thought, “OK. We’ll raid the fairy tale world again,” with twins and whatnot. There’s lots and lots of source material there. But I couldn’t quite get my head wrapped around it. And then one day Yvonne said, “What about this?” And she laid out the plot of the second book, which is why she gets the story credit on the cover because it was her idea. And so, once again, her drawing was the inspiration for the first book. It was her idea to go the direction we did. And so, by doing a time jump and introducing another threat, a different threat…

David Read:
But not completely out of the ordinary.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
What I love about it…

David Read:
It exists based on the universe that’s been established, the cracked planet.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
It really felt to me as if she pulled this plot from between the lines of the first book because it makes all the sense in the world. And, as you said, it expands on the premise that we introduce in the first book.

David Read:
Like many titles, underground movement is a multi-layered term here, and I have one more… I wanna trumpet you one more time before I get into Stargate Universe. We’ll circle back around to this at the end. The thing that I was so surprised with, you get us used to something in the story, and then you pull out the rug out from under us. There’s an explosion, an implied explosion fairly early on in the second book, and I was, like, “He did not just do that.”

Lou Diamond Phillips:
I know.

David Read:
And then it’s, like, “He may have. He may have done that.” Later on, because it’s very much a MacGuffin, this device, the Tinderbox. I’m thinking… You’re set up at a certain point to think they can deploy this thing, and it will protect them under any circumstance. In the climax of this book, which was a very interesting choice, I don’t even know if you’re consciously aware of it or not, it’s not in the climax. There’s a quake, and people are gonna get something, and it’s not there when it could have saved something from happening. That was a very interesting take where you really put this heroin in this particular circumstance to test her own metal. You don’t give her the crutch of having this device with her.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Exactly.

David Read:
And she has to make a call that will change her life forever.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Yes.

David Read:
Was that a deliberate choice?

Lou Diamond Phillips:
100 percent. And in the beta read, a lot of people were asking me why it’s Indigo. Named after my daughter. Our daughter.

David Read:
The princess.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Is Princess Indigo. Yes. There are so many easter eggs through both books, by the way. Princess Allegra is from the Allegra Café that Yvonne and I had our first date in.

David Read:
That’s great. Her mother.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Yeah, exactly. So, in the beta read, a lot of people were saying, “Well, why doesn’t her brother go with her?” And it’s, like… Well, if you look at the arc of that character, she needs that moment of reckoning. She needs that trial by fire. Her arc, it’s necessary for her to go through this and to deal with this alone, like many great heroes. Like her father did in the first book. It cannot be easy. And there has to be a price to pay for heroism. And so, because how else do you define a hero?

David Read:
Sooner or later, the hero must stand alone. They have help along the way but eventually it’s just them and fate.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Exactly. And that’s why also, interestingly enough, presented the premise the Tinderbox only works on Mono.

David Read:
That we know of, yeah.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
That we know of. Which is something that I am toying with dealing with in a potential third book. And I have a concept of a concept, but I have not wrapped my head around how to do that just yet. So, I’m waiting for my wife to have another epiphany.

David Read:
And Mono, for the folks listening, it’s half of a planet.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Yes.

David Read:
That was split apart. They drifted… I don’t know if they’re still within each other’s orbit technically, but they follow along the same path.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
It’s mentioned in the first book that they are gravitationally connected to one another. Not so close that it’s easy to get from one to the other.

David Read:
Exactly.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Because in the first book only the Endurance has space travel. But they orbit one another even as they orbit their twin suns.

David Read:
Yeah. There’s a lot of parallels. There’s a lot of duologies. There’s a lot of dyads.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Exactly.

David Read:
If you’re listening, I haven’t put the link below yet, but I will in the description afterwards. Go and check it out. The books are available everywhere online. I recommend the audiobook, but you don’t get Yvanna’s art. So, I’m gonna go out and pick them up just to have a look at the art. Lou, Stargate Universe in many respects is my favorite of the three series. And this is kind of what I do. I had a friend who made… This is a spinning Stargate.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Nice.

David Read:
That actually works except for the puddle. This is easily my favorite ship that was ever created for the show. James CD Robbins did a great job.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
It’s gorgeous.

