master_q 0 Posted August 7, 2003 Armin Shimerman Speaks Here is a sum of the interview from TrekToday: Armin Shimerman (Quark) credits his early mistakes for the development of the Ferengi on Deep Space Nine. In a lengthy interview at IGN FilmForce, Shimerman discussed how his classical theatre background prepared him for a career as an actor in Los Angeles, leading to the discovery that TV and film "didn't have...the four to five weeks of rehearsal time which made a character grow, and you really felt that you owned it." Because of the time pressure, Shimerman said, he made rapid decisions on Star Trek that were to haunt him for seven years. "I look back on the performances and say...that was totally the wrong choice...including the first time I did the Ferengi," he admitted. "They were all wrong choices. And, unfortunately, me and the dozens of actors who followed me playing Ferengi all had to live with them." "If you watch TNG in the earlier episodes, the Ferengi were spoken of as some sort of vicious, horrible, competitive creatures," he continued. "The moment you saw them, with me in the forefront, they became these sort of laughable idiots. That was the direction of the director, and the bad choices — admittedly — the bad choices by me." However, he added, his choices ended up becoming positives for Quark's character development: The thing you learn in life is the mistakes you make make you stronger, if you learn from them. There were many things that were set in stone because the Ferengi had been established on TNG, and many times I would have liked to have changed that. But, at the same time, I had to work twice as hard to improve, make them real, and still try to achieve some sort of three-dimensionality. Even though my work would have been a little easier if those earlier choices hadn't been made, I think my character, in the performance I gave eventually over the course of seven years, was stronger because of the handicaps that were given to me at the beginning of the series. The prosthetic makeup, Shimerman added, created "subconscious claustrophobia" but also enhanced his experience. "My wife gave me a valuable piece of information, which was simply, 'If you want to be a knight, you have to wear the armor'", he said. For the full interview, including Shimerman's reflections on growing up in small town New Jersey and his childhood wish to become a writer — a wish he is now realising as the author of several novels --TrekToday http://www.trektoday.com/news/060803_01.shtml Here is the full interview: To Star Trek fans, Armin Shimerman is the actor behind one of the most memorable characters to ever inhabit that universe – Deep Space Nine's Ferengi extraordinaire, Quark. (Seasons 1-4 of Deep Space Nine are currently available on DVD from Paramount Home Video.) To Buffy fans, he will always be the ill-tempered Principal Snyder. A distinguished stage actor and author (check out his Merchant Prince series), Shimerman is also the subject of our latest in-depth interview de resistance... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IGN FILMFORCE: Am I correct in understanding that you're originally from Lakewood, New Jersey? ARMIN SHIMERMAN: Yes ... a small town in the mid-section of New Jersey, Ocean County. It was a great, great childhood and it was a terrific town – probably still is. I haven't been there for decades. I keep waiting for them to invite me back to be sort of a VIP at one of their parades, but it hasn't happened yet. IGNFF: So now you're dropping hints... SHIMERMAN: I am. IGNFF: How would you describe small town life in the '50s? SHIMERMAN: In the '50s, yeah. Well, we went to a very small school. The town was dominated by the lake – it froze over in the winter and you skated on it in winter and you swam in it in summer. We kept the doors wide open, everybody knew everybody else... it was a small town. It had a lot of history, so we were always discovering new things about the town. That was kind of wonderful. We were right next door to Lakehurst. Most of my youth I watched the blimps fly over, because it was one of the last dirigible naval bases in the country. So we just grew up with blimps flying over all the time. When I look back on it now, I was very blessed to have been born there and to have grown up there. IGNFF: It almost seems like a stereotypical, '50s childhood in a small town. SHIMERMAN: It was. We had some problems, surely. My family was not very well-to-do, and I came from a divorced family and we were always struggling to make ends meet. But my brother and I never knew about that – my mother and my grandmother took care of that, sort of kept that from us. We had good friends, and great neighborhoods, and it didn't seem to matter. It didn't make any difference. IGNFF: And you were the first generation American citizen in your family, right? SHIMERMAN: My mom was first generation on her side, but on my father's side, I was indeed the first generation. IGNFF: Was there a certain view that you attained via that, as far as a certain way of viewing the country or the way you fit in? SHIMERMAN: It wasn't so much viewing