After starring in the popular sci-fi series Farscape, Ben Browder joined the cast of Stargate SG-1 in its ninth season as Lt. Colonel Cameron Mitchell. The actor spoke to Bryan Cairns about the end of the show and the upcoming TV movies The Ark of Truth and Continuum.

How do you feel your character had progressed by the end of season 10?

I liked that Mitchell is far more subtle in Season 10 within the context of the team and what he does. We found a good place for him to be...We finally figured out Mitchell’s only superpower is getting beat up and bleeding, which works perfectly for me. I am very happy with the way my superpower developed, which was basically a kind of muddy stigmata. I was pleased with all that. And as it progressed, the writers realised that was something that would add to the show and I was lucky to be the guy to do it.

I like that nine-year-old boy stuff where you are getting beat up or sitting in an F-15. Playing army - the fighting, the running, the jumping, getting muddy, dirty and all the things boys do when they’re young!

Were you sore and aching by the end of the day?

I come home - and I’m known to take my clothes off occasionally - and it’s like "Where did you get that bruise?" "Oh, just the other day I was getting thrown off something…"

I came home after Ark of Truth and my elbows were completely bruised!

What was it like filming Stargate: Continuum in the Arctic?

Again, in the wish fulfillment land, I’ve gone to a place I never thought I’d have the opportunity to go. We were 200 miles off shore on the Arctic ice flow living in a plywood hut on bunk beds. Everything is incredibly basic because the ice station was literally thrown up two weeks before we got there.

It was on a good solid chunk of ice, but all around it the ice was moving, so the runway where we landed was thin ice…The ice flows are not that big really - the size of a studio would be a good size chunk - and it is always moving around, so you hear the ice cracking. Amanda and I were shooting stuff where no one had walked.

Were you nervous about falling through the ice?

As you are walking, you hear hollow ice and you are not sure what the depth of the ice is. The camp before had some people drive out on the lead [flat mass of ice between two larger ice flows] on a snowmobile and the snowmobile went through. The two people went into the water. They were very lucky because the water is 28 Fahrenheit, or minus three Celsius, and you have about 30 seconds before you are dead. It is a very dangerous place between that, the polar bears, and the rabid arctic foxes.

There were polar bears that came within 10 miles of the camp because they were out there hunting seals. Polar bears are at the top of the food chain; they eat people and can outrun you. When we were shooting, we had one of the naval officers, Travis, always carrying a weapon. We weren’t supposed to go anywhere unescorted without a weapons officer.

How did you deal with the extreme temperatures?

When you are in that kind of cold, you realise you are in a perilous situation. If you [don’t protect yourself against] the cold, you are going to get hurt or you are going to die.

I made that mistake the first day I was working outside. I put my boots on the floor the night before. My boots were sitting there and we had a kerosene heater in the hut, so it was reasonably warm. So I picked my boots up and they felt kind of cold. I reached into my bag to take out my toiletry stuff and everything was frozen solid. The cold comes up through the ice and freezes everything, so my boots were frozen. I thought I would be okay, that I would slip them on, and they would warm up. But I was out on the ice for an hour and my feet were going numb. I’m in boots ready for 100 degrees below and this is a bad situation.

In the two-hour DVD format, it sounds like Stargate SG:1 is able to go bigger than ever before…

There is a lot of very cool stuff within the episode, a lot of big stuff. There are some flying sequences, there is a sequence out on the ice, there is stuff on boats, so it is just huge on the page. There are prosthetics and people playing multiple characters.

With the two direct-to-DVD Stargate movies completed, what’s next for you?

I have a project I am writing. I am not sure if I can say anything about it or not. I probably shouldn’t until the negotiations for the project are done. It is a step deal. It is not for Stargate, but completely separate. But it is going to be for TV. I wrote two Farscapes and a script I sold last year. I am very excited about it.

Is writing and directing something you’d like to do more of?

It is just another extension of the storytelling process, sort of a backward extension to what I have been doing my whole life. I was one of those guys who made C’s in high school English, and a lot of teachers convinced me I wasn’t a writer. It took me a while to get over that.

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