David Read:
It’s amazing. There’s no ship like it. And then my buddy William Murphy made me this custom clock based on the countdown clock, particularly used in Season One. When you look back on this show, what kind of memories does it leave you? Let’s start there.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Like anything… First of all, yes. And I’ve had sadly the experience of something that I’ve loved getting cut short. We can go back to Wolf Lake, which I thought was a fantastic show ahead of its time. Stargate Universe only getting two seasons. A recent absolute favorite of mine, Prodigal Son, only getting two seasons. And it’s the corporate mentality or whatever reason, I don’t know what it is, that creatively forces them to pull the rug out from under us. It’s always such a shame. And so, once again I think Stargate Universe was killed in its infancy just when it was really starting to click. And I think when the fan base, who at first were not…

David Read:
Reticent.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Yeah. They were not warm to it. Because it was such a shift tonally from the other versions of the franchise. It was darker, it was grittier, it was heady and intellectual. People who were Battlestar Galactica fans and my dear friend Katee Sackhoff, and Eddie Olmes, they… There were, I think, unfair comparisons to that. But I think people were really warming to it. And I loved that cast. My goodness, what an amazingly accomplished cast. And I’m still very close to number of people in that cast. So, we had a fantastic time doing the show. And what’s fun is that Telford was recurring. He’s not in every episode. I was never a regular. But it was through the first season where the fans really responded to him, as much of a prick as he was.

David Read:
He had his reasons for that. But he was the one who was supposed to go. And instead, he’s fighting in the F-302 to save as many as possible. What an arc for that guy. I just…

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Amazing arc, and it was gonna continue. He was gonna, like we talked about earlier, embrace his inner hero in the third season. I had already been given the broad strokes. Telford was gonna be their hope on Earth. He was not gonna let go getting Destiny back.

David Read:
Wow.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
I think come to a really great understanding between him and Young. And so that character evolved over the two seasons. At one point, I had to turn to the writers and say, “Have I done something to piss you off? Did I park in your space? Because you’ve killed Telford now four times.”

David Read:
Oh, man. Did you ask them early on in Season… In the first season, or at some point there… You guys have had such support over with the US Air Force over the years, “Why is this Colonel such a prick?” Did they tell you, “He’s under mind control,” or are they, like, “Just keep playing it?”

Lou Diamond Phillips:
No. They were… They didn’t tell me because I think you don’t want that little nugget to leak through in somebody’s performance. And I played a lot of bad guys, and you always have to say, “OK. The bad guy is the hero of his own story, and you cannot hold them at arms distance, and you have to embrace their world view.” So, in the beginning I had to play Telford as blunt and as tough as he was written. And then to get the script, it’s, like, “Oh, he’s under mind… Ah. Yeah.” It was such a relief to suddenly start lighting up.

David Read:
Well, it gave you a chance to play it a little differently in the second season and actually shows that these two colonels were allies. And everything that’s happened between… Wife, for crying out loud. I mean, come on. Some of these scenes here are rather intense.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
One of the most, if not the most interesting love scenes I have ever done.

David Read:
Yeah. “Hold on just a second. Hyperspace, incoming call. Yeah, this is your husband. Oh, gotta go.” And it’s over.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
And we’re having a virtual ménage à trois. Nice.

David Read:
I had a friend who wanted to know. His name is Kersten. He actually met you at the convention a few weeks ago where he brough up Dial the Gate. And thank you, Kersten, for making this possible. He said… What was it? Do you think the character felt like he just couldn’t get his hold on the ship. He’s there a little bit, then he gets left behind on Earth yet again. At least a version of him does. Do you think at a certain point the universe is telling him, “This is just not working out. We don’t want you on this ship?”

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Yeah, it’s like the second-string quarterback or the relief pitcher. “I can win this game. Just put me in, coach.”

David Read:
That’s right.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
And his selflessness does come out. He is ultimately a good guy. Although I do admit one of my favorite episodes was getting stuck on that seed ship with all the little aliens.

David Read:
The Ursini.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Yeah. They were pretty fabulous.

David Read:
Hold that thought. You’re not gonna be able to hear what I’m about to show and I’ll mute us until it’s back.

Telford:
So, the patient says to the doctor… I said, “Pingpong balls, not King Kong’s balls.” Up high!

Ursini:
Balls! (31:00)

David Read:
So, whose idea was that, Lou?

