Peter Jurasik (Dr. Geiger) Chat at I.D.I.C Online on July 10, 1999

Peter Jurasik: Whatever you would like us to do--they have asked us to come here to be part of Toronto Trek. They paid us good money, and here we are.

Wortham Krimmer: We love Canada.

Jurasik: The funniest thing about Canada so far is, we had lunch about an hour ago, and I said I wanted an iced coffee. They said, "We don’t have iced coffee." Canadians don’t do iced coffee. [Bob] did his Jack Nicholson impression. He said, "You got ice, right? And you got a glass, right? And you got coffee? Well then, you got iced coffee."

Krimmer: That was Peter doing me doing Jack.

Jurasik: Babylon 5 is over, we have not worked on it for a year and a half, so you can ask questions about—

Krimmer: Anyone.

Jurasik: Anyone’s sexual preferences, anything like that. If you have some questions, ask. Otherwise, we’ll just talk.

 I was confused at the end, because I thought the Shadows had disappeared. They had had this fight, and they had taken off and left the galaxy. All of a sudden, they appear over your shoulder and are watching you. I’m confused on how they tied that all in and why they brought them back for that.

Jurasik: I have a wonderful device that I use, and I’ll probably use it a couple of times here. Any question that comes up about continuity of character and stuff like that, I’ll immediately blame on JMS, because JMS has gotten so many kudos. The way I do it is I always say, "That’s another question for Joe to answer, don’t you think?" In terms of the Shadows—I never question Joe. An interviewer just asked me whether I had much input into Londo. Basically what I said was—Joe had a five-year arc for this story and these characters. Far be from me to start diddling with his five-year arc. [To Wortham] You didn’t give Joe much—

Krimmer: I diddled a lot.

Jurasik: Cartagia can’t help but diddle.

Krimmer: My first day on the set, Joe came up to me and said, "What the hell are you diddling about? You did this a lot different in your audition."

Jurasik: I don’t mean to duck your Shadow question, but continuity and plot stuff, I really have to bow to Joe.

Krimmer: The guy knows what he’s doing.

 This question’s for Peter. I love the new character you created on Sliders, and I was wondering, do you have a lot of input into the character, and is it going to keep coming back throughout the season?

Jurasik: I actually did five of them. I think three of them were at the beginning of the season and two were at the end. There was a request to do more and I didn’t—I’m in a unique position now that I’ve just been on a series. It’s not that I can pick and choose particularly, but after doing somebody like Londo, who had a lot of colours and was a pretty rich character, the character [of Dr. Oberon Geiger in Sliders] didn’t drive me completely nuts, so I thought, "This’ll be great." Bill Dial, who was the executive producer, wrote a wonderful character, and five was plenty. In terms of input, he’s a dimensional physicist. He’s way above my head. I’m a guy who, when I make cornbread muffins, has to look at the recipe three times. "Baking soda or baking powder?" Dimensional physics was way over my head. I didn’t give him any input.

Is it true that when you had the script to "War Without End," where we saw Londo die, you called JMS up and asked him what he’d been smoking, and to send you 10 pounds of it?

Jurasik: I did call him up about some script. Was that the script [where] I called him up and asked him to send 10 pounds?

Krimmer: "World Without End."

Jurasik: I did, at one point, ask him to send 10 pounds of whatever he was smoking. He didn’t, by the way. Not even an ounce.

I have a question for Peter. I really loved the show. It got me through pre-med and my first year of medical school, and anything that could keep me sane through that…I loved the character of Londo. It seemed like you had a lot of fun playing him. My favourite scene was with you and K’Gar in the prison cell, where you were describing how he was going to be tortured to death, and the intimacy that those characters achieved in their extremity. I was just wondering if you could tell us what some of your favourite scenes were to play.

Jurasik: It’s interesting you should say that, because one of the first things I always do say is that I loved those cell scenes. We found ourselves in an interesting position when we got into the story line with Cartagia. What preceded it was, the characters had been pushed apart. When G’Kar was no longer an ambassador, Joe had to kind of fake up reasons—a lot of people loved that elevator scene, where we got stuck in the elevator. What Joe was doing was finding reasons to stick these characters next to each other, and the cell was the perfect one. Here we were, stuck in a small spot right next to each other, and him becoming my bodyguard really worked well.

