How do actors begin the process of determining a character’s unwritten background, personality traits, and guiding motivations, often referred to as subtext? At the Comic-Con red carpet premier of Stargate: Continuum, we asked actors Michael Shanks and Ben Browder about the methods they use to develop their characters.

In the early seasons of Stargate SG-1, Shanks would “go to museums and look at Egyptian artifacts and all sorts of stuff,” he said. “And as time wore on and we created our own mythology for the show, any historical work that I did was thrown out the window because we were rewriting history for our own purposes.”

Developing characters on Stargate can be a very challenging process “because [SG-1] is an action show,” Shanks added. “The first thing that has to go when you’re writing and directing is character development. And that’s why we’ve seen so little of it. It’s always about the resolution of the problem, and the confrontation, and the conflict.”

As for the early development of Daniel Jackson, Shanks, of course, used the original film starring Kurt Russell and James Spader as a platform from which to build subtext. “I took what I could from the Spader portrayal,” he said, “stole what I could, and added a few tidbits that the writers years later would change. So, I started just taking the script pages and saying, ‘Tell me. I’ll follow you.'”

Browder added that early in his career he would “write copious notes. And I then found that I would get locked into those notes. … Once it’s on the page and you’re looking at it, you’re constantly reminded of the thought you had before.”

When looking beyond that initial subtext work, Browder said that the environment on-set can have great impact in how subtext is created and portrayed. “It depends on the working situation,” he said. “In a really good working situation, you come in, you know the words, and the scene unfolds for itself. It happens with what you know, what you know about the situation, and what’s going on between the characters. For instance, when I was working on Farscape, I would come in and I would just wait to see what Claudia Black did and play off of that.”

Using subtext to bring a script to life is a complex art form, and, for Browder, one full of discovery. “What an actor does to a writer’s words is always disconcerting,” he said. “The first time I did my own stuff I forgot most of my lines, because suddenly I’m having to rediscover them in a different way. It’s a very interesting process.”