Rainbow Sun Francks, who plays the gung-ho Lt. Aiden Ford in SCI FI Channel’s upcoming original series Stargate Atlantis, told SCI FI Wire that his character gets to "run around" and "shoot people." "He’s ... second in command," Francks said in an interview on the show’s set outside Vancouver, B.C. "Backstory’s a U.S. Marine. He’s a young guy. He’s definitely ... a guy who likes to get the job done, whatever the job may be. He’s at 200 percent at all times."

Francks’ character backs up military leader Maj. John Sheppard (Joe Flanigan) on the team of explorers who are dispatched through the Stargate to the lost city of Atlantis in the distant Pegasus galaxy. As a military character, Francks said he gets to do a lot of stunts.

"They’re letting me do, well, pretty much my own stuff as [much as] I can, other than stuff where things are blowing up in my face," Francks said. In one upcoming episode, Francks found himself in a wire stunt harness for a sequence in which he and members of the team are on board one of the show’s new spacecraft, nicknamed a "puddle jumper." To save the crew, Ford must blow the ship’s rear hatch "and let the air out of my lungs and hold on for dear life while I’m about to be sucked into space," he said. "What’s really cool is you see the door come ... down and start sucking things out. ... Then you just see me, and they’ve got my ankles hooked up, and I just get jacked right up, voom, like so hard and fast and really cool, and I’m holding on, and I couldn’t let go, because ... if I did let go, I would have just smashed my face right away. So I was really holding on for dear life. I haven’t seen the shot yet, but apparently it looks really good."

Stargate Atlantis premieres with a two-hour episode, "Rising," at 9 p.m. ET/PT on July 16.