By James van Hise

She's the venomous Queen Bee of V. However, whenever she stings she lives to
tell the tale. Her victims can't say the same.

"I love it. It's the most fun of anything I've ever done. What I enjoy most
about it is playing a woman who is so in control of herself. She's not a
victim. She's very powerful and very strong. She knows what she wants, goes
after it and gets it. It's very satisfying, unlike in real life where that
doesn't happen very often. Everyone is very excited about my chance to play
this role. They think it's just fantastic. I've gotten practically no
negative reactions.

"There were days on the set when I was very insecure, and I had to fight that. 
When I first started, it was very scary. I couldn't even believe that I'd been
cast for the role. They'd seen about five hundred women, including Jill St.
John and all of these older, harder actresses. When Ken Johnson chose me, I
thought, 'Oh, he doesn't really know I'm sweet.' But now it's evolved and it's
very easy for me to feel what Diana feels."

Just what does Diana, an alien who views humans as the better part of a
balanced diet, really feel? "I think that Diana does have a softer, more
vulnerable side. Under any kind of extreme drive there have to be some kinds
of vulnerable neuroses. It shows in insecurities in her relationship with
Lydia. The fact that she is a little threatened by Lydia shows that she's
insecure--which is a vulnerability. I've never played a character even
remotely like her. She's as different as anything I've ever played and as
different from me as anyone I've ever portrayed. On soaps, you play people who
are very close to yourself. For V, I've really drawn on nothing from my past. 
And the character has evolved a little.

"When I first started I was very scared of the character. If Diana is not
played with absolute authority and confidence, she's a joke. You have to have
tremendous power and conviction--people have to believe that you, indeed, are
coming from where Diana comes from. In that I have my own vulnerabilities, I
wondered if I could pull this off. But I think that's a fantasy. The role I
play and the role Joan Collins plays on "Dynasty" are fantasy figures, not to
be taken seriously. They're imaginary power trips, illustrating the kind of
extreme power a woman could wield. Not that she'd want it, but that's why I
think the characters are so popular. Women have been frustrated and kept back
for so long; that's part of what makes this role so enjoyable. And men are
very turned on by that type of woman. They may not admit they want to touch
her, they may say, 'Get away! I don't want any part of you,' yet they get a
vicarious thrill out of watching a tough woman act mean."

It isn't too difficult to see how Badler has drawn on and exaggerated facets of
her own personality in order to project the menacing believability of Diana. 
"I've used the feeling of impotence I've often experienced as a person trying
to succeed in the acting business," she reveals. "In life there's a lot of
anger that all of us feel over various injustices, so I use that drive. Not
that I want to destroy, but I take that basic impulse and exaggerate it."

Who Are The Visitors?

“As an alien group, they’re an oppressed people.  There is a dictatorship.  There is a leader in power not because he was voted in but because he took over from a kindlier leader.  His way of dealing with people is much more ruthless.  They are very militaristic, and I don’t think they’re a happy species.  It’s like Russia, or that kind of oppressed environment.

Diana is very much a product of that iron heel of authority.  “She is a woman of limitless ambition.  They know no end.  She would like to take over the Earth, engineer a total victory, then go back to her planet to be praised and receive all kinds of honors to prove that she’s the best.  Then she can gain more power on her home world.  Her one saving grace, the little devil, is that she is curious about the humans.  They intrigue her.”

The human who intrigues her the most is Mike Donovan (played by Marc Singer).  “Donovan is a tremendous threat to Diana.  No matter how many times she captures him, he always manages to escape.  Beneath all of it is a slight respect for him, because Diana respects people who are strong.  So as much as she hates him, there is a slight admiration on her part for him.  There is a rivalry there, too, and Diana would destroy him in a minute if she were capable of it.  Respect has no place in a game of power.”

While Diana would never admit to any esteem she secretly holds for Donovan, Jane Badler is free with praise for her co-star.  “I have the utmost respect for Marc as a professional.  He’s always up on the set.  He cares about everything no matter how long or how many days we’ve been working.  He’s very special in that way.  Not too many series actors are like that.  I really like Marc a lot.”

Who is Jane Badler?

“I always performed in high school and was a drama major at Northwestern University,” Badler says.  “I originally wanted to be a singer, and worked in a few nightclubs.  I began professionally at eighteen, when I moved (from her home in Vermont) to New York.  Then I began doing commercials and have done several hundred so far.  I got my first play after eight months, then two more in a row.  I appeared on the soap One Life to Live for a year and a half, playing a character named Melinda.

“Following that, I came out to Los Angeles for five months and did a TV movie, a Fantasy Island and some more commercials.  Back in New York, I did another soap called The Doctors.  While working on that, I made a videotape audition for The A-Team.  It was the same network and the same people.  They saw it and really loved me, but I wasn’t right for the part.  A week later they flew me out for V and I met Ken Johnson.”

Between V and its sequel, some personnel changes occurred, most notably the departure of Johnson, the series’ creator.  “The first miniseries was Ken’s,” explains Badler.  “He produced and wrote it.  It had a whole different feel to it than the second miniseries did.  That was my first nighttime miniseries, so it was quite exciting and new for me.  The part of Diana was a lot smaller then.  It was an important role, but I only had five scenes in two nights.  It was exciting, but I didn’t get real close to everybody like I did on the second miniseries.