the country, but because my father had struggled all of his life and actually had done well in his struggles, although he was always poor, he and my mother – my mother primarily – taught me to be self-reliant, to look towards goals, to try to achieve the best I could. One of the great things about the small town I was in was it had a terrific school system and my teachers were wonderful. They taught me a great deal, and with the tools that they gave me, when I finally moved to Los Angeles in my junior year of high school, I was way ahead of the class. IGNFF: At that time, if someone would have asked you when you were 14 or 15, what would you have said that your goals were? SHIMERMAN: I probably would have told you that I was going to grow up to be an attorney. Or possibly a writer. When I was 11 or 12, I was doing some writing and actually got published in a magazine at that time. It was never a serious thing, because the family ethic was to grow up and make money. They were very disappointed when I became an actor. But an attorney seemed like the right thing. I'm not sure why, when I look back on it. But I'm sure that at that age that is exactly what I was telling people I was going to grow up to be. IGNFF: Just because it seemed like the right thing to do? SHIMERMAN: Yeah, because it was the right thing to do. IGNFF: It's kind of ironic, because didn't your mother set you on the path to acting? SHIMERMAN: In a sense. What she did was she had a distant cousin who was a drama teacher in Los Angeles, and when my family moved to Los Angeles when I was 16, she felt that a great way for me to make friends would be through this drama club that her distant cousin was running. That was the beginning of the end. IGNFF: Moving to L.A. must have been quite a culture shock. SHIMERMAN: It was. It was a great culture shock. IGNFF: That was height of the '60s, right? SHIMERMAN: Yeah, we moved in, I would say '65, '66... I'm not really sure. One of those two years. I know when we moved to Los Angeles, as we were coming down the freeway for the first time, we saw smoke – it was exactly the week that the Watts riots happened. We moved to L.A. during the riots. But it was a cultural shock. It was a big city, and my brother and I weren't really used to that. IGNFF: Was your natural tendency to withdraw within? SHIMERMAN: Exactly. The tendency was to withdraw, to stay to ourselves, to sort of (I'm trying to say a bad word but can't) and moan about the fact that we'd lost all our friends. But my mom made a tremendous sacrifice. She moved all of us for many reasons, but one of the primary reasons was so that I would have residency requirements for UCLA, which I eventually attended. IGNFF: Was it her understanding that you were going to be going for law? SHIMERMAN: I don't think she was specific about what I was supposed to go for, but she knew that I had to go to college, and she knew that the UC system was a terrifically good system and that you needed to be a resident of California for two years to get the special tuition rates. So she moved us out, as I said, in my junior year so that I would make the residency requirements. I don't think she cared whether I was an attorney or not... I think she did care when I first told her I was going to be an actor, but that wasn't really until after I graduated. The moment after I graduated, I immediately went to work for the Globe Theater in San Diego, and that was the path that I took for the rest of my life. IGNFF: When you were first applying ... SHIMERMAN: When I first applied, I had a poli-sci major, so I assumed I was going to be a lawyer. IGNFF: How quickly did the acting bug hit you – and what exactly was the drama club? SHIMERMAN: The drama club was a local club that was attached to a local community center in Los Angeles. I joined that when we first moved here, and then in the senior year of my high school days, I no longer belonged to that club, because in the high school years, I continually did plays in high school and was the lead in two of the three productions we did that year. IGNFF: Which productions were they? SHIMERMAN: The first one was The Crucible, John Proctor was the character. The second one, I was not the lead, but I played Claudius in Hamlet. The third was Mr. Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth. IGNFF: Rather intense characters... SHIMERMAN: They were. I had a wonderful drama teacher, and he taught us to love great literature – especially Shakespeare. For many years after high school and college, that is primarily what I did, was classical theater. IGNFF: Did that instantly appeal to you? SHIMERMAN: Yes... It was the language, it was the scope of the characters, it was the puzzle. When you work with Shakespeare, it's a puzzle, and you have to solve the puzzle. It's the solving of the puzzle that was always enormously important to me. Even to this day when I research Shakespeare, if I come upon a puzzle that I haven't solved before, I spend most of the day trying to work it out. IGNFF: So it's as much an intellectual exercise as it is an emotional one... SHIMERMAN: Exactly. IGNFF: Right off