Our Man Zelenka: Stargate Atlantis’s Unsung Hero

The heroes of Stargate Atlantis don’t just include the likes of Colonel John Sheppard and his offworld recon team. They also include the many personnel who made the lost city of the Ancients their home — an international team of scientists and soldiers who filled Atlantis and contributed to the story week in and week out.

One of our favorite recurring characters on the series is Dr. Radek Zelenka, a genius Czech scientist who often found himself playing second fiddle to Rodney McKay. Cast in the role of Zelenka (who debuted all the way back in 2004’s “Thirty Eight Minutes”) was actor David Nykl, who quickly made the character his own. Thanks to David’s performance (and the show’s writing) Zelenka found his way into our hearts as smart, sassy, and compassionate.

GateWorld caught up with David at the most recent Stargate fan convention in Vancouver, B.C., Gatecon: The Celebration. We’re excited to share this conversation with you here, running about 22 minutes. David talks about his original casting (and how the role was rewritten for him), developing a “Mutt and Jeff” routine with his co-star David Hewlett, and some of the work he has done since Atlantis ended in 2009. He also reveals which other Atlantis character he auditioned for first.

A big thanks to David Nykl and to the team at Gatecon!

David Nykl: This is great! This is exciting to be interviewed by GateWorld. It really has been a long time, hasn’t it?

GateWorld: It’s been a long time. But it’s great to have you back, David Nykl! We’re here at Gatecon. Let’s start there: Gatecon and the convention experience, and particularly these fans … how do you find this experience?

DN: First hour here … Gatecon is always reliably the con in this city because it just draws the fans perennially (adjusted for COVID, of course). I think this is our first one back, isn’t it? That might be why I’m getting ’18s and ’19s messed up. Adjusted for COVID that was last time, wasn’t it?

GW: We missed it two years ago.

DN: Because we missed it two years ago, and last year. It’s a lot of fun, and what strikes me is how the community just keeps together. I see familiar faces, and it’s almost like a like a two-way conversation. “Oh, hey, I know you from Texas. You remember when we talked about this?” It went from sort of the excitement of the show, to kind of being a nostalgia act, and now it’s sort of morphed into … it’s more than just nostalgia now. It really is a lifestyle on both sides of the camera, as it were. I see Peter Williams, who I love, and I haven’t seen him for ages. And we’re like brothers. It’s just so fantastic to see him again. And I’m hoping that’s what is happening among the fans too – a chance to get together.

So that’s the real gift of these things. And the pandemic helped show me that too. I used to think, “People, people … I’m tired!” And it’s like you realize when you take them away, you miss them – people, that is. And your friends. And the fans. So I’m very happy to be back.

GW: This is only my second Gatecon but you’re right – when the shows were on, when they were in production, it felt like obviously there was kind of a focus on the show. And everybody was getting to know each other, and you were doing your first Stargate events …

DN: Yeah, [I was] so nervous. And so it was a whole different thing to learn how to do. Because as an actor you’re yourself and then there’s the character that you play … but these things taught me how to develop a sort of third person, yourself privately but a little bit more of a “rockstar” version of yourself, I guess. I don’t know how to say it.

GW: The public version of yourself that people want to line up and get their picture taken with.

DN: And that’s what I was most nervous about. Because when I first came out on stage during this heyday that you’re talking about, when it first started, it was a hotel in Heathrow and I was nervous and was like, “I don’t have anything prepared. I don’t have my lines.” And I came out and the flash cubes and 700 people and I’m going, “What is happening? What is happening!?”

We do the show and, you know, you do the scenes and you go home and you wash the dishes. It’s fun to shoot, it’s a lot of fun to do, but there’s really no feedback from from an audience. And you sort of get it all at once when you come up on stage and you go, “This show is huge.”

GW: Yeah, and now conventions like Gatecon are the family experience. We get together to see each other again!

DN: Yeah, and generations, right? “I grew up watching you.” [Laughs] Yeah … I guess you did!