What can I say about Andreas except that he did 17 years with Peter Brook in England, and is, without sounding completely pretentious, a consummate pro? He’s a great actor and he makes you better when you act with him. There was chemistry there because he pushed me on to do better work all the time. He just demanded it. We worked totally differently, but he would get all made up as [in Londo’s voice] "that ridiculous Narn," and he wouldn’t stay in character in a spastic way—because there you would see Andreas smoking a cigarette or eating a doughut. Of course, G’Kar doesn’t smoke or eat doughnuts, but Andreas would really stay in the work. He stayed very concentrated. So it was always an intense experience, working with him.

In terms of other scenes that I loved, it’s hard to pick them. What I always say about them—Bob will back me on this—in television, it’s a little like American baseball. In American baseball, if you get 3 hits out of 10 times at bat, you are one of the best players in the game. Television is that way. It’s moving so quickly that if, out of 10 scenes you have to do, 3 are successful, you’re really doing good. I remember the 6 or 7 or 8 out of 10 that didn’t work. I have favourites that are like ugly stepchildren. They’re the ones that weren’t successful. The successful ones, they stand on their own merits.

Krimmer: Does anybody have any SP30?

Jurasik: Cartagia’s always looking out for his good looks.

The other thing I think about different scenes is, Joe told me a little bit about how the character was going to change over five years. I marked those changes in my head. I saw when he was making those steps so I marked the fun scenes by those steps when I realized Londo was at a turn.

Bob, you had tons of great scenes. What were your favourites?

Krimmer: Everything. All of them. They’re all really good. They were really fun to play. I can’t think of just one of them.

Jurasik: If I can brag for him a little bit, when people come on the show as guests, a lot of people are really reticent. They hang back, especially when they’re playing Centauris. They don’t realize they’re going to have to put that hair on. Bob, along with Bill Forward, who played Refa, and a couple of other people jumped in with both feet and just went in the pool and played. That’s what he was like.

[To Wortham] You not only relished the role but you relished the work.

Krimmer: I was working with the three best actors on the show.

Jurasik: We had to give up 10% of our salary to get him to say that.

Robert, you made a magnificent villain. You did an excellent job in that role.

Krimmer: Thank you.

There’s nothing worse than being distracted by somebody’s bad acting, and I never even thought about it in the scenes you were in—or Peter’s scenes.

Peter, I loved the chemistry between Londo and G’Kar. Did that magically happen and then JMS capitalized on it, or would you say it was all written in and you guys just used it?

Jurasik: It’s hard for us as actors to believe that Joe wrote all of season 2 and all of season 3. No one in television had ever done that before. This guy was banging away on these scripts. He’d finish one and the next one would come out. He’d live in his office/cave and go to town. It’s hard to believe, but he had this story arced out in his mind. The relationship between G’Kar and Londo was certainly part of that arc. He may have capitalized on it when he saw that Andreas and I were really good friends and we had a chemistry together as actors. But there was a lot of good chemistry. He and I had a lot of good chemistry, and Stephen and I. I loved Jerry Doyle. I thought he and I were going to be buddies for the whole five years. I finished that last scene with Jerry in the bar where we kind of say goodbye to each other, and Garibaldi says, "I don’t trust you any more," and that was it. I practically never saw Jerry again.

It’s not based on chemistry. It was based on Joe’s story lines.

Your accent was utterly convincing and believable. It was really interesting to hear what your real voice sounds like. It’s completely not what Londo’s voice is. I just wanted to applaud you on that. A lot of put-on accents sound sort of fake, sort of stupid, and you kind of cringe listening. I never had that with you. I thought that was how you talked.

Jurasik: I have to tell you, I got the accent from Larry [Stewart]. He came up with it.

I had really no input into the character. Joe wrote the character and I had my own interpretation. But as actors, if we don’t have our scripts we just sit quietly in our trailers in our costumes and don’t do anything. But I did have input on the accent. It’s funny that people reacted in such a positive way to it.

Krimmer: It’s really hard, ’cause when I got the role, there were a bunch of episodes prior to my coming on that focused on the Centauri so Joe gave me those episodes to look at so I would understand the history. And I did. I knew Peter’s work because I’ve followed Peter’s career for a long time. I was watching Peter’s work and I started trying to do his accent, thinking that I would have to have that accent. It was impossible. It’s like when you do an Irish accent and it sounds like the Irish Spring commercial. So I go in and I sound like really bad Bela Lugosi. I went to Joe and said, "Look, Joe, I can’t do the Centauri accent. I just can’t. It doesn’t seem like Vir has an accent, so do I have to have one?" He said, "No, no. The way we justify that is that it’s like different dialects on this planet, like you have Southern dialects or Russian or whatever." Like our planet. He said, "You can pick any accent you want," so I just did my normal voice.

