Eric Breker

Eric Breker
PerformerRDM
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Portrays:	George Chu Gemenon Captain
Date of Birth:
Date of Death:	Missing required parameter 1=month!
Nationality:	CAN
Related Media
		@ BW Media
[{{{site}}} Official Site]
IMDb profile

Eric Breker is a Canadian actor from Humboldt, Saskatchewan, who portrayed the captain of the Gemenon Traveller in "Flesh and Bone" and George Chu in "Sacrifice". Outside Battlestar Galactica, he is best known to genre audiences for his recurring role as Colonel Albert Reynolds on Stargate SG-1, a part he played across 16 episodes between 1998 and 2007. Breker has also appeared in The X-Files, The Dead Zone, Dark Angel, and Smallville.

Career

Early life and training

Breker began acting in high school in Saskatchewan, crediting actor and director Gord McCall and the touring company Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan with introducing him to theatre as a craft rather than a pastime. He worked with Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan in the summer of 1988, an experience he later said was the first time he met actors who supported themselves through the work. The following year he joined the incoming class at the [[w:National Theatre School of Canada|National Theatre School of Canada** in Montreal, enrolling in the fall of 1989 alongside fellow Saskatchewan actor Karen Turner. He completed one year at the school before relocating to Victoria, British Columbia, to pursue stage work.

Stage work

In Victoria, Breker built a stage career through the first half of the 1990s. He played the title role in Theatre Inconnu's April 1992 production of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck at Market Square, with a local reviewer singling out a dance-hall scene in which the character "putrefies into a shuddering fit of jealousy" as the production's strongest moment. He originated the role of executed Second World War spy Frank Pickersgill in the Belfry Theatre's November 1994 premiere of Bill Penner and Jim Read's Night and Fog, a Remembrance Day production built around Pickersgill's wartime letters to his brother. The following spring he played the lead, Bob, opposite Jodie LaRiviere in the Chemainus Theatre's production of Beau Jest, by which point a Vancouver Island reviewer described him as an actor already familiar to Victoria audiences.

After relocating to Vancouver, Breker continued to take stage roles between screen jobs. He played Gerry Mackay, the father of one of the play's teenage characters, in the Firehall Arts Centre's spring 2001 production of Michael Lewis MacLennan's The Shooting Stage; a Vancouver Sun review noted that Breker had joined the cast later than his castmates and attributed some opening-night unevenness in his performance to the late addition. The following year he played Billy in Ron Chambers' Respectable, also at the Firehall Arts Centre.

Screen career

Breker's earliest verified screen credit is a voice role as the Danzig Posh Express agent in the 1995 interactive video Ripley's Believe It or Not!: The Riddle of Master Lu. Through the late 1990s he took a series of one-off and recurring guest roles on Vancouver-shot productions, including an uncredited ambulance driver in "Apocrypha" and an admitting officer in "Demons" on The X-Files, and Malcolm Hunziger and Howard Rothenburg in two unrelated episodes of Millennium. He also played Dale Haney and Dr. Eric Desrosiers across two separate episodes of the Canadian police drama Cold Squad between 1998 and 2000. Several credits from this period, including a 2002 episode of John Doe, were billed under the spelling "Erik Breker"; IMDb lists this as a verified alternate credit.

By late June 1998, with The X-Files having relocated production away from Vancouver the previous month, Breker was a working actor balancing auditions against a deadline he had set for himself; recently married, he told the Saskatoon StarPhoenix that he intended to give the business three years to support him before considering other options, including a return to Saskatchewan. Around the same period he auditioned for principal roles on the series Dead Man's Gun and First Wave and lost out, by his own description as a "second choice," for a part in the Sam Elliott feature One Last Town; he credited Vancouver casting director Stewart Aikens with bringing him several of these auditions.

Breker first appeared on Stargate SG-1 as Major Reynolds in the second-season episode "Touchstone," which aired October 30, 1998. Recalling his casting in a 2024 interview, Breker said producer Robert C. Cooper later told him the production wanted "an intelligent officer" rather than a stock military type for the part. In the same interview, Breker recalled that the character, subsequently named Albert Reynolds, was promoted from Sergeant to Major to Lieutenant Colonel to Colonel over the course of the show's run, eventually taking command of the recurring team SG-3. Breker reprised the role in the direct-to-video film Stargate: The Ark of Truth (2008).

Breker portrayed the captain of the Gemenon Traveller in the Battlestar Galactica first-season episode "Flesh and Bone," which aired February 25, 2005, and returned as the civilian George Chu in the second-season episode "Sacrifice," which aired February 10, 2006. IMDb's biography notes that Breker is among a small number of performers to have guest-starred on what it identifies as the three longest-running North American science-fiction series of the era — The X-Files, Stargate SG-1, and Smallville.

In the years following Battlestar Galactica, Breker continued working steadily as a Vancouver-based actor, including a guest appearance as Sergeant Macready on Primeval: New World and a one-episode role as Leo Mueller in the first-season Arrow episode "Damaged." He took the lead role of corrupt detective John Rancour in the independent feature Captive (2013). He returned to The X-Files as Agent Brem in the 2016 revival episode "Babylon," and played John Smith, Johnny's grandfather, in a 2006 episode of The Dead Zone titled "Panic," having earlier appeared in the series as Mugger #1 in the 2003 episode "Deja Voodoo."

More recently, Breker has had recurring and guest roles on Virgin River as Josh across five episodes between 2020 and 2024, and one-off appearances on Project Blue Book, Batwoman, and The Last of Us, the latter as Bryan's father in a 2023 episode. Beyond acting, Breker wrote the 2007 short film Pig Tale.

Personal life

A 1997 obituary for his aunt, Angeline Breker Fernholz, names an Eric Breker of Humboldt, Saskatchewan, among the children of Mathieu and Elvira Breker.

In July 1994, Victoria's Times Colonist reported that Breker became engaged to fellow actor and advertising model Jenny Matechuk; the proposal took place during a newspaper photo shoot in which the couple had been posed as a "dream couple" to promote the paper's new voice-personals feature, and Breker produced a ring partway through the session. The couple were preparing at the time to tour a play, Once There, to Fringe festivals across western Canada. He married in early 1998, travelling to [[w:Australia|Australia** for the wedding before returning to resume his Vancouver acting career.

Breker has worked for years as a contractor carpenter alongside his acting career, a parallel he discussed in a 2024 interview by comparing notes with fellow actor and tradesman Don S. Davis, his Stargate SG-1 co-star. In the same interview, he referred to balancing his construction business with his "family and kids" during the lean stretches between acting jobs, and attributed to his early stage training a piece of theater-school advice he still keeps in mind: that an actor's career is a matter of outlasting, rather than outworking, one's peers.

References