GW: And you as actors as well, you get to see each other again. You just crashed Pauly’s photo op …

DN: Oh, I might have. Yeah, he needs that! He needs a little course correction every now and then – he just gets too much on himself. He needs to be brought to earth. [Laughs] Love you, Pauly! You’re not going to watch this anyway … But I’ll tell it to your face.

GW: So somebody asked a question yesterday during one of the panels: Whose first Gatecon? Who’s new here? And you’d be shocked [by] the number hands that went up – 10, 20, 25 percent of the audience.

DN: Really?

GW: So OK, there’s a new generation of viewers who are watching the show. They’re watching Atlantis on Hulu or wherever it is in their local territory right now. It just came back to Amazon Prime, so there’s more opportunity for folks to discover the show for the first time.

DN: Well that’s evidence of that then, if they’re showing up …

GW: So yeah, now they’re showing up to conventions and they’re taking that next step into the fandom. So if you’ll let me I’m going to ask questions that I asked you 15 years ago, because we have a whole new audience!

DN: Oh, yeah, sure. [Laughs] Sure. Okay.

GW: I want to go back and, in addition to what you’re doing now, I want to talk about the the early days when you first joined the show as Radek Zelenka in “Thirty Eight Minutes” – an episode that we just watched with our kids! Our kids are into Atlantis now, so we’re cultivating the next generation.

DN: Excellent! Well, you’re asking me to reach back. I spoke about it a little bit on stage. What I remember about that – I wasn’t cast in the pilot. I remember I auditioned for the role of Dr. Beckett with a Scottish accent. That was when it first came up for the pilot. I didn’t get that because apparently Paul’s Scottish accent is better [scoffs]. But a few weeks later a call came in for a Russian Eastern European scientist for a new show called Stargate Atlantis. And I said, “Oh, Stargate!” “No, not the one you’re thinking. It’s a new show. It’s a spin-off.” “Oh, OK. The one I auditioned for the doctor?” “Yeah,” “Oh, OK.”

So they put me in and I come into an audition room and it’s just a bunch of big, burly Russian guys. Okay, so it’s this kind of a thing. And it was a scene from “Thirty Eight Minutes” where I’m talking to Torri [Higginson, “Elizabeth Weir”] on the radio. And we did that – and whatever the gag was, I remember doing it up. I thought, “I’m not gonna do like that so they can see my eyes. I’m going to do it like that.”

GW: You’re working the control panels in the back of the Puddle Jumper trying to figure out how to retract the drive pods.

DN: Exactly! That scene, and I’m [saying] “Don’t talk to me, please” or something.

GW: “… Stop talking.”

DN: And that was the scene that we did. And a few days later I got the call to come in on set. And they changed the name from “Ruslan” or “Ruslav,” or something like that was the name of the character, to Zelenka – which is a well-known Czech name. It means “green.” Zelenka, zelený is green – so “Dr. Green.” And so [I thought] that’s kind of cool, it’s a Czech name. They knew I was Czech so they cast that way.

And Brad Wright was on set that day that I came in for the thing, and I told him my one Czech joke. Were you in the audience today? Should I say the Czech joke?

GW: Yeah, we’ve gotta hear it …

DN: OK, so Czech guy … I told him my name was Nykl, “N-Y-K-L” is now it’s spelled. “Can I buy a vowel” sort of thing. And I said, this is the one Czech joke I know.

A Czech guy goes to his optometrist and there’s a chart on the wall. And he says, “Cover one eye and read the bottom line.” So he covers his eye and he goes, “K, Q, R, X, V, V, T, R, K, K, L, T, Z.” And he goes, “That’s great that you can read that –” And he says, “Read that? I know him!”

GW: [Laughs]

DN: “Can I buy a vowel?” So I said this joke to Brad Wright. And I like to think that that’s the joke that got me the part! He laughed and Zelenka came by … having only a last name first, and then about three episodes later I got my first name which is Radek.