My basic approach is to have as much fun as possible at any particular point in time. So I try to make it as easy on myself as I can. I don’t dig deep.

Jurasik: The quick story about the accent, if I can tell you how I patchworked it together, is I was doing a play downtown, a Tennessee Williams play, and I worked really hard on a Memphis accent. I felt like I had really nailed it. But one L.A. critic nailed me and said, "That’s a terrible Memphis accent. That doesn’t sound like a Southern accent." I was really hurt. About that time was when "The Gathering," the pilot, showed up. I called Joe and said, "What do you want me to sound like?" He said, "Let him sound like whatever you want," so I purposely took a couple of different things. There’s a character who plays the parole officer in A Clockwork Orange, the guy who’s always saying, "And night-time is the best time, um, yes?" I took my Czechoslovakian grandmother. I had spent three consecutive summers in Ireland. I didn’t always take sounds; I took rhythms. Londo had a kind of musical thing.

Krimmer: Tell them about the fun we used to have. Cartagia kept saying over and over, "I like you, Mollari," so every time we said goodnight I’d say, "I like you, Peter. I like you."

Jurasik: It was sickening.

Harlan Ellison was involved in the early stages. He’s a writer and you guys are making a TV show, and I was wondering, how well did he feel that his concept had been translated, and would you say the cast and the director agreed with him as to how well it had been translated?

Krimmer: Do you know Harlan personally?

I heard of him in his younger years. I would imagine he had mellowed somewhat now.

Jurasik: He has not mellowed. We were lucky. He was a creative consultant on the show. That meant that his role was that if something, in his opinion, really stuck out as not working or bad, inconsistent, he would have the courage and the place to tell Joe when he thought stories were going awry. We were really lucky to have him. He has a really keen eye. We joke about how tough he is, ’cause he’s a completely shoot-from-the-hip guy. He doesn’t suffer fools at all. If something stinks or sucks, he’s going to tell you. And basically in that language.

Krimmer: But one thing about Joe is that he does watch carefully to see what you’re doing. A funny story is that we audition for a part and there’s a lot of different people in the room, and you look at the person you’re reading opposite right in the eye and you try to be as truthful as you can. You bring as much of the character as you can to the audition, but not all of it. So when I went in and started performing the part, the character had a lot more sick humour than I think Joe had necessarily envisioned. But he began to get into it, to the point where by the third episode he was writing shtick for Cartagia. One of the funniest bits was in the scene where Cartagia is talking to his console of decapitated heads. So Peter made this really delicious choice. When I bring him in saying "I like you, Mollari; I want to show you something," I bring him into this dungeon with the heads, and Peter reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handkerchief and puts it over his nose, realizing that the stench emanating from these heads is not to be believed. And Joe called me off to the side and says, "This is what I want you to do. I had the prop guy place a thing of Centauri candy on the side of the desk that the heads are on. So in the middle of your scene with Londo, I want you to reach over and pull out the candy and offer him some." Joe’s all excited; he’s usually so serious. "And they’re called Snicks." I’m going on about how I’m going to become a god and wipe out a planet, and then I turned away and reached into the drawer and handed him these things and say, "Snicks?" He starts laughing.

Jurasik: The other thing that was funny in that scene was that Andreas’s head was one of the heads. Were you aware of that? Go back and look at your tapes. There were eight heads, and they were forms of crew people, and the one that was closest to me was the form that they used of Andreas’s to make his product.

Krimmer: This was so brilliant. Peter suggested, "What I want you to do is lower my chair so that my head is right at the same level." I thought, "Oh man, this guy is good."

Jurasik: It was a way to have Londo kinda nervous during the scene. "Oh great, I fit up here really nicely. There’s actually a spot for my head here."

Any other questions? Where are the juicy questions? Oh, they’re Canadians, that’s why. [No, it’s not. See Stephen Furst’s transcript for July 10—Ed.]

Krimmer: They’re Canadians. They know all the answers.

I have a question for Bob, but first, Peter, I have a message from DragonCon—I’ll let you explain—"Mmm, mmm, mmm. Put that in my mouth."

Jurasik: You don’t really want to hear, do you? Do you know a mythological creature called Dawn? She’s a red-headed, gorgeous woman. She’s a cartoon/myth creature. They had, at DragonCon, a Dawn look-alike contest. She has long, flowing red hair and she’s really built, and she’s always walking around in a bustier and stockings and leather boots up to here. I, of course, volunteered to emcee the Dawn look-alike contest. Why not? I’m in town. What am I going to do, watch TV in my room?

