Whip It Good

All across America, teenaged girls' hearts are breaking tonight: Whip, the ultra-cool poster boy for slackster hippitude, is in love.

As his legions of adoring fans no doubt already know thanks to his unofficial "Official Whip Fan Club Blog" Whip recently auditioned for a guest-starring role on the SCI FI Original series Stargate SG-1 and immediately afterward professed his undying love for series star Amanda Tapping.

"I always thought love was for losers," the adolescent actor says as he snags a Budweiser tallboy from a beer-stocked cooler that a stagehand has smuggled into his dressing room. "I mean, except beer. I've always loved beer. But that's different."

"Amanda is the coolest," he adds. "I knew from the moment we met that there were sparks. The way she looked at me as I emptied an entire keg of Molson Canadian in under a minute ... I could tell she was impressed."

"I was horrified," Tapping says when asked about the incident. "I thought a wild animal had wandered onto the set. I asked our production manager to call animal control, and they tranquilized it and hauled it away. Later, Rob [executive producer Robert Cooper] told me I'd sicced the dogcatcher on a potential guest star."

Whip remembers the incident both differently and fondly: "She got someone to hook me up with an awesome buzz, then I woke up in jail. It was a great practical joke. That's what Amanda's like: Always a kidder."

The chance meeting was the icing on the cake of Whip's visit to Stargate SG-1. "Once word hit the street that I was gonna be on Tripping the Rift, my agent's phone rang off the hook," Whip says. "Suddenly, after months of paying my dues as a struggling actor, I was getting scripts from Enterprise, Angel, some HBO show about a circus everyone wanted a piece of the Whipster."

But unlike the work Whip has snagged on other series, the call from Stargate SG-1 proved fateful. "My first day there, I had a lovely dinner with Amanda," he recalls. "I felt like we really bonded, and I knew right then she was the only one for me."

Tapping's memory of that meal is equally vivid. "The cast was sitting down for the dinner break when this green thing sat down across from me," she says. "I tried to tell him that Rick [Stargate SG-1 star Richard Dean Anderson] was sitting there, but he ignored me. Then this disgusting little monster started ... I guess you could call it 'eating.' I was repulsed, but I had to run another scene with him after the break, so I didn't want to be rude."

As Tripping the Rift prepares for its 2004 series premiere on SCI FI, Whip foresees great things for himself and his romance with Tapping. "By next summer I'm gonna be doing action movies," he predicts. "Bruce Willis? Will Smith? Has-beens. Me, I'm writing a script for a movie that'll blow the doors off X-Men. And I'm gonna cast Amanda as my love interest," he says, then adds with a leer, "on and off the screen."

When made aware of Whip's amorous intentions, Tapping recoils in horror. "Ewww," she says with a wince. "Is he kidding? I'm married. What's wrong with that little freak?"