Other stars of the story include Dan Castellaneta ("The Simpsons") and Bruce Altman as "Angels" producers Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg; Wallace Langham as Jay Bernstein, Fawcett-Majors' then-manager; Ben Browder ("Farscape") as "The Six Million Dollar Man" Lee Majors; and Dan Lauria ("The Wonder Years") as Fred Silverman, ABC's programming chief when the network debuted "Charlie's Angels."
Helfer's firsthand knowledge of the Fawcett-Majors "Charlie's Angels" phenomenon is recent, since she grew up in Canada without a TV set. "I obviously knew about it. I just wasn't familiar with the show itself," Helfer says. "When I first got the audition for this, I had to go out and get some DVDs so I could get a grasp on the characters. I watched them on my computer, and my husband and his friend just stood there watching, too. You realize the show really had something, because it's still a draw. Everyone gets sucked into it."
Controversial as "jiggle TV" in its day, "Charlie's Angels" seems relatively tame in the era of Janet Jackson's Super Bowl halftime show. "There really wasn't anything daring about it," Helfer believes, especially after trying to capture the essence of Fawcett-Majors, who dropped the "Majors" after her 1982 divorce. "It's a fine line between mimicking the person and bringing something to the part. You can be so concerned with how the person walks and talks that you lose a bit of yourself.
"A voice coach gave me a good tip: When you're playing another actor, you have to nail the scenes that everybody knows. With the scenes that nobody knows, like [Farrah] being in her trailer or with her husband, you can relax into those a little more. At the end of the day, we know Farrah Fawcett-Majors as she was in an interview or playing Jill Munroe (her 'Charlie's Angels' part), but not how she was in her own space and time."
Set to return as an evil Cylon in a weekly "Battlestar Galactica" revival on Sci-Fi Channel, Helfer was comforted by not being alone in playing a well-known actress. She says she and "Behind the Camera" co-stars Chambers and Stamile "definitely formed a bond of being there for one another. Each of us had her moments of doubting her performance in a way, so we supported one another and provided a realistic idea of whether something sounded good or not. On a project like this, it's nice to know that somebody else is going through it with you."
