Playing Hawk 

Before playing Hawk in Buck Rogers, Thom had been on various TV shows, but his main experience was on the New York stage, both on and off Broadway (see Stage performances). Thom was asked to do a screen test for Hawk after having visited the NBC/Universal casting department in connection with another role. Upon reading the character breakdown, he got very excited by the wonderful acting challenge offered by Hawk.

Motivation

"What got to me about Hawk's character was his exoticness. I knew you could take this character, with feathers on his head, black spandex and laser gun and relate him, as John [Mantley] and the writers had, to the ancient bird legends of Aku-Aku in the South Pacific. I had read the book Aku-Aku (The Secret of Easter Island) by Thor Heyerdahl years earlier and that played into it as well." [1] For Thom, an important part of the appeal of Hawk was the wide "range of emotional ideas and colors to play with." [2] He was very happy that there was more to this character than just "the bizarre visual thing". [3]

Preparation

Having got the role, Thom started preparing for his performance as a birdman by studying the mannerisms of hawks: looking them up in the Audubon books, visiting the birds section of the American Museum of Natural History, and observing real-life hawks in the Central Park zoo. A few typical gestures resulting from these observations were Hawk's quick focusing head motions (based on the Central Park hawks' focus-and-spot behavior) and his only using his legs to climb -- having had years of training as a dancer, Thom was able to make this look quite effortless. One other thing that helped him prepare for his role as Hawk, was music. "One night I put on Gustav Holst's The Planets. The first band on the record is 'Mars'. And as that music ran through my mind, I thought, 'If there is a theme for Hawk, that would be it.' That gave me the mood for the character." [4]