Secret Lives of the Cast of Galaxy Quest

1. Action

People didn't realize how lonely it was, being the Commander. Not -- being the guy who played the Commander. As soon as they'd started shooting, it was like a Him and Them kind of situation. You couldn't blame Tommy, okay, Tommy was six. But the other grown-ups -- what was their problem? Jason had auditioned for his role just like everyone else had auditioned for theirs. Except Alex, who he'd suggested they approach about the role of Lazarus as soon as they'd offered him the role of Taggart. And except Gwen, possibly, depending who you talked to. Okay, so that left Fred as the only adult besides himself that he knew for sure had auditioned for his part. And come to think of it, Fred was the least hostile. Of course, Fred was stoned a lot of the time, which might have had a lot to do with it.

But the way Jason saw it, he was the only one who didn't stand out in some way. Like: except for Alex, they were all American. Except for Gwen, they were all male. Except for Tommy, they were all adults; and except for Fred, they were all not high. So it was weird that before he knew it, in this group -- a well-respected British actor, a blonde starlet, a pothead, a six-year-old child, and himself -- Jason Nesmith was the odd man out. It wasn't that he thought they hated him, or even disliked him; but he always felt like he was intruding when he joined them after work. Alex and Gwen would be sitting at a table laughing together about something -- him, for all he knew -- while Fred stretched out sideways in a booth and leaned his head against the wall with a vacant smile and Tommy sat at the bar, swinging his feet and doing his homework. He didn't have a way in. Most of the time he sat on the other side of Fred's booth, hovering on the fringe of Alex and Gwen's conversation but not interrupting it. Sometimes he accepted a hit of whatever Fred was smoking. Once in a while he tried to make small talk with Tommy about school. It was a lot harder when there was no script.

Hardly surprising that he gravitated toward the guest stars. They always found him the most interesting, or at least they pretended to, which was good enough for him; they weren't around for very long, so he didn't have to worry about anyone getting bored or scary, or both; and they were often not especially bright, so he could use substantially the same lines on them that Taggart used on their characters and expect more or less the same results. Everybody was a winner.

Yeah, right.

2. For This He Takes Ten Percent?

He'd been at the deafening and champagne-soaked wrap party for Cyrano de Bergerac when a waiter tapped on his shoulder and made a telephone receiver with his thumb and little finger. Alexander nodded to the waiter and shouted to Vanessa and Sydney that he'd be right back, and when they shook their heads and tapped their ears, he'd done a mime of his own to let them know he wasn't leaving.

The phone was just round a corner from the epicentre of the party, so if it was any quieter it was a matter of fractions of decibels. Alexander nodded to the waiter again as he took the phone. "Hello? Hello, Dane here."

"Alex, high feet. Bet shell pram?"

What? "Sorry? Hello, this is Alexander Dane, who's speaking, please?" He held his free hand over his ear in an attempt to hear the voice on the line.

"Alex. It's Pete. Did you get my telegram."

If there had been a less convenient time to ring, his agent would unerringly have found it. "Pete, it's a bit noisy here, as you can no doubt tell -- can I ring you in the morning?"

"Fraid not, buddy -- they want an answer by close of business, i.e. five Pacific, i.e. one hour from now. You made a decision?"

"Peter, I'm tired and a bit drunk and surrounded by even drunker idiots shouting at the top of their voices -- hang on." Someone had pressed an envelope into his hand. "Is this your telegram?"

"It's a great opportunity," Pete was saying. Alexander tucked the phone against his shoulder and opened the message.

HAD OFFER FROM GQ STOP JN ETC ASKED 4 YOU SPCLY STOP NEED DEC BY COB PDT STOP WILL CALL TO CONFIRM ALL STOP

GQ, was it? He ought to say no -- if they didn't want him when he was a brilliant stage actor, they didn't deserve him just because he'd made a good-looking little sure-to-be-Oscar-nominated film. But then again, there was no way to beat that kind of exposure. He supposed he could relax his pride just a little bit. Just this once.

Pete was still talking. "Yeah, Pete, all right, sure, no problem. Listen, just take care of it, will you -- I don't mind about the details right now. Fine. Speak to you tomorrow."

A week later, having learnt too late that GQ did not, in this instance, stand for Gentlemen's Quarterly, Alexander agreed to fulfill the terms of his contract.

But he fired the living hell out of Pete.

3. Oh, Don't Sweetheart Me, You Son of a Bitch

There was no casting couch. Really. There wasn't -- Gwen got all her work without ever once sleeping with a director or a producer or even a writer. (Maybe if she'd slept with the Galaxy Quest writers she'd have gotten better dialogue or more to do -- but that hadn't occurred to her at the time.) Not that she hadn't had offers, of course. But she was a one-man woman, and she was already sleeping with her agent.

Ironically, as devoted as she was to him, he was never anything like faithful to her. Or, more accurately, he was actually not faithful with her.

She knew it was stupid to have an affair with a married man. For sure she'd never planned to be the Other Woman. But aside from the wife thing, Gwen felt really good about the relationship -- she didn't feel like either of them was using the other, which was a new experience for her.

Okay, except that (at first) they were both clearly using each other for sex. But, she meant, she wasn't with him because he could be good for her professionally; and he wasn't with her because of any benefit she could have done to his career. Whatever that might have been.

Alex warned her not to get too invested in Wayne. Men who said they were going to leave their wives to be with their mistresses seldom did so, he said. "Why on earth," he pointed out, "would the fellow make a choice when he obviously hasn't got to? Mark my words." And she did mark his words -- she just wasn't sure he was right. Men left their wives all the time. It wasn't like every marriage that ended because of infidelity was because the wife found out and left the husband. Right? And Wayne had never lied to her about anything else. If he said he was going to leave his wife for her, why shouldn't she believe him? She had his ring on her finger -- diamonds didn't lie.

