From his days as the original strong-but-silent Lt. Castillo on TV’s Miami Vice to his current tour of duty as the oft-conflicted commander of the Battlestar Galactica, Edward James Olmos has always made for an imposing authority figure. But when Hollywood.com caught up with him at Comic-Con to talk about Galactica and his new film Splinter, we found him more full of answers than orders.
Hollywood.com: Battlestar Galactica has not only had phenomenal success, the reviews compare it to some of the most dramatic, most honored non-sci-fi series on television. Are you disappointed that the show came up short on Emmy nominations, probably because of the genre?
Edward J. Olmos: Forget it. It’s way beyond them. We’re a Peabody-winning show. The Peabody is like winning the Pulitzer, or winning the Nobel Prize. The only difference between the Nobel and the Pulitzer Prize is that the Nobel Prize gives you $1.25 million with the award. The Pulitzer can’t afford to do that because they don’t have an endowment, but that’s the only difference. But the caliber of the intellectual critique of those awards; Pulitzer, The Nobel Prize, The Peabody – George Foster Peabody – is all in the finest integrity of the usage of the medium. The Pulitzer is writing. The Peabody, it’s usage of electronic medium, radio. That’s where it started 65 years ago: radio. And they don’t have to give any awards out, or they give as many as they want, and there are no categories. It’s just excellence in the usage of the medium and we got it, man. F**king Battlestar Galactica got it. I was like, “Yeah!”
HW: Did you feel that when you first read the original script? Did you look at your character Adama and realize that it was going to be that rich and deep?
EJO: The only thing that I can tell you is this: I knew that the writing was superb. Ron Moore is a great writer. He really knows his shit about writing character and being able to deeply weave character into those stories and in this genre. He would probably be a great dramatic writer all the way around, because that’s what he’s doing. He’s just doing dramatic work now. I read it and I was totally in love with it. So he was willing to go into my aesthetic when I came over and said, “Listen, I don’t want to romanticize the glamour or have gratuitous exploitation of the material, okay? I don’t want to indicate to the viewer how they should feel and I don’t want to play any results. That’s my aesthetic. And I want this to step into the door of where Blade Runner stopped.” That door, no one walked into that world. They all went into Star Wars, the opera, and they went that way. No one walked into that other door, and that door was wide open. No one was walking in and it’s a world that’s dark. But man, it’s ambitious and really driven. As a matter of fact I talked to Ridley [Scott] three weeks ago and he’s re-editing it and they’re going to put it out again as a major motion picture. It’s real nice because now you’re going to really see what’ll happen with that movie.
HW: Anything that you’re looking forward to playing this season on the show?
EJO: Yeah, man, it’s crazy. You’re not going to believe it. I can honestly tell you that the first two seasons do not prepare you for the third. It’s brutal. You’re going to be sorry. It’s like going and switching to CNN right in the middle of the Iraq war, and it’s like, “Boom! What’s going on?” And you hadn’t heard anything. You turn it on and people are dying and things are happening and the reality is hard. You have the same dynamic that’s happening right now, post-9/11.
HW: In Adama, you picked up a role that someone on television had done, before and now with Miami Vice someone has picked up a role that you did on television, Lt. Castillo. What’s that like for you?
EJO: Well, they asked me to do it. I was in Battlestar and I couldn’t do it. I was very lucky that I couldn’t do it. I’ve done that already. I’ve played that character. It wouldn’t have been as affective as it was when a new character came up. People would’ve loved him, they would’ve loved seeing him again because that character was truly a gift. It was a gift.
HW: Prior to signing on to Battlestar Galactica, you appeared in the film Splinter, a serious look at gangs and drugs directed by your son Michael Olmos. That film is now about to be released—is it gratifying to know that you might be pulling in an even broader audience for the film since you started doing that show?
EJO: Yeah. It always helps to be able to contribute energy and time and the ability to bring a whole new audience to my kind of work, and this is a little different than my normal kind of work. I’ve never done a film like this and it’s really – I’m anxious to see it. I’ll be there with baited breath. But it was a really strong experience, doing this and I think that the people who enjoy my work will enjoy the movie even, though it’s a completely different trip.
HW: What’s it like to see your son carry on the family legacy?
EJO: It’s wonderful. His brothers helped him, and of course his wife helped him, and I helped him. It was a real family affair. He has helped all of us, and we’ve been helping each other throughout this whole experience of living. My feelings for the work that he’s doing is just that I’m very, very happy. I’m happy that he became a writer because that’s what we needed. We needed to produce writers in our family. That’s really the way tp continue moving in the direction that your moving in. If you don’t control the understanding, if you can’t write them – that’s the whole basis of our world, the written word. I don’t give a sh*t what anyone says, books are the most important aspect of living because it documents everything. A human being sits there patiently and thinks about every single dot and period and quote and word and structure. It’s really intense and then from that you get radio, film, television, poetry, drama, comedy and all this other stuff. So he did it.
HW: No one would know better than you how Hollywood deals with Latinos in films and television these days. Do you think that it’s been getting better?
EJO: Oh, no. It’s getting worse. It’s getting worse because there are so many more people of Latin decent here, and it used to be that two percent of the images that you would see on film and television were of Latin decent, cultures and now we’re less than that. They say that we’re now 14 to 15 percent of the population—and I think that we’re more, but they’re afraid of saying it. So that put out that conservative number. And the African American experience is like 12 percent of the population, and they’re 17 percent of the images that we see on film and television. With the indigenous, Asian American and the Latinos, we don’t even hold three percent, all of us put together. It’s devastating. So this film really does tap into that. I think that the Latino community will find this one to be striking. It’s very difficult to watch—it’s going to be difficult to watch because the story is intense. It’s very dark, but it’s a reality. There is a reality here. Granted, this is a thriller and it’s manipulative in some ways, but there is a truth that goes right through this and that’s a truth between good guys and the good guys and who they are and whether they’re really the good guys or is everyone bad? They tagged it really well in the poster that I saw – I thought that it was really smart – that said “Everyone Dies Dirty.” That’s really what it’s all about. So it’s a movie that I think people who like the genre are going to love. It’s state-of-the-art in moving this forward, but for those who don’t like the genre, don’t see this one. This is one that you shouldn’t see. Don’t even give it a chance. Stay away from it [Laughs].
