Tiffany Lyndall-Knight

Tiffany Lyndall-Knight
PerformerTRS
{{{credit}}}
Portrays:	Hybrid
Date of Birth:	October 17, 1972
Date of Death:	Missing required parameter 1=month! ,
Age:	53
Nationality:	CAN
Related Media
		@ BW Media
Official Site (archived)
IMDb profile

Tiffany Lyndall-Knight is a Canadian-Australian actress and academic who portrayed the Cylon Hybrid in the Re-imagined Series. Born in Canada and moving to Australia at age nine when her parents divorced, she has established herself as both a performer and educator with extensive credits in theatre, film, and television. She is a four-time Jessie Theatre Richardson Award nominee and has been a science fiction fan for years. She describes herself as "50/50" Canadian-Australian, calling herself "a hybrid now."

Career

Early Life and Theatre Training

Lyndall-Knight's interest in performance began early when she saw Star Wars as a young child and "wanted to be Han Solo." After moving to Australia, theatre became "the first place where I sort of found my tribe" as she struggled with feeling like she didn't belong with her different accent.

Her first significant theatrical experience was in high school, performing as one of the Gemini Twins in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" at an all-girls school. She later attended theatre school in Canada after not getting into her preferred program in Australia, nearly quitting several times before her father encouraged her to persist, telling her "you're not a quitter" and "this is a huge industry, and there's a space for everyone in it."

Theatre

Lyndall-Knight is a graduate of Toronto's George Brown Theatre School. Her extensive theatre career spans eight seasons with Vancouver's Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival, where she performed notable roles including Ariel in "The Tempest," Olivia in "Twelfth Night," Helena in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and Regan in "King Lear." Her Shakespeare experience proved crucial for later roles, as she performed in "about 12 shows" before her screen career began.

She has performed with theatre companies across Australia and Canada, including State Theatre Company South Australia, Queensland Theatre, and Manitoba Theatre Centre.

Lyndall-Knight originated the role of Emily in the multi-award-winning solo show 19 weeks by Emily Steel. The performance, staged in a swimming pool and based on Steel's experience of terminating a pregnancy at nineteen weeks, garnered Curtain Call Awards for Best Professional Drama and Best Professional Female Performer. The show was awarded both a weekly award and overall winner for Best Theatre at Adelaide Fringe in 2017, and has since toured extensively, been adapted for BBC Radio 4, and made into a film. Steel wrote the piece because "I need to write about this, because I don't have any touchstones for how to navigate this" and asked Lyndall-Knight to play her. The staging involved audiences sitting on the edge of the pool with their feet in the water while Lyndall-Knight performed in the water, creating a shared immersive experience. The show was later filmed with funding from Australia Council and has had significant impact on audiences, with many thanking Steel afterward for articulating experiences they had been through. She wrote her PhD thesis about this project.

Screen Work

Lyndall-Knight's transition to screen acting was primarily practical, driven by the need to support her family. "Film and television really was, for me, a means to an end" because "once I had a baby, I didn't want to be away from them and go into debt just to do my craft." Working in Vancouver, she "learned on the job" as the city provided excellent opportunities for both theatre and screen work.

Her first professional television job was playing Lamour in Stargate SG-1 episode "Touchstone," which she described as terrifying because "I really didn't know what I was doing in terms of film and television at that stage." The production involved green screen work, fake snow that "tasted like soap" or "dried baby biscuits," and being spray-painted for a tan. She particularly remembered Amanda Tapping taking her "under her wing" at craft services, honestly discussing industry challenges including body image pressures, and serving as "a bit of a role model" through her evolution from ingenue to respected director. The role allowed her to buy her first car, "a Mazda RX-7, bright red, with the headlights that popped" which became known as "the Stargate car for years."

She returned to Stargate SG-1 five years later as Evala in "Revisions," a role she found more fulfilling because "it wasn't about her body, it was about her journey in that story" compared to earlier roles where she was "spray-painted" and "dressed in a bikini."