Krimmer: Before we went out to DragonCon, he said, "Bob, Bob, listen. Just talk to somebody. Make sure that you’re one of the judges."

Jurasik: It’s a nice way to spend an evening. I was the emcee, and what I told the audience is, "We get a chance to react, and I don’t know if you all know how to react to all these beautiful women. Let’s rehearse three different reactions." Here’s the first one: "Oh, my God!" The second one is, "Yes, yes, oh YES!" The last one was the one he was referring to, which became the hit of the evening: "Mmm, mmm, mmm. Put that in my mouth."

Krimmer: On Saturday night, I was one of the judges. It was just so funny. The entire place was probably three times what this crowd is. That Monday I flew back to New York from Atlanta. I had to film One Life to Live, which is the soap opera I’m on in New York. I play a minister, and it’s thrilling.

Jurasik: He really is a lot quieter than Cartagia.

Krimmer: You do eight weeks of work on sci-fi and get more recognition than 10 years of labour on a soap.

I get on the set, and I’m working with one of the actresses, and we’re doing a scene where she did something really sexy and provocative—

Jurasik: You didn’t tell me this.

Krimmer: I didn’t tell you this yet. So I’m on the set and I look at her and I go, "Mmm, mmm, mmm. Put that in my mouth." Everybody cracked up. They go, "Where did that come from?"

Jurasik: Make it part of your own personal repertoire. The occasion will arise. Sometime with a loved one or a spouse—or with your parents instead—just drop it at one of your holiday gatherings.

What was the question you had for Bob?

In reference to the concept of guest-starring, when you come into a series that’s been going for a while, and you know you’re only going to be there for a limited period, do you get a chance to become part of the community, to feel like you fit there before you’re gone, and how does that affect you coming to conventions like this, when you were just a small part of it?

Krimmer: There are no small parts; only small actors.

In the broad scope of the five-year arc, Cartagia was of course a small component. But the answer to your question is, there have been times in my career when I’ve guest-starred and it’s been really painful. Particularly on sitcoms, and I’ve done a lot of them. They’re just well-oiled machines and everybody knows each other.

[On B5,] I come onto the set and I see Kim Holly, who was my costume designer for a bunch of plays I did at a southern California repertory company. Her boyfriend is Wayne Alexander; we did Shakespeare together for years. Then I saw Peter, who I knew from Hill Street [Blues]. Then I knew Bruce Boxleitner because we had done Scarecrow and Mrs. King together. John Iacovelli, the set designer, was one of my old friends from college days. It was ridiculous; I knew everybody. So it did feel like family, and I realized that it was going to be a really fun and really safe place to act, where I didn’t have to worry about being judged, that I would be supported. That’s primarily what was responsible for anything good that happened in my performance—that I was working with people who I felt trusted by.

Jurasik: You know what else I say too? You couldn’t hang back; you had to get in there. If you hung back, you were going to to get into trouble. Instead of hanging back, [Bob] just said, "I’m in."

Krimmer: Yeah, but there were times when I went way over the top. Peter would say, "Just look me in the eyes and talk to me," so he helped me modulate the performance so at times I could be really out there but other times he helped me find the reality of the character.

Stephen Furst—I have to tell a little story on him. At the end of the episodes I did, I was talking to Peter and Stephen, and Peter said, "Bob did such a nice job of this, didn’t he, Stephen?" And Stephen went, "He would have done better had I directed him."

I noted that many of you have European backgrounds. Peter, you said you drew upon your Czechoslovakian grandmother, and Worther, your name is—

Krimmer: Wortham.

—is German?

Krimmer: It’s actually British, but I’m of Lithuanian extraction. I never quite figured out what that means. What does it mean to be Lithuanian? I’d love being Lithuanian if only I knew what it meant. If they ask me what I am, I say, "Lithuanian," and they go, "Oh."

Where somebody’s from is no big deal, but it was the accents and the voices and the believability. It was a saga—Shakespearean. The whole thing is going to exist for a long, long time in people’s memories.

Jurasik: We felt lucky to be part of it; it was great.

Could you tell us about the joke on Joe that you and Andreas pulled?