GW: If you can make folks laugh on that cast, and have a good time and not be full of yourself – “Life’s too short” was their motto on set – you’re gonna go a long way in Stargate.

DN: Yeah. It was fun. From remember from remembering the shoot days to the sort of “Mutt and Jeff” routine with David Hewlett, to the kind of back and forth … I liked the fact that they could trust us with some improv. That was a really nice thing. It wasn’t as rigorous as I’ve heard other productions can be with with their words, which is ultimately a good trust in the actors. So that was really nice.

And it was the first time I really had a chance to develop a long-form character on a TV series. Plus also there’s a technical education to that, like hitting your mark and plate shots and how things are set up. When you first come to that you don’t necessarily learn those specifics in acting classes, right? They talk about motivations, and objectives, and all that sort of stuff. But hitting your mark and getting the lighting in the way it’s supposed to be is a whole other school. And that really got honed on Stargate for me.

GW: And technical in the dialogue – obviously you and David carried a lot of dialogue. And a lot of other cast members have told us, “God bless them, I could never do that.” Do you have to be wired a certain way as an actor to be that kind of dialogue-heavy?

DN: Yeah, it helps having someone David along. I think that rather than having him go through huge monologues they created a second character so it’d be dialogues in nature. So I had to do the same thing with an accent. [Laughs] So it’s like Ginger Rogers: she did the same thing as Fred Astaire but she did it backwards and in heels.

GW: So again, we’re rewatching the show. We’re in the middle of Season One, and so we hit “The Storm” and “The Eye” – the big two-parter in the middle of the first season. And it felt to me, knowing what’s ahead for the characters, this is kind of the moment where the Mutt and Jeff routine starts with McKay and where Zelenka as a character starts to click and it’s clear this character is working and he’s going to be around for a while. Can you speak to that transition of just coming in as a one-off day player to being somebody who is more consistently reliably recurring?

DN: You mentioned that happened in that episode. I’ve never thought of it in terms of that, that that’s sort of the impression of that. You hope for that. You never know. You don’t know what they need. The only thing you can do is show up and do your job (and everybody says that). [I’m] lucky enough to having been able to do that.

But the real credit I think goes to the way the producers and the writers conceived the thing. Again, like I said, that they didn’t have just David Hewlett going – that they split it off. The analog is Beaker and … on The Muppets, right? Beaker and … what’s his name? Bunsen Honeydew! Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, that sort of the scientist and … that was the one image that came into my mind probably around the time that you’re talking about, “The Eye” and “The Storm.” And I think the writers sort of caught on that, that there was this chemistry going. And that’s one of the most enjoyable parts of Stargate for me, is the riffing with David Hewlett.

It subsided a little bit through Season Three and Four, and they brought it back I find in Season Five. I didn’t have as many scenes with David through those seasons as I had in the earlier.

GW: And that dynamic between Zelenka and McKay changes as well. Because they’re teamed up, they’re a buddy when they’re trying to get the shield raised before the storm hits. And the sort of argumentative snippiness isn’t there just yet.

DN: Yeah. And also the dynamic is important, which is that he’s the boss and I’m an underling. I liked that the dynamic was that, and that it was .. I wouldn’t say rancorous, but that there was the sort of sniping back and forth. It wouldn’t have been as much fun if we were friends. Right? There’s no push back, there’s no sort of drama there. So the fact that he was an insufferable megalomaniac … [Laughs] Hi, Dave! You know what I mean!

[That] was the meat my character could chew on it. It was something to react to, like, “Oh my god, this idiot!” and all the swearing that I did in Czech was because of him.

GW: McKay’s character was conceived as kind of a foil to Samantha Carter. And now when you put him in a new show it feels like he needs a new foil. And they found that with Zelenka.

DN: Maybe that’s it, yeah. He’s a good foil for a lot of characters, yeah.

GW: How would you describe Radek Zelenka’s inner monologue? Who is this guy inside of his head? Is he kind of a “what you see is what you get” person, or is he plotting to take over the city?

