Michael Beach Looks Back on "Quantum Leap"

[JamesG]

One of Michael Beach’s early TV gigs — playing a civil-rights leader in a 1965-set episode of "Quantum Leap" — taught him several memorable lessons about the biz.

First: Just because a show is genre doesn’t mean it’s gimmicky.

“Quantum Leap was trying to tackle really interesting, really provocative, really worthwhile subjects such as the Klu Klux Klan’s terrorizing of Black voting advocates in the South,” he says, remembering that one scene found him standing next to series lead Scott Bakula, both of them wearing nooses around their necks.




Bakula himself provided Lesson #2: Give it your all.

“He never had a moment’s break, because pretty much, he was in every scene,” Beach recalls. “And it was important to him that, regardless of what other people thought about the show, he was trying to make a good, quality show — which I thought it was.”




Finally, after overhearing a child actor getting berated by her mother, he vowed to do whatever he could to make his fellow actors feel at ease on set.

“To this day, I always try to go out of my way to make people comfortable, especially if I’m a regular on the set,” he says. “That is how we should be making product: We should be encouraging people and bringing people in, and giving them the opportunity to do their best.”

https://tvline.com/lists/michael-bea...tum-leap/er-2/