Casey Biggs & Andrew Robinson Interviews

[master_q 0]

Casey Biggs & Andrew Robinson Interviews

 

 

Casey Biggs (Damar) Interview

Click for Spoiler:

STARTREK.COM:: Who are you and where are you from?

 

Casey Biggs:: My name is Casey Biggs. I'm originally from Toledo, Ohio. I went to school at Julliard in New York City, lived there for many years, and I was going back and forth quite a bit. And when I got DS9 ... I was living out here for about two years when I finally got the first episode that I did. Before I started working on Star Trek ... I started in the theater. I mean I was classically trained, and when I grew up I couldn't believe anybody would pay me to want to act. I only really wanted to act on stage. I wasn't really interested in film or television. Then I did a little bit of television and film work and of course it gets under your skin and you can't stop. I did a lot of episodes of bad guys in a lot of episodes on television. What's interesting, too, is that I ... it was an interesting change because when I came out here ... I mean, I was always the hero on-stage. I mean, always cast as the hero, the leading man. When you're out here you're like unless it's your show, you're always the bad guy. So you're the bad guy guest of the week. But what was neat about DS9 was that I started out as a bad guy and ended up as a hero. So that's what was great about that.

 

Q:: How did you get the role of Damar and how did the role develop?

 

CB:: I got a call to come in and audition for this part. I looked at the script, and I literally had two lines. They were: "In range, Sir" and "Fire." I'm sitting there with a room-full of people thinking, "Why am I here? Anybody could do this." So I went into the room, and I really didn't know anybody in the room, and Ira Behr — who's the executive producer — was in there. Then I got a call back! I had to come back and read those same lines again! I walked into the room and they'd said, "Oh, that was a very intelligent reading you did last time." And I thought, "Well, four words, that's pretty intelligent." What I didn't know — and I didn't learn this till about a year later — that Ira Behr, who's a great guy and has become a great friend, is an obsessive fan, historically, of the Alamo. I did a huge film about the Alamo. It was a huge literally and figuratively. It was an IMAX film called The Price of Freedom. It was the very, very first dramatic IMAX film ever shot. He had seen that. So when I walked into the room and he saw me, it was like, "Oh my God, William Barret Travis is in the room." But to answer your question whether I knew this role was going to go this way, no, I didn't, and neither did the writers. I remember talking to Hans Beimler and Rene Echevarria and all the guys that were writing the show around the last episode that we were doing and they didn't even know where it was going to go. They liked me, which was great, and they liked what I was doing with the character, and I think Rick Berman liked what I was doing with the character. It just kept getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. For those of you out there who really know about the Alamo, you can really pick out all these Alamo references through the end. The way I died was the way that my character died in the Alamo, pretty much. It was all ... it was fascinating. But no, I had no idea. I think the first season I did two episodes, the next season I did six or seven, and then did fourteen per year after that. That was fantastic.

 

Q:: Can you describe a typical day?

 

CB:: A typical day, coming in to shoot... It usually started with me the night before realizing that I had to get up at three o'clock in the morning to be at Paramount at four o'clock in the morning to sit there and get all the makeup on. In the beginning it was rather exciting because it was all new, but by the second year I was like, "Oh, my gosh." The worst thing for me was putting those big things on your neck. Think about it: four o'clock in the morning, and they're rubber — they're very light, but it's always surgical adhesive that they have to paint on you, and it's cold, and it's four o'clock in the morning. The thought of that still give me shivers of having to put that on. So you get there at four o'clock, you're supposed to be finished by seven, you rehearse from seven to eight, and you start shooting. Then — what a lot of people may or might not know — is that shooting a television show or a film is so much about hurry up and wait. You're just waiting to shoot. You'll get ten minutes on screen or on camera in an eighteen hour day. So you finish seven, eight o'clock at night, from four o'clock in the morning, and it will take an hour to take the make-up off. So that's another hour or so. I think more Cardassians got overtime in this show than anybody else that had ever been in Star Trek. Then you go and start all over again, you know? Get up at four o'clock the next morning, or three o'clock, and come back in. But you know, I wouldn't have changed it for anything.

 

Q:: What was it that Damar was always drinking?

 

CB:: I did an episode, or scene with Armin Shimerman where I was in the bar, and for some reason all the producers liked the way I looked sitting in that bar. Well, from then on there was rarely a scene that I didn't have a drink in my hand. It's a very funny story, too, because that stuff ... you know, the prop people go to the producers and say, "Well, what do you want this to look like?" And somebody just happened to say, "Well, it should be very thick." They go away, "Thick, thick. What is thick?" So I come in one day and they pour this stuff that I have to drink, and it's Caro syrup. Now, it makes me gag the thought of it — anybody who's tried drinking Caro syrup — and I complained for a year and a half about this stuff, because I would drink it. I had to drink it all the time. And then the last season I finally said to the producer, I said, "If I have to drink this you have to drink it. I mean, something has to change here." So I came in one day and instead of Caro syrup they had sugar-free maple syrup, which is even worse to me than Caro syrup. Anyway, I was very glad when they led up to this episode that Rene directed where Damar turns and he decides he's had enough, and he's going to become a rebel. And I take that Caro syrup and I look in the mirror, and I catch a glimpse of myself. I'm disgusted with what I've become, and I just take it and I throw it into the mirror and it drips down. I never had to have a drink of that again, the whole last half of the season. So that was good.