Jurasik: We were at a con. This was just when the accolades were really starting to roll in for Joe. Joe’s not a performer so he never knew what to do with it. This was a con in L.A. in season 2 or 3. Andreas and I went on right before Joe, who hadn’t arrived yet. We told the audience, "Listen, when Joe comes out, when he’s announced, don’t react at all. Just sit there like you don’t know who he is. Whatever he says, don’t laugh or boo; just sit there." Isn’t that a great thing to do to your boss? Of course, we were sitting right in front for Joe, watching. Before Joe comes out, they run three minutes of Babylon 5 stock and say, "And finally, Joseph Michael Straczynski!" Out he comes, and the audience does nothing. You could see immediately his knees started going into flop-sweat. He actually said, "Hi, I’m J. Michael Straczynski," and the audience does nothing. He pathetically said, "Babylon 5?" It’s a Babylon 5 convention. "You know, the creator of Babylon 5?" Everybody is perfectly quiet. He just started to shake. He didn’t know what to say or where to go. We saved him and spared him, but he promised to get back at us.

The way he got back at us was almost a year later. He wrote a script that was released to us the way all the other scripts came down—it was sent to our homes. In the script, we found out that the Narns had to transform into women, and Andreas’s character turned into a female Narn. And of course the first thing she wanted to do was get into bed with Londo. [In Londo’s voice] "This to me wasn’t surprising. Makes sense." He wrote it really well; it wasn’t overdone. We all believed it. I remember Bruce Boxleitner read it and called me up and said, "You’re—you’re not gonna do it, are you?" I said, "What are we supposed to do? Not do it?" He said, "I think he’s been working too hard." And Mira, who is exactly the person she seems to be, completely gracious and sincere and wonderful—she does overuse the word "horrible," though. She said to me on the phone, "Horrible, Peter. Don’t do it." They were begging me not to do it, and Andreas kept on saying to me, "No, it’s a joke. He couldn’t do it." They actually called him in for a costume fitting, and Andreas and I were thinking, "Oh, no." There was a scene where he comes on to me and kind of takes me, and of course Londo goes along with it. What does Londo know? Any port in a storm, clearly. Then we had a smoking scene in bed afterwards. The opening line to that scene was, "I didn’t hurt you, did I?" It was really poignant.

We had a big convention in England. I agreed, under some duress and a good amount of money, to read that, theatre-style, with Andreas, at two lecterns. There was a moment when his character would kiss me, and he kissed me on stage—and stuck his tongue in my mouth. It was definitely the low point of my career. I’m okay now, I’m over it, but I still have some bad dreams. Big guys like that, Narns, are not my type.

Krimmer: Oh, my God. I don’t want to know you guys.

Do you like practical joke stories? I played a good one on Peter. We had been going for a while so I felt comfortable playing a practical joke on Peter. At the time, Peter had a classic Porsche that he loved so much. He parked it in the parking lot for the actors behind where the trailers were. He had more work to do, and I was done for the day. I worked this out with the stage manager. I said, "This is what’s going to happen. I’m gonna get my car and I’m gonna pull it out and park it in such a way that Peter cannot possibly get his car out. Then I’m gonna lift up the front hood and come into the makeup room. You take it from there." So I did it. I got my car and boxed Peter’s car in so that there was no way he was going to get out. Then I came into the makeup room where Peter was getting a touch-up, completely frantic, saying that my car wasn’t working and I had get back home. Did anybody have a triple-A card? Peter says, "I don’t," and I say, "I’ll figure something out," and I left. Then I come back a little while later and say, "Well, my car’s still not working and I’m just gonna have to find a way home." Peter says, "I’m sorry. Good luck to you." Then the stage manager goes in there and says, "Peter, is that your Porsche?" Peter goes, "Yeah." He says to Peter, "Well, Krimmer’s car is parked right behind it. You’re not going to be able to get out." Peter says, "Oh, yeah. Krimmer’s car’s stalled. He’s getting somebody to tow it, fix it." He goes, "No, his wife picked him up."

Jurasik: If I can interrupt, he actually waited till I was ready to be released. It was late and it was getting dark and I couldn’t wait to get home, and I said, "Oh great, we’re going to go." He said, "You know what? You can’t get your car out."

Krimmer: So then I hide around the side of the trailer, right? Out comes Peter with the stage manager, and I overhear this whole conversation. This is Peter, the nicest guy in the world, going, "I don’t understand why Bob would do something like this. He seems like a nice guy. Why would he do that?"
Jurasik: It’s like the dumbest thing in the world. Who would take their car and jam my car in?

Krimmer: Sorry about that. Isn’t that funny?

I have a question for Bob. How did you come by the part of Cartagia?

