‘Babylon 5’ star discusses career as part of event in Bethel Park
Harry Funk/The Almanac
Patricia Tallman shows the updated edition of her autobiography during the Horror Realm convention in Bethel Park.
Harry Funk/The Almanac
Patricia Tallman enlightens her audience about her career.
Harry Funk/The Almanac
Patricia Tallman enlightens her audience about her career.
Talk about a gift that keeps on giving.
“I still get residuals from ‘Star Trek,'” said Patricia Tallman, who acted in three of the TV series bearing variations of that title. “I mean, they’re 50 cents now, but it’s meaningful.”
Her résumé also includes playing the telepathic Lyta Alexander on another science-fiction series, “Babylon 5.” And during a panel discussion she conducted as a featured guest of this year’s Horror Realm convention in Bethel Park, she gave some viewpoints regarding those particular shows.
“‘Babylon 5,’ I think, is amazing because of the writing and of the characters. They evolve. They don’t stay the same,” she said.
That contrasts with the general “Star Trek” motif.
“You’ve got your bad guys. And they’re kind of always consistent,” Tallman said. “But with ‘Babylon 5,’ you never knew. You think some guy is really terrible, and then he does something really good. And you’re like, what? But it’s kind of like life.”
In that context, her preference helps explain the title of her 2011 autobiography, “Pleasure Thresholds, Patricia Tallman’s Babylon 5 Memoir,” for which she has an update to be published this year.
Her appearance at Horror Realm, held March 6-8 at Crowne Plaza Suites Pittsburgh South, was connected primarily with work she has done in that realm, most notably starring in Tom Savini’s 1990 remake of George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.”
Tallman – who, like Romero, graduated from Carnegie Mellon University – plays Barbara, the lead character who manages to survive a plethora of zombie attacks. And in a portrayal that runs counter to the general characterization of women in horror movies, she metes out some justice, herself.
“I did have a producer-writer at one point say that he’d come up with this idea of what would happen to Barbara after this. He had come up with this postapocalyptic zombie world 15 or 20 years after, and that we have these young people kind of get together, and then they come across Barbara,” Tallman said, describing her as “sort of like Sarah Conner,” the waitress-turned-vigilante in “The Terminator” universe, “but dreadlocked and filthy, and just like the ultimate zombie killer, a lethal weapon.”
Along with acting, Tallman established a career doing stunts, most notably doubling for Laura Dern in a particularly successful Steven Spielberg film.
“Has everyone seen ‘Jurassic Park’? Spoiler alert: There are dinosaurs in it,” Tallman joked with the Bethel Park audience.
“There’s a point where Laura’s character, which was me, is running along the edge of dinosaur bones, then falling and holding onto the bones. And the bones start spinning around and breaking apart, and then she falls to the floor,” she recalled.
“All the bones start falling around her, and so she tightens up into a ball, and the prop guys are throwing bones and dust around her to make it look like all the bones are falling on her or close to her,” Tallman continued. “I worked with Laura so that she could figure out a way to fall that wouldn’t bruise her. In general, you just don’t want your actor hurt. Your job is to keep them from even getting a bruise.”
About becoming a stuntwoman, she quipped: “I fell into it.”
The actual story involves a period sword technique class she took in New York City, and one of her classmates was a stunt coordinator.
“He came up to me after class and said, ‘I need someone 5-foot-9 with red hair to fall down some stairs. Would you be interested?'” Tallman recalled. “They paid me, I think, $1,200 for the day. I was working in the little girls department of Macy’s, and that’s more than I made in a month.”
Of course, that offered plenty of incentive to continue, although she often didn’t knew exactly what she would encounter.
“Stunts are so unusual. Every job is a new challenge,” she said. “There was almost never a point where I felt like, oh, I know how to do this. It was always, OK. Suck it up. Learn something new.
“But motorcycles, I wouldn’t do.”