 

Q:: What was your favorite episode?

 

CB:: The cool thing they had with Weyoun and Damar. The Vortas. Somehow they could keep making them. They are cloning these things. I guess one of the episodes when Worf and Dax were ... we had captured them or something, and Worf kills Weyoun — and I sort of set it up. I come walking into the scene and I see that he's done that. I look down and I sort of chuckle, and I say, "Well, you should have killed me because there's only one Damar." In the next scene I'm sitting in my office on the starship or wherever we were, and in walks Jeff again. I look at him, and I said, "Oh, well, Weyoun number fifteen, or whatever you were." I say, "Yeah, you be careful. I'll be saying hello to Weyoun number sixteen pretty soon." So I really liked that a lot.

 

I wanted to be Bill Shatner when I was young. I don't want to be him now, but I wanted to be him when I was young, because I thought, "That's the kind of actor that interests me. Someone with that kind of passion, that kind of delivery." The one episode that I couldn't do, that I would love to have done was the one when they all run a baseball team, and everyone is out of makeup, and Jeff and Mark were cops. What they did do nicely is that —I think because they knew I wanted to be in it and I was in New York, I couldn't do it — they made me Avery's psychiatrist in one episode. I was Damar and the psychiatrist. That was really a cool thing to be — those two characters in the same episode.

 

Q:: What do you enjoy most about working on Star Trek?

 

CB:: One of my favorite parts of this piece, doing this particular work, is two or three-fold. When you do this kind of work, and I've said this before in interviews, that you really have to sort of be of Shakespearean proportion to be able to do this kind of dialogue, because it's so incredibly melodramatic. Now, in order to make that kind of stuff work and be believable, you really have to have great actors. You know the first time they open their mouth that you don't believe them otherwise. That's what's great about Avery, and Nana, and Mark Alaimo, and Jeff, and Armin. These are all incredibly well-trained actors. I spent four years in a classical school at Julliard myself. In order to do this — a lot of times sounds like gobbledygook — but to really still make it sound like it's coming from some kind of a being, you really have to be well-trained. I think stepping on-set, or the stage with these people who are incredibly well-trained, you feel like you're in rarified company and that's one of the things that I enjoyed most about it.

--StarTrek.Com http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/feat...rticle/146.html

 

 

 

Andrew Robinson (Garak) Interview

Click for Spoiler:

STARTREK.COM. Who are you and where are you from?

 

Andrew Robinson. I'm Andy Robinson and originally I'm from New York and New England. My parents moved around a lot when I was a kid.

 

Q. When did you start acting?

 

AR. My career started when I got a Fulbright Scholarship which was an extraordinary gift from the U.S. government … thank you very much … and it was that year while I was … it was that year that I decided … this is what I want to do for a living. I'd done high school and college drama, but I didn't really think … now this was in the late 50's, early 60's … that this was something I could make a living at. It was like a rarified profession, but when I got that Full Bright, that sort of brought it down to earth for me and I never looked back.

 

Q. How did playing the killer in "Dirty Harry” affect your career?

 

AR. It gave me a career and it effectively ended a certain part of my career at the same time … it ended a film career because of film and the nature of film and the big screen and the power of the image on the big screen. It has such an effect on people. In the business, once you get associated with a character as defining and as strong as the "Scorpio” killer. People don't want to hire you for the good guy, for the poet, for the dad, for the sympathetic character. And therefore they'll hire you for the heavy, but even then, I was so identified with that one particular heavy because that particular kind of psychopathic killer was the first of it's kind really. You had Richard Bismark, harbingers of that character, but that was really the first post-modern psycho-killer with no motivation, no history, no background; just out there doing unspeakable things. So the only thing I got offered was more of that. So when I started turning down those, because there are only so many of those the human psyche and nervous system can take. Then that was it. And I went back to theater. And thank god there was television.

 

Q. How did you get involved with Star Trek?

 

AR. I got the job on Deep Space Nine because I didn't get Odo. And it came down to 3 people. Gerrit Graham who later did lots of Star Trek, obviously Rene Auberjonois, and myself, but they liked my audition a lot for Odo so they asked me back for Garak and the irony is that I didn't want to go back. They've already seen me several times for Odo. What do they want to see me this time for. And it was my wife who convinced me to go to the audition. Thank God!