Krimmer: I was in New York doing this other show I do, and I had a week and a half off from the soap. So I called my agent and said, "I’m going to be back in L.A. Maybe I can audition and find something." So he faxed me the audition sides for this role. I read them and said, "This is fantastic. I’d like to audition for it." They set up the audition, and I got offered the role. My agent said, "You got the part. There’s a problem. The part’s going to film for eight weeks." I said, "But I thought you said it was a week." He said, "I thought it was, but it’s not." So I called up my executive producer on One Life to Live and I explained the situation. I said, "This is just an amazing opportunity, a great role, so different from what I’ve been doing. My sanity requires that I do this. Please, please let me do it." So ABC—and this is so rare I can’t even tell you—consented to take a second position to Babylon 5 for the two months. Babylon would storyboard and say what days they needed me, it would get communicated to my agent, we’d communicate to ABC and work my filming schedule out. So I was going back and forth, being the minister, being Cartagia. I really lucked out.

It’s a good question, and there actually is a story to go with it, other than, "I auditioned. And then I got it. And I did it. Then it ended."

I have a question for Peter. I really liked you as Greasy Sid on Hill Street Blues. I was wondering if Steven Bochco’s ever asked you to do an appearance on NYPD Blue, so you and Dennis Franz could pair up again.

Jurasik: I’ve done a lot of work with Bochco. He did ask me to do an NYPD Blue, but Dennis and I both felt, when I came back to that show—it just didn’t feel like it was the right part. I had a history with Bochco, telling him: "No, write me something interesting. I don’t want to play another lawyer or another doctor." In this case he wrote me a fairly interesting part, but I wanted to play a lawyer or somebody really straight, because I felt that Sid was so off-beat that to put another off-beat character next to Dennis wasn’t going to be right. I wanted to play somebody a little tight-assed. It could still happen.

Peter, I understand that in order to get into the character of Londo, I read in an interview that all you had to do was say, "Mr. Garibaldi," and you’d be there. Could you, as a favour to us, just say it?

Jurasik: Just before I came on I said to Larry, "We get distanced from these characters." [To Wortham] And what did you say?

Krimmer: I said I couldn’t do Cartagia if somebody paid me to right now. I don’t know where that guy went. He went away, thankfully.

Jurasik: I have to agree. After a year and a half—I mean, I certainly can say "Mr. Garibaldi" and will—but, the story that goes with it is that the characters do go away from you eventually. Londo was particularly a character that I needed to get away from, ’cause he was very consuming. The character was a little like Cartagia—much bigger than you—these characters, when you did them, couldn’t have a slow day. You couldn’t show up a little down to do Londo or Cartagia.

Krimmer: High-energy people.

Jurasik: High-energy people. So I kinda looked forward to getting away. I used that as a device to get in character in the first season. All I would do was walk around saying [in Londo’s voice], "Mr. Garibaldi. My good, dear friend, Mr. Garibaldi." "Mr. Garibaldi" is a good word. Of course the quintessential word to work on is "VIR!" As though he forgot to do something. If you work on "Mr. Garibaldi" and "Vir" and lower your voice, you get a good likeness.

Mr. Jurasik, I’ve been to conventions for over 15 years and have met many Trek guests, many Babylon 5 guests. I had the privilege of meeting for just a few minutes with you, and I found you to be friendly, affable, approachable and totally classy. I wanted to thank you for making the best convention in Canada that much better.

Jurasik: Ladies and gentlemen, my brother-in-law.

We know a little bit about the Centauri male anatomy, and they have six. So what about female Centauris?

Jurasik: Very early on we had crossed that bridge. Remember in "Born to the Purple," the first time he meets Adira? They had a bedroom scene, the scene that Stephen interrupts, the famous "moon-faced assassin of joy"? In that scene, she had to get out of bed and walk away from the camera. That was the first time Joe was going to play the six genitalia. This beautiful actress, here she is—if it’s not a hard enough day, she’s lying in bed with me all day. On top of it, they put six slots—I don’t recall what they were going for there—

Krimmer: Receptacles.

Jurasik: Receptacles, and they were horizontal. There were three down this side, and three down this side. So when she got up, she was going to walk away from the camera and you were going to see that. There was going to be no comment from me or anybody on it. They tried to do it, and they started filming it. It was like, "Ugh. What’s on her back?" It was a little like the card-playing scene with Lennier ["The Quality of Mercy," first season]. That was a great day for the prop guy too, handing in Londo’s…thing. "Here it is. Is this how you like it?" "No, bigger." "No, smaller." "Wetter." "No, dryer."

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