DN: No, I don’t think it’s as nefarious as that. I think from the point of view as being the Czech there’s kind of an immigrant mentality in there. That he’s gotten on to the Stargate program. He’s in this thing, but he’s not American. He’s maybe NATO aligned. So there’s a sort of thing [that] my performance is what’s going to get me to belong. Right? So that’s sort of the inner monologue that was important for him, that he has to keep doing well.

And he was doing well. He was in some cases doing better than his superiors. But the fact that it was never sort of really recognized is the gag, right, is the character of that. And I like that. Because people can relate to that character that never really gets his really gets his due. So I’d say that he was always after trying to do his best.

GW: He’s kind of the “everyman genius.”

DN: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. But I know that type of guy in eastern Europe that [is] just very analytical, very much about the numbers, very much about getting the problem solved that way. And human resources and issues like that are just sort of in the way.

GW: It’s been a while since Atlantis went off the air, since you guys wrapped up that [time]. When you look back on it – you come and talk to all of us Stargate fans in a big room and folks pepper you with questions. What memories stand out from that experience?

DN: Well, this whole “third person” sort of thing is … I sort of thought when it would first start that it would be like “gotcha” questions. Like, “Ah, you didn’t now what the proper thing was,” or what it is. But that’s not the case at all. What I realize is I had to find a way to try to share the experience. Because the fans want to know, “What is it like to be on set with Jason Momoa?” for example. And I didn’t really actually work with him that much. I mean, he was on set, but we didn’t have too many scenes together, for example. So it was sort of dredging up or remembering those kind of moments to share what a day on set is like. That was what I learned how to do or to explain.

And then as we’ve talked about earlier, how it’s morphed into a different thing now as the relationship has grown with the fans, and they know that you tell the story … like the one fan this morning in the panels said, “Teryl, tell your bird story!” So she’s obviously heard it before, and Teryl has obviously said it before. It’s just like, “Can you play that again for us, please?”

GW: It’s like listening to your favorite song …

DN: “Play ‘Stairway to Heaven!'”

GW: “Play ‘Stairway to Heaven!’ Tell us the Puff & Ruffle story!”

DN: Yeah, exactly. So it sort of becomes its own mythology, you know.

GW: Working on the show, I don’t know if you go back and watch episodes years later now …

DN: I haven’t done it for a long time. I did it about five years ago, but not since then.

GW: Are their favorite Zelenka moments, scenes, opportunities? A little bit more in Season Four and Five you got to kind of step out and do a little bit more. You had some stuff with the Travelers in Season Five.

DN: Offworld, yes! Offworld – in Season Four for no reason at all I got called in for a wardrobe fitting. And I thought, “Oh, wow … I’m not going to wear a blue shirt any more! It’s going to be …” And then it came and it’s a blue shirt. “We just wanted to make sure.” “Okay, yeah … still fits. Same shirt.” Now that I think about it maybe I was putting on weight! Hmm, why would I have to come in for a [fitting]?

So yeah, I wore the same stuff. I stayed behind in the Gate Room pretty much. And a few times I went offworld, but I think Zelenka was a bit scared or didn’t have that sort of … he was the stay at home scientist. I welcome any chance to go off set. Not personally as an actor, because that means driving to Langley! [Laughs] I can ride my bike to the studio from where I live. I liked having a close commute.

GW: One of the things that’s happened recently is Big Finish brought their audio dramas back. They’re back in print.

DN: I heard! Those were a blast.

GW: So you got a Zelenka story – or did you do two?

DN: I did two, yeah.

GW: You did two Zelenka stories [“Zero Point” and “Meltdown”]. Tell us a little bit about that experience. And hey, would you do more if we could get more Zelenka stories?