 

Q. Did you know that Garak was going to be a recurring character?

 

AR. They wanted a relationship for the Dr. Bashir character. It was the first season and they were trying to fit him into the flow of the show. They thought at the beginning that this would be an interesting relationship for Bashir, but they weren't going to go further with it if it didn't work out between the two characters, if there wasn't a certain amount of chemistry. From the moment we started acting together, that was no longer an issue. They loved the stuff between Sid and I.

 

Q. Tell us about the first time you wore the costume.

 

AR. The only story that really stays with me in my experience with Deep Space 9 is the very first time they put the makeup on me. I'm claustrophobic and the makeup consists of 7 prosthetic pieces plus a paint job that would make Earl Schieb envious plus the costume that is built on the material that you make upholstery. Ah – so it doesn't breathe. Nothing breathes. In a sense it's like putting you in a mobile coffin. They put it on me and I really had an attack. I thought … I'm not going to be able to do this. I don't know how I can get out of this. I was really going to call my agent and say, "Listen you gotta get me out of this because this is psychically not possible. I looked in the mirror and I saw this creature staring back at me and I thought this is extraordinary. I have never seen anything like this. This is an actor's dream to be able to do a character the inside of a character that looks like this. The claustrophobia went away. I never really had another attack for the 7 years though there were a couple of long days .. you know one of the 16-18 hour Star Trek days that occasionally happen where it got pretty old.

 

Q. Did you like the way Garak developed?

 

AR. The beautiful thing about doing Garak was how the writers increasingly fell in love with the character and they told me that every time there was an episode that included Garak that sort of quickened their juices and they wrote beautifully for me. They also picked up on business that I would come up with, behavior, and amplifying that and in the next script I would see a piece of business or behavior that I had pulled out in the previous episode.

 

Q. How would you describe Cardassians?

 

AR. Reptilian. Using the human model, the brain model, Cardassians really work from their reptilian brain. I'm not making a value judgment about that. We all have that. Human beings have what is called a tripartite brain. There are 3 parts to our brain; the oldest part of our brain is the reptilian brain. So don't cast any aspersions about a 1/3 of my brain and I'm a great defender of Cardassians so there's a lot to be said about the reptilian brain. Reptilian brain knows what boundaries are. Reptilian brain knows how to take care of itself so that the species survive. Now having said that, there are downsides to the Reptilian brain knows what boundaries are. The reptilian brain knows how to take care of itself in order that the species survive. Now, having said that, there are downsides to the reptilian brain. And the Cardassians, it's true, have a lot of that. You know, the militarism, and the brutality, which the occupation of Bajor is on a level with anything that the Germans did with World War II. That being said (laughs) the positive things – the trains ran on time, the streets are clean (laughs).

 

Q. Do you have a favorite episode?

 

AR. Yeah. There's one episode called "The Wire” where Garak is – being an operative, a secret agent within the Obsidian Order – has this mechanism that they call a wire placed in his brain. Basically, what it is simply is that if he's ever caught, and if he's tortured, this wire would then trip off the endorphins that would transmute the pain of the torture into pleasure. Well, Garak then gets addicted to this, the way any addict would become addicted to a drug, and basically Bashir saves his life and sees him through a cold-turkey process. But in that process, Garak is emotionally at the edge, and is spewing forth all these variations of stories and so forth. No one knows the truth, which story is true, but that's Garak. No one ever knows. It was a fabulous episode, and it was beautifully written by this guy, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who wrote for several years for the show. The other episodes that I really liked a lot – there was a two-parter, where Odo and Garak set out to find Enabran Tain, who was the head of the Obsidian Order, and who eventually turns out to be Garak's father. "Improbable Cause” and … I can't remember the name of the other one. It's a two-parter I really liked a lot. The "Doctor Bashir, I presume”, the James Bond spoof that we did, that was a lot of fun. It was hellacious to film, because I probably spent more hours in that makeup on that show than any other show. The show was a bear. They really were trying to make a James Bond movie, but it was an enormous amount of fun. And I thought that Winrich Kolbe, the director, did a wonderful job on it. Unfortunately, we ran afoul of the James Bond people, and we were going to do a lot of those, but that was the one and only. [clip from "Our Man Bashir”]

 

Q. How did the book "A Stitch in Time” come about?

 

AR. A diary I started keeping, as if Garak were keeping a diary – it's all in the first person. And it happened because when I started going to conventions, I thought I wanted to do more than just answer questions about how long it takes to put on the makeup, and so forth. And so I started reading entries from the diary. The people at the conventions really enjoyed it, and this one guy, once, at a convention, David George, who co-wrote a book wit Armin Shimerman about Quark (I think The 34th Rule or something like that). And David very kindly suggested, "You know, you should gather this material, contact the people at Pocket Books, and see if they'd be interested in turning this into a book.” So I did, and they were very enthusiastic about it.

--StarTrek.Com http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/feat...rticle/151.html

 

 

 

 

Master Q

StarTrek_Master_Q@yahoo.com

[VaBeachGuy 12]

I love the Damar interview, thanks M_Q! I'll read Garak in a while. They were 2 very interesting characters from DS9.