Battlestar Galactica Role

Lyndall-Knight's connection to Battlestar Galactica came through Alessandro Juliani (who plays Felix Gaeta), "a very close friend" and "my kid's godfather." She was already "a huge fan of the show" when she auditioned.

When she booked the Hybrid role, her second child was about six months old, and she developed her character approach by imagining "what it must be like to be in utero." She explained: "You know, she's floating in water, and she just gets all these signals floating around the world, around her. And in the cosmos, she is the ship. So, she's floating in empty space, right?" She imagined channeling signals "like, if I was in utero, I was channeling all the things that I was hearing out there and just sort of putting them into a stream of consciousness." To prepare for her audition, she drew on her recent experience as a new mother, imagining the character as "a child in the womb and having all of these different cells and sensory experiences sort of being filtered through the umbilical cord."

Her approach to the Hybrid connected to her understanding of infant development: "I think that babies understand a lot, but it takes them time to learn how to find the language to communicate that, but they hear it all. They understand it." She believed the Hybrid "is channeling things, and it's just up to the people who listen to decode it, really. She doesn't have the capacity."

The Hybrid's dialogue, a highly stylized stream of consciousness incorporating scientific terms, poetry, folk songs, political speeches, and references to Homer's Iliad, required extensive research and preparation. Her Shakespeare training proved crucial for memorizing the complex dialogue. "All the Shakespeare I had done, because I'd done about 12 shows at that stage, really helped me, because I just had to look at that text as poetry and find for myself those internal links and the symbolism and the backstory that is just sort of encoded into that text." Lyndall-Knight approached the complex dialogue using her Shakespeare training, breaking down the text "like a piece of poetry and find the connection for myself, so I can learn it." She created "a whole storyline that goes underneath all that stuff that's unique to me, that makes complete sense in my mind." Writers would ask "how do you learn all these lines?" to which she replied, "you guys wrote it, you know, come on."

The role required her to lie in an immersion tank filled with warm water and tempera paint to create the milky, opaque appearance. The physical requirements included being submerged in water with "Tempura paint to get the right opacity" and being "covered in KY Jelly." She had a dedicated crew member who "always kept the temperature at a certain level," making the experience comfortable despite the complex setup. At one point during costume development, "there was like tentacles at one stage. It was a real process."

She returned for The Plan and had to complete voice-over work from Australia: "I had to do voice-over here in a studio and patch that in."

Interestingly, after appearing on the show, "the magic went away" and she stopped watching: "all I couldn't see was everything outside the frame. Like, I can imagine the guy running boom, and I can imagine my water guy." She called the experience "a great, great career-defining experience."

Her science fiction credits include roles in Stargate SG-1 (playing the characters La Moor and Evalla), Smallville, Supernatural, and I, Robot. She co-wrote and starred in the Canadian film Mothers & Daughters.

More recent projects include roles in Australian productions such as Red Dog, The Babadook, ANZAC Girls, Wanted, Wolf Creek, and the Netflix series Pine Gap. In Wolf Creek, she played the serial killer's mother in a flashback scene, filming in "a huge old abandoned building" filled with "pigeon shit" and "old children's toys" that created an eerie atmosphere perfect for the role.

Academic and Teaching Career

Lyndall-Knight is currently a Lecturer in Drama at Flinders University in South Australia, where she primarily teaches screen acting. She moved to South Australia recognizing that it would be different from Vancouver's opportunities, making "a decision that I'd done it. I played enough roles and done enough things that I was ready to challenge myself with something else." Her teaching strategy involves networking: "if I taught people at a university level, once they graduated and they entered the industry, they'd hire me, or I'd get to work with them."

She believes "I might be a better teacher than I am an actor" and "I certainly think I'm a better teacher of screen acting than I am a screen actor" because "I've learned so much as a performer by having to deconstruct it and figure out how to communicate those ideas to another person."

She was awarded a PhD in Theatre from Flinders University in 2018 with a thesis titled "Creative Artefact: 19 weeks. Exegesis: 'Just the Actor': A Practice-Led Research Investigation into the Actor's Status in Contemporary Independent Theatre" and received the Vice Chancellor's Prize for Doctoral Thesis Excellence. Her thesis examination was exceptional for part of it being performed in front of a live audience during the 2017 Adelaide Fringe, conducted in an indoor swimming pool where audience members put their feet in the water while she performed.