DN: Absolutely, for sure. I love doing audio books. And it was a really fun experience, particularly because I was surprised at how the fans responded to them. I thought it was like a one-off, and you do them and they would sort of disappear. But I heard later on a couple years later about a family that was stuck in some snowstorm in a highway, and they listened to both of those audio books. It was like, “Thank you for getting us through this thing!” “Oh, that’s kind of cool.” Whenever you hear stories like that, right? And of course it was in the Zelenka voice. So there’s the different timbre and the different sort of tones of the character.

But the stories were really well written. They were very much in keeping with canon, the way the stories are on Stargate. So I was impressed with them. I’d love to do another one of them again.

GW: That would be fun. It would be great to see more future stories – even if they didn’t get the big Atlantis movie going at least there’s avenues for storytelling with these characters again.

DN: Yeah, yeah. Well, there’s rumors I keep hearing – you probably know better than I do – about it coming back, the franchise.

GW: That would be nice! We’re waiting to see what Amazon and MGM want to do with this thing.

DN: We’re waiting to see what Amazon and MGM want to do with this thing. [Laughs]

GW: David, what are you been working on lately? It’s been a while since Arrow was done, but boy we just loved Anatoly as a character.

DN: Did you? Did you guys see that?

GW: Yeah, we watched religiously. We love the way that the dynamic shifted and then Anatoly becomes a bit of an antagonist for a little while. Working on that show and working with Stephen Amell …

DN: It was fun. Stephen Amell is great. He’s a consummate professional. Man, the work that that kid did on that show was pretty impressive. I mean, from starting in the gym in the morning to that sort of … I don’t have that kind of devotion. Good for him!

It was a harder show than Stargate in a lot of ways. It was street-level crime so a lot of stunt work, ratchet work, rolling in puddles at 2 in the morning sort of thing … in nice Italian shoes. Driving nice cars. That’s what I remember. But mostly night shoots. And a pretty serious set. There was a little bit of fooling around, but because of the amount of work that needed to get done – and it was a lot harder because guys were jumping off of buildings, and like I said, ratchets. So stunts were a big thing. I’d spend hours waiting in the trailer for a stunt to happen and then I’d have my scene, for example. So those sorts of things were great.

After that I did a show in Europe [for] HBO called The Sleepers, which was an HBO series. It was a spy drama like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy where I played an English agent. That was super, super fun. We shot that in Prague [in 2018, 2019] just before the pandemic came. So if you watch it’s on HBO Max. It’s called The Sleepers. And it’s set in Czechoslovakia, back when it was Czechoslovakia in 1989, just before the wall came down.

And now there’s another one that may be coming up, hopefully in Europe. Can’t talk about it too much. But there’s another miniseries maybe in the works. So fingers crossed.

GW: Has it shot yet?

DN: No, no, no, we’re in negotiations right now. And I might be going off to Budapest. So we’ll see what happens.

GW: That’d be fantastic.

DN: Looking forward to that one. That would be great.

GW: And a great segue, talking about your Czech fans and the new Czech fans. I still get comments all the time from Czech fans about, “Zelenka is obviously the star of the show!”

DN: Do you? [Laughs] From the Czech perspective.

GW: Any parting words for your Czech fans?

DN: [Yells] “I’m trying, do prdele!”

The idea behind that I think is that I got to swear in Czech. So the script would say, “Swears in Czech.” And I got to say to Rodney what I really thought of him. And when there’s no sensors that understand what you really think of him, you can say anything you want. So it turns out I did! And that’s in Czech, and the Czechs just love it.

For example what I just said is, “I’m trying, for f–k sakes!” [Laughs] It’s become like a catchphrase. It’s like “I’m trying, do prdele!” – and that’s the one where I’m with Kavan [Smith, “Major Lorne”] I think the Daedalus is exploding or something like that [“No Man’s Land”]. I think I remember that.

When you say if I’ve seen episodes of Atlantis, it’s actually more online I see the clips and memes and bits and I go, “Oh, yeah! That’s …” That where I see them.

But yeah, the Czechs are great. There’s a great comic con out there that I love going to. So looking forward to doing that again.