Lou Diamond Phillips:
So, this is one of the first experiences I had with just a massive amount of CGI and green screen and whatnot. I had done Supernova with James Spader and Angela Bassett, and the wonderful Walter Hill, [and] Peter Facinelli, who I see a lot these days at Cons. But you have to wait time… You have to be there where they get multiple plates where you sort of standing there, “OK, Lou. Let’s get you out of there. OK, let’s put you in there. OK, here are the tennis balls.” And then we even had very small gymnasts in green screen suits moving around. So, there’s multiple, multiple versions of this. And one of those where I’m just standing around, I decided to do that. And Mark Savela, who’s an absolute genius…

David Read:
Brilliant.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
I love this guy so much. Blows my mind what they’re able to do on a television budget. He took it and he ran with it, and it’s one of my favorite outtakes because it didn’t really happen.

David Read:
Well, the thing is, Bruce Woloshyn, who was Rainmaker’s digital effects supervisor for years, was saying, “We love Stargate. We love working on it. We would to have the ship fall over in a shot,” but they just never have time. I you finally made it happen with some of the visual effects. So, this was like a long-running gag that they never had the time to do it, and you made it possible with this cute little scene with this little guy. It’s great stuff. Kersten also wanted to know, was it difficult keeping track of all the different versions of yourself? There’s one back on Earth. There’s one that’s sent this way. There’s one on the Destiny now that’s been twinned, and poor guy gets electrocuted. Was it hard to keep some of that straight?

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Actors are simple people.

David Read:
Very good.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
A lot of times, you just gotta play what’s in front of you. You just have to play the truth of the moment, and where you are. But also, that version of yourself. I had a wonderful opportunity to do that in one of my favorite films of mine, Courage Under Fire, which was very much that Rashomon kind of tell the story from four different points of view or five different points of view. And working with Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan, Matt Damon. It requires you to do your homework. And now that I’m directing a lot more television myself, it just reinforces something that I learned a long time ago in theater. And that is homework you do at home.

David Read:
That’s it.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
So when you get to… And when you get to the set then you start working out all the details and everything else, and all the that changes everything that you’ve worked on. But you must have that foundation to build upon. Otherwise, you’re just parroting lines, and there’s nothing deeper. There’s nothing between the lines. There’s nothing going on behind your eyes when you’re listening to other people interacting. And so, to me, if you’re gonna give a layered performance at all, it really, really requires you to know what’s going on, to know back stories, to know the complexities of everything that’s happening that are beyond step one, which is learning your lines. And to be quite honest, when you’re dealing with something like sci-fi that is so technical and so esoteric, it’s important to know what you’re saying. It’s like doing Shakespeare. “What do I mean when I say this? And what is it that I’m seeing? Please describe this to me in detail.” So that I can be authentic when I’m looking at the green screen, “Oh, look at that!”

David Read:
That’s right. Because fans are gonna expect you to know. And sometimes you can’t know because it doesn’t exist. But you have to look like you believe or think that you know. It has to be there.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
That’s an old acting trick, too, by the way. If you believe it, I’ll believe it.

David Read:
That’s it. For sure. And I just lost it. Janice Jennings wanted to know. Do you have anything from Telford that you took with you? Props? Costume? Did they give you anything.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
No, I did not. And it’s mainly because they pulled the rug out from under us. They… Bless those guys. They literally had to cobble together an ending with like three or four episodes notice. It was terribly unfair.

David Read:
Did you watch the ending?

Lou Diamond Phillips:
What’s that?

David Read:
Did you watch the ending.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Yeah, I saw it all and it’s just, like… They wisely left the door open for us to do a movie or to pick it up at some point but… Maybe they’re gonna have to do a time jump like I did in The Tinderbox, like, “20 years later.”

David Read:
Right. You can keep your gray hair. Everyone else [is] gonna have to CG because they’re all in stasis.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Exactly.

David Read:
I still hold out hope that… Because Brad still has his idea. God know what it is. Were you told anything about Destiny’s mission? Did you ever ask? He’s only told, like, three or four people.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
He did not tell me.

David Read:
He did not tell you.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
He did not. No. But Brad and Rob did tell me that Telford was… I think they were gonna kick me up to being a regular. Even in the second season I was still just recurring. They’re gonna kick me up to be a regular and to be obviously much more engaged on a weekly basis, to get everybody home. So, for that reason alone, I’m disappointed.

