Judge on jokes and being the ‘resident Jaffa’

For eleven years, Christopher Judge has been a man of few words — on camera as Stargate SG-1‘s Teal’c, at least.

In a new, multi-part interview with Australia’s SCI FI Channel Web site, the actor couldn’t stop talking. In the first portion of the interview, Judge talked about what happened if he ended up getting bored during filming.

“I’m really good at getting those really soft chocolate chip cookies and mixing them up so they look like poo,” Judge said while laughing. “I’m good with stuff like that. I’ll put it around people’s toilets or smear it on their bowl. I’ll ‘penny lock’ people into their trailers. Most doors don’t shut tight, so you can jam pennies in it, so you can lock them in, even if the lock’s on the inside. I’ve been doing that since college, though!”

It wasn’t all fun and games on the set of SG-1. Judge revealed that when it came to developing the culture and language of the Jaffa race, many decisions came down to his discretion.

“They just let me run with it,” Judge said. “Early on we established that the human characters didn’t have to pronounce things like the aliens, so whenever I got the chance to get a new word and put my spin on it, I would. Even my speech, and I hate to say it, but iambic pentameter, the long short short, that’s definitely what it was based in and I started really elongating the long syllables.

“Take for example the zats — the zat’ni’katel [weapon],” Judge said. “Basically what (co-creator) Jonathan Glassner did was throw a bunch of letters together. I went up to his office and asked him ‘How do you want this pronounced?’ And he says ‘I don’t know, it’s your weapon!’ And I said ‘Anything?’ [He said] ‘However you think it should sound!’ So that’s where zat’ni’katel came from.”

Check out part one of the full interview at SCI FI PI, and keep your browser locked to GateWorld for more updates. The next chapter in the SG-1 saga arrives with Stargate: Continuum, available on DVD and Blu-ray formats on July 29.

(Thanks to Morjana for the tip)