“They got Richard Heffron to direct and they changed producers, so the series became a little less esoteric.  It was more action and less philosophy.  More just good-old-fun-science-fiction which leads into the series, which was a blast.  I had a great time.”

When V did go to a weekly series format, Badler wasn’t so confident that it would be such a rewarding experience.  “I was very nervous about maintaining the standards that were set in the two miniseries.  I’d heard horror stories about when things go weekly and people get lax.  For the most part, though, it went beyond my happiest expectations.”

Happy, perhaps, but not without its discomforts.  “After the first week of the series I wasn’t sure if I would be able to make it through because they had me do a lot of my own stunts.  The first day I got shot once and carried into an ambulance.  The next day I was shot five times!  Three bullets in the front and two in the back.  The charges blew up in my face twice.

“It was my second day and I started crying.  But I had to be Diana!  I was so petrified.  They had these high heels on me, I had to run across pebbles as fast as I could, down a thin little grading and then get shot three times in the back.  I’m telling you, it was the worst day!  Then the next day, I had to have a huge brawl with Marc down on the ground, wrestling with him.  So I was black and blue from those three days, and I haven’t had any stunts since.

“The producers were very involved in the series.  They were on the set practically every day, watching over.  They were very concerned about not only having a hit but maintaining high quality, which I found very exciting.”

Science Fiction vs. Soaps

Needless to say, there are quite a few differences between working on soap operas and portraying chief villainess of the universe.  "Doing soaps was much more pressure," Badler confesses.  "There were fewer pages to learn for V.  It had its own pressures, but they were nothing like the soaps.  You had to learn thirty pages a day and go straight through from beginning to end.  On V, I got to do one thing at a time.  It was film rather than tape, so we got a lot more time.  And they'd shoot the same scene from four different angles.

"The character was a lot more fun for me than the ones I'd played on soaps, too.  Those girls suffered a lot more."

Just because the role of a science fiction vixem was new to Badler didn't mean that science fiction itself was.  "I love science fiction.  It's one of my favorite things--good science fiction, that is, when it's not simplistic.  If it's really obvious and unbelievable, I tend not to like it.  But if it's creative and gives me insight into what could be...I love things about the future.  My favorites are 1984 and a book Ayn Rand wrote called Anthem.  I also enjoyed Ira Levin's novel This Perfect Day.

"Science fiction is great because it keeps people aware of the fact that there are things other than those of our own Earth.  It keeps the consciousness going about space exploration and the great beyond.  We tend to get caught up in our own lives, our day-to-day existence, and we tend to forget than it's also important to expand ourselves outwardly, too."

Being in a science fiction series means being in science fiction situations as well, which means having to react to things you can't see.  "A lot of times the special effects are done later, so you're acting in a void.  You're acting and nothing is existing.  For example, yesterday I had to look down and see Donovan in his spaceship shooting my spaceship and destroying it.  Of course, none of this was happening because it all gets added later.  So you have to imagine all that and then react to it.  I've never had to do that before."

Of course, the most talked-about special effects sequence involving Diana was the first in which she dined on her favorite meal--live animals.  "Most of the preparation for the eating scene was done without me.  I just had to life the guinea pig to my mouth--that's it.  Then they fed it to a dummy and edited back to me putting a little furry thing in my mouth so it looked like I'd swallowed it.

"They also built a neck on me, and that took two hours.  They had to make this huge latex thing with tubing down the back so they could pump air into it and make it expand.  It was pretty easy to prepare for.  I didn't have to do too much work, I just had to try not to be too grossed out when I lifted that creature.  I hate all those things!  I hate anything that's creepy and crawly like rats and snakes and worms.  I'd never been around them while growing up, so they were alien to me.  They frighten me, they really do.  But when you know that, as a character, you have to do something, it's funny how your fear goes away and you can do a lot that you would normally never do."

V for Victory

The popularity of the powerful persona of Diana has opened a lot of future possibilities for Badler's career.  "I didn't think that this would be the vehicle that would do it for me.  I just thought of it as another role.  But having a lead in a major series can definitely change your life.  It has already affected my career a lot.  I'm meeting people that I never would have met before.  Suddenly I'm meeting major producers of films; it's a different echelon of people who I'm in contact with now, so that's exciting."

Badler definitely has ideas about the kinds of roles she'd like to do now that V is over.  "I'd like to play in a great love story of a different time, like when women wore those beautiful long dresses, tight bodices and hats.  Something romantic about a great love that didn't work out, like Romeo and Juliet.  I'd love to do that or something showing women's conflicts today, that sheds some light upon the relationship of women to society.

"I enjoy all the media and I'd like to skip around.  I'd like to be one of those actresses who is able to work in any medium.  That would be wonderful."

But is it possible that she has already become entrenched in people's minds as a lovely lady lizardess?

"People do tend to typecast, but I won't allow that to happen to me.  In my hiatus, there is no way I'll do a role that's anything like Diana.  I'll do something very different, and I'm very capable of that.  So I'm not too worried about being pigeonholed.  What I hope for is some kind of challenge for me as an actress instead of doing the same thing again."