David Read:
For sure. I still hold out hope that we’ll learn…

Lou Diamond Phillips:
But no, I didn’t know what the ultimate mission was supposed to be.

David Read:
One of these days, I hope we’ll figure it out. Caroline Fleur… In whatever Brad decides to tell, either… Computer animation has come a long way. That’s what I told him a few years ago. I would love to see it told in like a two or three-hour computer-animated movie or miniseries, and all of you come in and do the voiceover work.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
I’ll be thrilled.

David Read:
Absolutely. Caroline Fleur wants to know, when you started Tinderbox number one, did you feel any kind of pressure to knock it out of the park because you’re already an established celebrity in your own right? You’re already known in other mediums. Was there a concern there that, “I can’t put this thing out until it meets a certain level of my own personal quality,” or are you, like, “Let’s scatter this thing to the wind and see if it sticks with someone?”

Lou Diamond Phillips:
That’s a great question. Thank you, Caroline, and by the way, that’s… A lot of my friends from X are here. I call them the FOLD, the Friends of Lou Diamond. And you thank your friend Kersten as well. The Cons have been wonderful, and the books have been selling really well at the Cons. What’s great about getting the book from me at a Con is not only… Well, I sign it and personalize it but Yvonne’s signature’s in there as well.

David Read:
Hey, there you go. Absolutely.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
The ones I bring to the Con have Yvonne’s signature as well. So, getting back to narrative writing was really, really challenging. And yeah, I was afraid, and maybe that’s why it took me so long to write the first book. Because it’s, like, “Ah, is this good enough?” I had to get Craig Johnson’s approval on that as well. It’s, like, “Am I as good as I think or I hope I am?” I know I’m re-reading the thing I wrote 40 years ago and it’s, like, “Wow. Dude. You’ve come a long way.”

David Read:
Your voice is all different.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
And so, one of the… Even when I look at my screenplay writing or my acting or my directing, it’s just, like… One of my worst fears is to be mediocre. I just don’t wanna do something just to do it. So, no matter how small the role or how independent the project is or what they’re paying me, I gotta bring my A-game every single time. And I really felt as if, if I’m gonna write a book, I have to be proud of it. And by the way, just so people know, I got plenty of rejection letters. I got tons of rejection letters, OK? Just because I’m famous in one arena, [it] doesn’t mean that I’m automatically gonna get an entrée into another. Funny little story. In the movie Ambition, that I wrote but I did not direct, my character is a novelist because I’ve wanted to do this for a long, long time. And that character is burning some rejection letters. Those are copies of the rejection letters I got for the first book I wrote that Deborah Schneider tried to get sold. She’s now my agent and I’m hoping she’s gonna have much better luck the second time round with that.

David Read:
Art does imitate life, doesn’t it?

Lou Diamond Phillips:
Yeah. That was cathartic for me to burn those rejection letters. Penelopy Burns is also… She’s my day-to-day gal. And she’s amazing. She is the first person other than Yvonne to read each book.

David Read:
Wow. You have to have the right people in your back pocket.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
100 percent.

David Read:
Stargate: Seed and Kathiescall wanted to know, “Let’s say the Destiny crew gets rescued in 2025.” Do you think would wanna stay on Earth to help those of the crew who chose to stay behind, or do you think he would wanna be out there on the mission, assisting Colonel Young in some way, shape or form? What do you think he would be wanting to do at this point in his life? Because he’s been a colonel… He’s probably a general by now. Where do you think he would wanna be at this point if it were done now?

Lou Diamond Phillips:
I think, and I think this was the plan quite, honestly… We can look at what’s happening today. We can look at what’s happening in leadership today in whatever administration. FaceTime. FaceTime is incredibly important. And so, to get anything done, to cut through the bureaucracy, I don’t think that Telford could 100 percent be on the Destiny. I think he would have to go back and forth. I think he would have to be in those meetings, looking after that agenda. Otherwise, it would fall through the cracks. Stuff would be happening in boardrooms that he was not in. And so, I think that it would incumbent upon Telford. And he would be savvy enough a politician at this point to know that… Yes, he would try to be helping missions aboard the Destiny, but he would have to go back to command central to make sure that that particular agenda was getting its due.