She is a Full Member of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and the Assemblage Centre for Creative Practice Research. She co-authored The Creative PhD: Challenges, Opportunities, Reflections with Professor Tara Brabazon and Natalie Hills, published by Emerald Press. She has also published academic research on her performance work, including "19 weeks: Performing Theatre about Abortion" in Women's Studies International Forum (2020), which examines the creative processes employed by an actor playing a woman who chooses a late-term abortion following a diagnosis of Down Syndrome. Her recent research includes co-authoring "AusStage Follows the Money: An introduction to the design and functionality of the new financial table in the AusStage database" as part of analyzing the South Australian performing arts sector.

Throughout her career, she has been a teaching artist at multiple institutions, including the University of Adelaide's Elder Conservatory Musical Theatre program, Adelaide College of the Arts, and the University of British Columbia. She co-founded the Gateway Academy of Performing Arts at the Gateway Theatre in Richmond, British Columbia.

Directing

Lyndall-Knight has moved into directing, recently completing a web series called "Behind the Scenes" about "a woman who runs a vintage clothing shop, and her father has just died, and her mother brings all his clothes." The series explores "the sandwich generation women my age who are caring up and caring down at the same time" while weaving in themes of "slow fashion and upcycling and caring for our world by caring for our past." The series was distributed on Facebook Watch through a Screen Australia initiative.

She believes "every actor should direct if they get the opportunity" because "as an actor, you get to make so many creative decisions in this sort of pathway, in this band. And then, when you direct, those choices just get to expand like this."

Voice and Dialect Coaching

Lyndall-Knight works as a dialect and voice coach with private clients and companies including State Theatre Company South Australia, STAN, Heesom Casting, NHK, and Netflix.

Personal Life

Lyndall-Knight has two children and describes her father as a major influence on her career. Her father worked for Kodak Canada as head of Corporate Communications and taught her the importance of storytelling and communication from an early age through regular letter writing and tape recordings when she moved to Australia. Her father was also a "big fan" of Stargate and a "Trekkie," which is how she became familiar with the show.

She currently lives in "a little country town" about half an hour from Adelaide and enjoys gardening and walking as her primary forms of relaxation. In 2023, she returned to Canada with her son for the first time since COVID, visiting Vancouver and Toronto, and was "really relieved" to realize that Australia is "where I'm meant to be right now." Her 19-year-old son is planning to move to Vancouver, and she hopes to help him get into the Director's Guild and find work as a Production Assistant, believing "he would be a fantastic First A.D."

She is a major Star Trek: Voyager fan and compares directing to "Katherine Janeway from Voyager, a bridge, like, every person, their expert is in their field, and the captain's job is really just to bring all these great minds together."

Lyndall-Knight has been married to John James Hong since September 9, 2001.

Industry Involvement

She is a proud member of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), where she served as President of the South Australian Branch (Equity Section) from 2019-2021 and National Vice President (Equity Section) from 2021-24. As of the interview, she described herself as "the national vice president of Equity" in Australia. One of her major advocacy focuses is "streaming and making sure that we get Australian content into streaming" and ensuring reciprocal relationships where Australian stories reach global audiences rather than just serving as locations for international productions. In her advocacy role, she has participated in industry panel discussions about the actor/agent relationship and the current state of the entertainment industry.

Career Philosophy

Throughout her career, Lyndall-Knight has been influenced by advice from veteran actor Jerry Wasserman, who told her during a quiet period: "you got, you know, enough shots on goal, one eventually is going to get into the net." This hockey analogy resonated with her Canadian background and became a guiding principle of persistence in the industry.

She reflects that Vancouver was fortunate for actors because "you can actually be, by and large, settled in one place and have a home as an actor, because that is absolutely not the reality for the vast majority of people, particularly in Australia." She notes that most actors today must either "have many, many strings to your bows and be a portfolio worker" or "be prepared to just be a nomad."

References