(Jason also thought she should leave Wayne, but his reasoning had more to do with thinking she should be with him instead. Him, she ignored.)

In fact, though, Wayne had lied to her about anything else. About practically everything else, actually. Two years after Galaxy Quest went off the air -- when she'd been with him for seven years, and with him with him for five -- he did leave his wife: for a twenty-three-year-old intern in the human resources department at Paramount. At the same time, it turned out that he hadn't submitted her for any work since the third season. He'd said he was keeping her name out there and she'd get something eventually, and in the meantime she had her residuals -- but in reality, her resume was at the back of a file drawer, where he kept the headshots of the girls who were pretty enough not to throw away because one of these days someone might need them for a commercial or something. And the ring? Yeah -- paste. By the time she had it appraised, she guessed she should have expected that.

Gwen fired Wayne and found a new agent -- and, when he continued to expect to see her socially, she sent the tape from her answering machine to the HR intern. She kept the ring, though -- for its value as a reminder, if not as a memento.

4. The Good Life

Tommy Webber's mother raised him right. He never knew why she'd let him go to that audition -- maybe she was thinking that the sooner he got the idea that it would be cool to be on TV out of his head, the better -- but when he got the part and pointed out that she'd promised, she said that was true and she let him do the show. But he was not to think of himself as Mister Television Star (did he understand that, young man?); as far as she was concerned, having a job meant having a boss, which meant Tommy had more adults to answer to than he would ever have had if he'd just kept quiet and stayed in the first grade where he belonged.

And he learned, all right. He heard stories about other child actors being spoiled brats, blowing through all their money, being in AA before they finished high school. He never got that far; his rebellious stage, a couple of years after Galaxy Quest was cancelled, consisted of shaving zigzags into his hair. His mama raised her eyebrows and told him if he wanted to look like a fool it was his business. (But he knew he was lucky that was as bad as it got, with his mama; he also heard stories about stage parents who spent all their actor children's money, drove them to drink, and all the rest of that.) When the show ended, he went back to his regular school, and his classmates had not, as a group, been fans; they were either too young to have watched the show, or too impossibly cool to admit being interested in anything.

Or they didn't have a TV in the house. That was the thing; because Tommy's mother had no intention of letting his success go to his head, she never moved out of the neighborhood they'd lived in before he was on television. The lesson that he was nothing special was taught to him at the same time as the lesson that it wasn't nice to show people you had more than they did. For about forty-five minutes when Tommy was nineteen, he resented her for depriving him of his opportunity to be a star among his peers; then he remembered that because of his mother's determination, he'd never had any trouble fitting in with the kids in his age group, and he thanked her for it.

Now that he was grown, though, and it was his mother who needed taking care of, Tommy let himself be glad he had the money from the show. She tried to tell him she didn't need him fussing like that, but he said she was going to be comfortable, damn it, and if he wanted to spend his money on a hospice nurse instead of a new car, who the hell brought him up to make that kind of choice anyway?

And then, of course, she always scolded him for his language.

5. Kilo Hotel Alpha November

Of course it's incredibly hard to get work as an actor, and damn near impossible to get enough work to earn a living. Fred knew that, but what else could he do? Not what else could he be happy doing; what else could he actually do? He was the first to admit he didn't really have much -- or, you know, anything -- in the way of qualifications.

Turned out he wasn't completely without skills, though. Who knew it would be so useful to remember stuff and remain coordinated even while you were stoned? He did some student films, and then, when he was bored with the undergraduates, he had a reel he could send to legit agents and show them he was too good for the work he'd been doing. Wasn't ever going to win an Oscar, but he could hold his own and do his own stunts. Soon he was getting real jobs, and pretty regularly, too.

Only thing was, he had to change his name. "There's already a Fred Khan in the Screen Actors Guild," they told him at the agency when he went in to fill out his paperwork. "Union rules."

"What, nobody in the -- no two people have the same name?" Of course they didn't, not in the credits. "So, what, should I use a middle initial?"

"You could do that," the agent said, "but there could still be confusion between you and the real Fred Khan --"

"I'm a real Fred Khan."

"Okay, the original Fred Khan --"

"How old is he?"

"Oh, about ... sixteen."

"Then I'm the original Fred Khan."

"Look -- the other Fred Khan. There could be -- he could get your jobs, you know what I'm saying? So you should pick something different."

"Like Ghengis."

He would have thought it was obvious that he was kidding, but apparently this agent was dumber than the film students he used to work with. He had a suggestion, though; he was sure he could get Fred a part in a kung fu movie, and recommended he change his name to Kwan.

"Kwan? But I'm not Korean."

"I know."

"I'm not Asian at all."

"Won't matter. If anyone asks, make up a line if you want. You're half Chinese and half black. Who cares."

"I'm Persian."

"Point is, it'll make you more likely to get this job now, and if people get hung up on it in the future, that's more press for you, right? Win-win. So what do you think?"

Fred thought it was idiotic, but then, the whole business was kind of insane. He signed up to be Fred Kwan, took the kung fu gig, and then kept getting called to auditions for Asian characters. Fortunately he got enough other work to get by, because he mostly didn't get the parts that called for Asians, oddly enough. He didn't know why he kept going to the auditions -- networking, he supposed.

And sometimes they didn't care. Galaxy Quest seemed like a good deal; it was kind of goofy, but if it got picked up he'd be set for a while, and when they offered him the part of Tech Sergeant Chen and told him to go ahead and squint, he figured what the hell; if that was how much they cared, this would be easy money.

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