David Read:
It makes a lot of sense. O’Neill would be retired now. I suspect he would have taken his place at the Pentagon for Homeworld Command. That makes a lot [of sense]. Harvey and Todd The Wraith were also… They were asking, in terms of you becoming a main character, eventually, with the show, that totally stands to reason. I’m thrilled to hear that that was their intent. Because one of the things that Brad said in terms of setting this thing up long term was that he wanted there to be conflict at the beginning, but for them to ultimately work through it with each other and figure things out. And you begin to see that at the turning point for the second half of Season Two, which I think is some of the best sci-fi that has ever been produced. And I’m just getting goosebumps thinking about it with all the lineages, and…

Lou Diamond Phillips:
It was such a solid show, man.

David Read:
Solid. The visual effects. Everything was on their A-game. Everyone was.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
And a cast that… It was a roster of actors’ actors. And, once again, diverse before diverse was cool.

David Read:
Exactly right. There’s a reason that people are coming up to, especially folks like Alaina and some of the others at conventions now, saying, “I get it now. I didn’t then,” but this show was decades ahead of its time in terms of its pacing. It unfolds like a good book. And it is the first act of a three-act play. So, anyone who is on the fence, “Well, it’s unfinished,” go and watch it. It’s full of amazing performances. Lou, I’m not gonna keep you. I would love to have you back to talk about the creative process in terms of creating some of these characters that you grew from the ground up for Tinderbox. I can’t wait to hear more about this “from left field” book that you’ve been developing across your life. I wanna hear more. And please, just continued success for everything that you’re working on. Stand and Deliver is one of my favorite films. I didn’t even touch on that. This is such an important movie in terms of me and my teenage years. That’s where I discovered Eddie, before I even saw Blade Runner. So, very important role. So, it was a pleasure to have you.

Lou Diamond Phillips:
“His body’s decomposing in my locker.”

David Read:
That’s it!

My pleasure, David. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you to the FOLD for showing up to watch. And I encourage people be looking out for me. I’ve still got another half a dozen Con appearances this year. So, please do come up and say hello. I answer whatever questions I can whenever you guys come by. But thanks again, David, for having me.

David Read:
Absolutely. Do they need to bring a physical copy of The Tinderbox or are you selling… You have them there?

Lou Diamond Phillips:
No, I bring the copies myself. I bring copies myself to the…

David Read:
Perfect. I recommend everyone to give the book series a shot, even if you’re not a reader. Lou’s one of ours. So, thank you so much for your time. Hey, there they are right there. Perfect. I can’t wait to see her art. I’m gonna wrap up the show on this end, sir. Thank you so much. Be well. Lou Diamond Phillips, everyone. Colonel David Telford in Stargate Universe, and a terrific author in his own right. I remember being in Florida in, I guess it was 2020, and just reading this first book of his and just being completely blown away by how accessible the material was, and how much it did remind me of books like Dune. I am trying to think of the other one right now. It’s running away from me. But it’s unlike really anything I’ve ever read and yet at the same time it really does hold Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces monomyth. It’s cut right from that cloth, and e very good read. And the second one is just as good. He just expands on his mythology. My tremendous thanks to everyone who wrote in questions for Lou. I’m sorry we couldn’t get to all of them, but I’m thrilled that we had him for the time that we did. If you enjoy Stargate and you wanna see more content like this on YouTube, click that Like button. It really does make a difference with the show and will continue help us grow our audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend, and if you wanna get notified about future episodes, click Subscribe. And clips from this livestream will be released over the course of the next few weeks on both the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. I am thrilled to find out that he was eventually gonna be a regular on the show, and that they had plans to make him more of a hero in his own right, Colonel Telford, based on the position that he was in and what he was doing. Stargate Universe continues to be just one of my favorites sci-fi series all the way around, and it was a pleasure to speak with Lout and discuss it just a little bit. Thanks to my moderators. Anthony, Rawling… Excuse me, yes, Anthony Rawling. Jeremy, Kevin, Lockwatcher, Marsha, Raj, and Jakub, for making this and all the other shows possible on the back end. I couldn’t do the show without you, guys. My producers, Anthony Rawling, Kevin Weaver, Linda GateGabber Fury, and Frederick Marcoux over at ConceptsWeb. He keeps dialthegate.com up and running. We’ve got more shows scheduled for the rest of June and I’m starting to fill in July right now. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. I really appreciate you tuning in and we will see you guys on the other side. Bye-bye.