Joe Flanigan Battles More Monsters in ‘Ferocious Planet’

Joe Flanigan stars in tonight’s Syfy movie premiere, Ferocious Planet, and once again, he’s battling monsters. These are a bit different than the ones he has come up against in Stargate Atlantis. “They seem to be almost impossible to kill. I seemed to be very good at killing the other ones,” Joe told us in a recent blogger conference call. “And in this case, I have to say they’re much bigger than I anticipated them to be.”

The plot for Ferocious Planet reads: ‘An experimental device designed to view alternate universes malfunctions on its first demonstration, transporting a group of observers into a nightmarish new dimension. The team must use ingenuity and courage to outwit the bloodthirsty creatures inhabiting this bizarre, while trying to repair the machine and return them back home. ‘ Hmm, sounds a lot like Primeval.

This film also stars the wonderful John Rhys-Davies, whom Joe considers ‘a consummate professional’. “He’s a wonderful guy. And, he’s just filled with tons of fantastic stories. He’s done so much. We took him out to dinner one night in Dublin and he kind of regaled us with like all sorts of interesting stories. You know, he’s just done theater everywhere, movies everywhere. And he was wonderful to work with.”

Joe gives his thoughts on what we can expect from Ferocious Planet: “Well, the movie is kind of part homage to the genre and also part actually the genre, so it’s one of those – you could call it in some ways a guilty pleasure in some ways. There are elements that are similar to Stargate in terms of the character and in terms of being kind of off world. But beyond that, it’s more of a kind of – I would say – I want to say it’s dinosaur-centric, but I guess it is. It looks like that.”

One of the challenges Joe talked about in filming this movie was that most of it was shot on green screen, and the visual effects were not really described very well to him. “When I saw the movie, the monsters were way bigger than I thought they were. Oh, my God. This is – it’s very, very tricky and fraught with a lot of obstacles when you’re doing science fiction acting. And I’m a bit of a stickler on set about making sure I know exactly what the levels of urgency are so that I don’t get a lot of egg on my face after they do a lot of the post-production. And you say to yourself, “My God! Why is he not reacting to the 300 foot tall monster?” Because I thought it was 3 feet tall. So you can imagine it gets tricky.”

While not originally a fan of the genre, Joe admits to having a change of heart the more he worked with it. “I approached science fiction with a lot of trepidation. I wasn’t really that enthusiastic about the genre when I started. And then as time went on, it – I’ve been converted you know 180 degrees, and I absolutely would say it’s now my favorite genre. And it gives you so much freedom. And I mean at heart, I’m an action/adventure kind of guru. I like that. And that you can do that and mix in science and fantasy and all sorts of things is pretty cool. And so, I really do miss doing my show, and I really hope to do another one. I think TV needs some more action/adventure, science fiction stuff.”

In fact, Joe had mentioned that there were a couple of shows on TV today that were science fiction and pretty interesting to him. One of them was True Blood, so being a Truebie myself, I had to ask him if he had the opportunity to be on that show, would he rathre play a human or a supernatural. “I wouldn’t want be human. It’s a lot of fun being the bad guy with big teeth. Playing bad guys is an awful lot of fun. You do it on a limited basis, but it’s an awful lot of fun.” So Alan Ball, if you’re reading this, Joe would probably make a great vampire hunter!

Ferocious Planet premieres tonight at 9/8 central, on Syfy.