Galactica's Jamie Bamber Visits a Heavenly Ghost

TVGuide.com: How did this role on Ghost Whisperer come about?

Bamber: I just moved down to L.A. with my family, after the Season 3 climax of Battlestar. We started making a home here, and they asked me to do an episode of Cold Case. I did that, and then this other opportunity came up. I enjoyed doing Cold Case and working on someone else's show and experiencing it from the other side. I'd never worked on TV shows here before Battlestar, so I thought it would be a good experience from a different crew and working environment.

TVGuide.com: Is it less stress to be only a guest on a show, instead of a star?

Bamber: Actually, no, it was more stress. I've never worked so hard in my life. I was playing two different characters, and it was pretty confusing and there were quite a few challenges. My first day I think I should have won a medal for gross overacting in the presence of a TV star. Jennifer Love Hewitt and David [Conrad] were on set, and I was throwing myself around all over the floor trying to be a ghost whose been snatched and trying to stop the body from escaping. It was just one man acting against the world basically. It was a little embarrassing. But I think it worked out alright.

TVGuide.com: Are you playing two different characters? Or are they the same character but just the dead and alive versions of them?

Bamber: I play a guy who is a high-school football star whose life leads down dead ends; he's on the eve of his 10-year reunion and he can't face going back as a loser. So he walks in front of a car and gets himself killed. At the same time, in the morgue, I'm a dead body — a ghost — and then his body gets taken over by another ghost, who happens to be a kid in his class who was wheelchair-bound and died at 17. So this other ghost has been wandering around the earth for 10 years, I suppose looking for another body to get in. Anyway, he ends up taking over this body that he always envied, because of the opportunities that this jock had at school, and becomes this living-dead zombie wandering around town, and he intends to go to the reunion in this other guy's body. Basically, I'm playing the ghost who did die, and the body that has been taken over by the 17-year-old paraplegic. It was quite fun trying to play all of those things, and there was a bit more humor in it than I've been playing recently on Battlestar, so it was a nice change.

TVGuide.com: Was there a lot of trick photography going on?

Bamber: The director was playing with beveled glass, flying it in front of the screen to make multiple images of me. There is a lot of green screen. It is an amazingly ambitious show. They don't use a second unit — for Battlestar Galactica, we do quite a lot of stuff with a second unit and a lot of CGI stuff. They have the multiple characters, at least they did with me anyway, like we do with Cylons, and yet they shoot very fast. They rarely give more than two or three takes. On Battlestar, we shoot it more like a movie and we take a bit longer, so this was impressive.

TVGuide.com: Was it nice to be in a civilian wardrobe for a change?

Bamber: Yeah, except that my main wardrobe was this roadkill outfit, the ghost having been run over by about three different cars. I had shards of glass sticking out of me and blood all over me for most of it. Then for makeup, I was in various states of putrefaction and death, it wasn't exactly a change. If anything, it was a bit more gruesome than Battlestar. Even the wardrobe that the dead guy wears, he stole from a dry cleaners so it looks horrendous and doesn't match and doesn't fit. I enjoyed doing it.