Michael Trucco Talks Battlestar, Big Bang and One Huge Meteor Storm
Sometimes people recognize him as Samuel Anders from Battlestar Galactica. Other people know him as Cooper Lee from One Tree Hill and if you're a Big Bang Theory fan, you'll remember him as the brainy but hunky Dr. Underhill in the infamous Christmas episode. But with more than 40 different roles to his credit, Michael Trucco says most people recognize him as Michael Trucco and that's a nice place for any actor to be.
This weekend, Michael runs headlong into danger as the star of Syfy's original movie Meteor Storm. Having survived the rain of fire from the sky, he and I both were muddling through the worst LA rainstorm in recent years when we sat down to chat. Bright, funny and immensely welcoming, Michael talked with me about the challenges of making a disaster film, his biggest roles on TV and the career change that changed his life.
Here's ten minutes with Michael Trucco:
Cynthia: Let’s start by talking about what goes into making a disaster movie. What are some of the challenges involved and how close were you to some of the explosions?
Michael: There’s a lot of discussion of the scene before you start to shoot something, there’s a lot of storyboards, our director and our special effects guys, they get together and they did a really good job of explaining it to us before each shot. They would show us renderings done on the computer of what the final scene was going to look like once they had put all the plates in, but at the end of the day you gotta roll up on a motorcycle and look at a bridge collapse that’s just not there, and it’s a little bit daunting at times. So the challenge in making a movie of this scale is being able to conjure and fabricate images of impending doom that will be seen on screen but at the time you just get talked through it and the director’s going… ‘and then that blows up, and there’s collapsing and there’s devastation and there’s fire’ …you know, because there’s only so much you can do. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you can’t actually destroy the city of San Francisco to make a movie.
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