According to Shanks: "I think the stand-out element is the characters. The chemistry between Daniel, Jack O'Neill, Sam Carter and Teal'c. There is an interesting dichotomy between them, an interesting balance. Each character is different, unique. It's a case of opposites attracting." Daniel Jackson is very much the outsider in the militaristic world of SG-1. A civilian, he often finds himself at odds with the more pragmatic views of his colleagues. "Daniel's an innocent, naive optimist whose curiosity often kills the cat and whose energy and excitement are contagious. He's a little boy who's opened the biggest Christmas present you could imagine, constantly excited and enthused. At the moment, I don't know where they're going to take him. I'm curious about what direction the character and the show are going to go in. I have no idea what the writers have in mind. We're so busy here, working on the show we've just filmed, on the one we're filming now, on the next one, there's no time to think about it. It's completely out of our control." I have a much larger dark side than Daniel. It would be fun to explore that in him a little, but not too much. And not regularly. Just a little. What I really like is Daniel's genuine quality, his caring for people. His honesty and compassion. If they changed that about him then I wouldn't want to play him any more."

Perhaps because he's civilian, not military, Daniel is the most overtly emotional character in the SG1 team. Episodes like Need and Legacy have provided Shanks with some highly charged acting scenes. "You have to be prepared to expose yourself," says the actor. "That's basically the job description. The willingness to go to those places always has to be there. The ability varies, depending on how tired your are, who you're working with. There are levels of comfort, and the family of people you're working with. You have to be able to make the scene work, no matter what. But I don't have that problem here." To date, Shanks considers his best episodes to have been Need and Holiday. The hardest, not surprisingly, is Holiday, "because of the aspect of working with yourself. And the six hours of prosthetic makeup. And the fact that I was playing a character inside a character. Daniel isn't a lot like me, so I'm playing someone different, and then having to play that person inside another person's body, that was a challenge. They gave me actors to work with in those scenes, not just stand-ins, but sometimes I just acted with the bed."

Preparing for the role of Daniel is a lot of hard work. "In the beginning, for the audition, I re-watched the movie because I hadn't seen it since its cinema release. Found the parts of the character that are also in me, aspects that I liked, and those I didn't. For me, the Daniel in the movie was a little hard, a little jaded maybe. I wanted to focus more on the subtextual elements of family, displacement, being a loner. I wanted to make Daniel a little more naive, not quite so together as he was in the film. And I worked on it from there. On a week to week basis, filming the series, first of all I do a cold read of the new script, just to see what happens, where my character fits into the action. Then I read paying attention to Daniel's scenes, his arc, his journey. This is an ensemble cast, he's not always the focus of attention every time, but he's there, and there's always something to work with, something to add to the scene. Then I use my theatre training and processes. I break down every scene into beats.