Canadian actress Amanda Tapping has been playing Stargate heroine Samatha Carter on television and in movies for 11 years.

Proud Canadian actress Amanda Tapping has been playing the same American sci-fi character -- Samantha Carter -- for 11 years. That covers two TV series and now two direct-to-DVD movies. The risk of burnout is obvious.

"Absolutely! Of course," Tapping tells Sun Media about the possibility of getting bored and being boring to fans. "Actually, that is the biggest challenge in playing somebody for so long. The beauty for me is that the writers have always given me something to work with. The challenge for me is to not go on auto-pilot. It would be very easy. So you have to find a whole new way into the character and, every couple of years, you have to do that."

Sci-fi geek boys and fan chicks already know who Samantha Carter is and they love her for it. For the uninitiated, Carter was one of the core characters throughout the 10 years of the Stargate: SG-1 series, which docked in 2007 after 211 episodes. She is also featured in Stargate: Atlantis, the spinoff series.

In addition, Carter is a key player in the two feature-length movies, which Tapping says is her new way in to the character again. The first one, Stargate: The Ark of Truth, arrived on DVD March 11. The next one, Stargate: Continuum, is due in the summer.

The Ark of Truth gives lie to the notion that all direct-to-DVD movies are crap, throwaways that could not make it into theatres. While not on par with top-flight, mainstream sci-fi such as the best X-Men or Star Trek films, it is well made, looks great, is mildly amusing and wraps up the religious fanatics Ori storyline that was left dangling in Season 10 of Stargate: SG-1.

"The past year has been incredibly challenging, doing both the movies and the new Stargate series," Tapping says from her home in Vancouver, which is also the production base for all the Stargates.

"And I'm involved in a completely different series as well (the all-Canadian Sanctuary), which is not at all the Sam Carter character. That is another way to open up creatively. So, some actor friends will say, 'Oh my god, how can you do that for 11 years?' And I say, 'How can I not?' I have fun. It's a great gig. It's an interesting, informed, sexy and intelligent character. And I get to stay in a country that I love and raise my family (she shares a 3-year-old daughter with her husband of 14 years, Allan Kovacs). Hello? I love living and working in Canada. I'm really proud of that!"

Tapping was born in Essex, England, but arrived in Toronto at age three with her family. Now 42, Tapping studied drama in Windsor and established her TV career in the 1990s with shows such as Street Legal, The Newsroom, Due South, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues and even an episode of The X-Files.

Stargate: SG-1 brought her cult stardom.

"I think our fans will embrace them," Tapping says of The Ark of Truth, much of which was shot around Burnaby, B.C, and Continuum, which has Arctic scenes shot in March 2007 on a drifting ice floe in the ocean north of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.

"They are huge, huge stories and beautifully shot. I mean visually stunning. They were shot as films and they were shot on film. We've been used to shooting on HD the last few years (for the two series), so going back to film was really nice. I'm a film purist. I prefer the richness of that."

Richard Dean Anderson, a Stargate original who dropped out of the series, is back for Continuum and Tapping is delighted. She is also keen on all of her ongoing co-stars. Ark features Ben Browder, Christopher Judge, Michael Shanks and Claudia Black. There is a real friendship circle.

"I think there was just some sort of magic fairy dust in the air when the whole show came together," Tapping says.

All that nothing is really something

Next to giving birth to daughter Olivia three years ago, shooting Stargate: Continuum in the Arctic Ocean was the most extraordinary experience of Amanda Tapping's life.

The 42-year-old Canadian actress found herself with limited cast and crew on a drifting ice floe for eight days in March 2007 to shoot scenes of a nuclear submarine breaking through the ice. It was frigid. They were all wary of polar bears, which had been spotted nearby and were the reason co-star Christopher Judge refused to participate (he claims to have an aversion to be eaten by bears). They lived in plywood shacks. It was the ultimate in roughing it.

Yet Tapping found herself humbled before the magnificence of nature. "It was just a really rugged, beautiful, harsh, pristine environment," she tells Sun Media.

"The clarity of thought, to me, up there is amazing because there are no planes flying overhead and no cellphones and no sirens or car horns. There's nothing. It is just absolutely pure. So it makes you focus, which allows you to have these profound moments to realize our very important insignificance, if that makes any sense.

"You realize we are nothing."

Humans need to be reminded of that nothingness from time to time, Tapping tells Sun Media. "I had a lot of those moments because there was little to distract me. It was life altering. It was unbelievable. It was the most exciting thing I've ever done in my career, by far."