Morris Chapdelaine

Morris Chapdelaine
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Portrays:	Reporter #2
Date of Birth:	June 01, 1970
Date of Death:	Missing required parameter 1=month!
Age:	55
Nationality:	CAN
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		@ BW Media
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IMDb profile

Morris Chapdelaine is a Canadian actor, puppeteer, and producer who plays Reporter #2 in the Battlestar Galactica episode "Litmus." Born on June 1, 1970, he is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and has worked across acting, puppeteering, and production in the Vancouver film and television industry.

Career

Chapdelaine studied drama arts at the University of Alberta and subsequently trained in producing through the Creative Producers Intensive program at the Canadian Film Centre. He described his entry into puppetry as having come through voice work and theatre workshops undertaken during his training, and noted that after arriving in Vancouver he sought out apprenticeships with established media puppeteers working in the city's genre film community as a route into the science fiction and horror productions that were shooting there continuously. He accumulated credits as both a performer and a puppeteer across a range of genre productions, including Andromeda and Smallville. He also produced one of the earliest Canadian web series, the 2001 production West of Denman, which subsequently aired nationally on OutTV.

His appearance as Reporter #2 in the first-season Battlestar Galactica episode "Litmus" (2004) came during the early period of his Vancouver career, when he was simultaneously active as the lead Asgard puppeteer on the co-located Stargate SG-1 production. Around the same time, he appeared in front of the camera on Stargate SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis in several on-screen alien roles. On Stargate SG-1, he portrayed the recurring Lucian Alliance alien Tenat in three episodes: "Prometheus Unbound" (Season 8, 2005), "The Ties That Bind" (Season 9, 2005), and "Company of Thieves" (Season 10, 2006). He also appeared on Stargate SG-1 as an Ori Prior in "Arthur's Mantle" (Season 9, 2006) and in the direct-to-video film Stargate: The Ark of Truth (2008), and on Stargate: Atlantis as a Newborn Wraith in "Spoils of War" (Season 4, 2008).

Puppetry work

Chapdelaine with the Asgard puppet on the set of the Stargate franchise.

Chapdelaine began working on Stargate SG-1 in Season Five, initially as an apprentice to the existing make-up artists and puppeteers. He learned the animatronics work during that apprenticeship and in Season Six took over as lead puppeteer, hiring the team, running pre-production meetings, and taking responsibility for all the Asgard characters across both productions — work he estimated spanned approximately 25 to 26 episodes in total. As lead puppeteer, he operated the mouth and jaw of the Asgard puppet figures and delivered the characters' lines on set opposite the principal cast during production, giving actors something to respond to; the final dubbed voice was supplied in post-production by other performers — Michael Shanks voiced Thor, for example. He was part of a team of four to five operators covering the eyes, brows, head, arms, and body, and was given rehearsal days to develop distinct physical characteristics for each character. His background as a voice-over artist made the on-set dialogue work a natural extension of his acting practice.

His introduction to the Asgard work came through special effects make-up artist and fellow puppeteer Todd Masters, with whom he had worked on earlier productions. His core puppeteer team included Geoff Redknap, Paul Hooson, and Jeny Cassady. Characters he performed as lead puppeteer included Thor, Loki, Kvasir, and Hermiod across Stargate SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis. On Stargate: Atlantis, he was the lead puppeteer for Hermiod, a technician stationed aboard the Daedalus, describing the character as a younger and more assertive variant of Thor with less patience for human contact. The team's familiarity with the puppet eventually extended to improvisation in scenes alongside series regulars including Amanda Tapping and Richard Dean Anderson, which Chapdelaine attributed to the group's shared theatrical backgrounds and the extended time they had spent working with the puppet. He also worked in a crew capacity as prosthetic animatronic operator on multiple Stargate SG-1 episodes, including "200" and "Camelot".

On Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007), Chapdelaine was part of the puppeteer team working under Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc. (ADI), using hand, rod, cable, hydraulic, and animatronic techniques across multiple creature types. He and the other Canadian puppeteers on the production had prior working experience with ADI from projects including Scary Movie 3 and The Santa Clause, which gave them early familiarity with ADI's builds and puppet controls before rehearsals began on the film. He described the hydraulic puppet as the standout assignment on the production, noting it was new territory for the franchise and required approximately seven to eight operators working simultaneously to bring it to life. He contrasted the work on AVP: Requiem with his Stargate experience, observing that the Asgard puppets were characterized by intelligence and dialogue rather than the physical aggression required of the AVP creatures.

Chapdelaine contributed puppetry or creature-performance work on several further productions: Slither (2006), The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), Falling Skies (2012–2015), and Jim Henson's Turkey Hollow (2015). In television, he appeared as Delbrook / Shapeshifter Embryo in the Fringe episode "The Man from the Other Side" (Season 2, 2010) and as Morgue Worker #2 in "Alone in the World" (Season 4, 2011).

Producing career

Chapdelaine transitioned into television and film production during the mid-2000s, working across both documentary and scripted genres. In 2009, he co-founded the production company Big Gay Movie with filmmaker Bob Christie while producing their first feature documentary, Beyond Gay: The Politics of Pride. The film screened at over sixty festivals and won multiple best documentary awards at LGBTQ+ film festivals internationally, and was broadcast on Super Channel in Canada and Showtime in the United States, as well as Sky Italy and Globosat Brasil.

He subsequently produced scripted television for Nomadic Pictures, serving as a producer on the Syfy/Netflix horror series Van Helsing across all five seasons (2016–2021). He also served as producer or associate producer on the Netflix series Wu Assassins (2019), The Order (2019–2020), The I-Land (2019), and The Imperfects (2022).

In 2021, Big Gay Movie partnered with Border2Border Entertainment on the documentary feature Pat Rocco Dared, which Chapdelaine co-directed and co-produced with Bob Christie. The film had its world premiere at the Whistler Film Festival in December 2021 and subsequently screened at Frameline46 in San Francisco and Inside Out Toronto. The documentary chronicles the life and work of LGBTQ+ filmmaker and activist Pat Rocco through an interview with filmmaker Charlie David, tracing Rocco's career from his erotic films of the late 1960s through his involvement in early LGBTQ+ liberation activism.

References