Bakula: Still the Captain, Though Interested in Politics

Scott Bakula (Captain Archer) continued to make the rounds of media publicity for his movie Blue Smoke, which made its debut last night on Lifetime.

Speaking on the radio to The Bob Rivers Show (via Project Quantum Leap), Bakula spoke about what he had been doing since "Captain Jonathan Archer has docked the Starship Enterprise", in the words of the talk show host.

Asked whether he missed the Paramount lot, Bakula said, "They still let me on," though he lamented, "They took my parking pass away, though." Rivers joked with him about his ability to beam in and out whenever he wanted, then inquired about the baggage he carried about being an ex-starship captain.

"I get such a mixture of responses from fans," Bakula replied. "It's great for me...you'll walk by somebody and you'll get saluted, or you'll get 'Hello, Captain' periodically, but I get an equal amount or more from Quantum Leap."

Bakula explained that he spent much of the last year performing onstage in Shenandoah, "a return to my roots in theatre" and an eerie experience since he was doing the play at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC - a Civil War musical on the stage where Abraham Lincoln's assassin leapt after fatally shooting the president.

After a few episodes of The New Adventures of Old Christine, he was invited to do Blue Smoke, based on a novel by the extremely successful Nora Roberts. "You walk through an airport and you look in those bookstores, and it's all Nora Roberts - a whole wall of Nora Roberts," he observed.

His co-star is Alicia Witt, "and it was really so much fun to work with her and do this project with Lifetime." On the series, he and Witt both play arson investigators attempting to discover why every man who gets close to her dies in a fire.

"Now it's the new pilot season and I'm looking to see if there's any TV out there that might be fun to do," Bakula added. Asked if he were in private sector, not an actor, what would he be good at, he replied, "I think I always thought I would make a good trial lawyer, which is kind of like acting anyway. As I get older, I think more about what a good politician would be, or a good representative."

Then would he run for governor, like several former actors? "I don't think so!"

As for his Enterprise co-stars, when Rivers inquired what had happened to that "hot Vulcan woman" on the series, Bakula joked that he didn't know there was a hot vulcan woman before explaining that he and Jolene Blalock had missed each other at a convention in Las Vegas. "I haven't seen Jolene much," he admitted. "I know that John Billingsley was on The Nine...it was a good show and he was great."

Bakula recalled that Connor Trinneer had been on a science fiction show whose name he had forgotten (presumably Stargate: Atlantis) and he knew where his other co-stars had been working, leading Rivers to claim that this means Scott Bakula is still the captain.

A podcast of the show can be found here. Thanks to Project Quantum Leap for the links.

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