the bat that struck you in that way? SHIMERMAN: Yeah, yeah. Because the language was really hard for a high school student to understand. It was in English – you figure you should be able to understand it. My high school teacher, he helped me with the challenge and he also nurtured my talent and kept asking me to do more and more, and it was, I guess, part of being a small town kid – being in the large city, it was a way of disappearing out of the city and going into a more familiar world... even if it wasn't familiar, it could be familiar after several weeks of rehearsal. IGNFF: Especially after you had invested the time to, as you say, unlock the puzzle. SHIMERMAN: Right. IGNFF: So it was almost a mastering of the domain within which you'd placed yourself... SHIMERMAN: Exactly. Ironically enough, the local business that I own is called Mastering Shakespeare, so mastering is exactly the right word. IGNFF: Moving on to UCLA, at that period of time, was there again a culture shock? SHIMERMAN: No, because for the first year I lived at home. UCLA was not that far away from home and it was a big school, obviously much bigger than Santa Monica, where I went to high school. But it wasn't so much a culture shock. Remember, I had just left my small town junior year and then I went to Santa Monica, so the idea of changing classmates, I had already practiced once, and it wasn't that hard. I enrolled as a Political Science major, and I graduated as an English major, but I always matriculated over to the drama department and immediately started doing plays in the theater department. IGNFF: Was drama offered as a major at that time? SHIMERMAN: Oh, absolutely. In fact, after I graduated – I'm not sure whether I had anything to do with it, and I played a lot of lead parts in the theater department over the course of the four years that I was there – but after I graduated, they changed the rules so that you had to be a theater major to play the big parts. IGNFF: Was it something that you didn't even consider, as far as changing your major? SHIMERMAN: No. I wanted to be an English major and my specialization was Shakespeare. Even in the last two years of college when it became clear to me that I was very much interested in acting – poly-sci major had disappeared after my first year – for my junior, senior and sophomore years I was an English major. As it became clear to me that I wanted to be an actor, it also became clear to me that I wanted to be a classical actor, and so I thought the best way to investigate the classical studies would be through the English department rather than the theater department, because I was continuing to act in the theater department – so I was getting a seat-of-your-pants education by doing it in the theater department, but I was getting a formal education in the English department, studying the language and the works. IGNFF: Learning the mechanics behind it. SHIMERMAN: Right. IGNFF: At that time, starting out as an actor, what were the biggest obstacles that you had to overcome? SHIMERMAN: Well, one of the biggest obstacles was living in Los Angeles and seeing the film industry was primarily interested in very good looking people. I was always a character actor, so that was always a detriment. I always thought, "Okay, well, this is going to be a very tough uphill climb." And it turned out to be hard and easy at the same time. The other part was simply I was mostly interested in classical theater, and there wasn't a lot of that in Los Angeles to follow. Most of my mentors were suggesting I should move to New York, where there was more theater to be found. At that time, when I was in college, I really wasn't interested at all in doing television or film. I really was only interested in doing theater. That is what I had been trained for, that is what I was excited about, and that was the path I eventually followed. IGNFF: Because you simply weren't interested in TV or film? SHIMERMAN: That's right. It didn't have the language that theater did. It didn't have the four to five weeks of rehearsal time which made a character grow, and you really felt that you owned it. Again, it seemed like a closed door to me, because I only saw good-looking people appearing on films and TV. The people who weren't so good looking were the older people, but I was a long way from that age. So I thought it'd be best for me to stay in the theater where I thought your acting ability was more important. I've learned over a lifetime that that's not true, but at that time, I thought that real actors only went into the theater. IGNFF: In which direction did your professors point you? SHIMERMAN: A wonderful, wonderful professor named Ed Kaye-Martin, who was my mentor for many years – even after school – he always recommended working in the theater and always recommended that I go to New York. So, eventually, I took his advice and went. IGNFF: This was after the stint at the Globe Theater in San Diego? SHIMERMAN: I left for New York after The Globe. I had spent a summer there in San Diego, working with actors who either lived in San Francisco or lived in New York City. I got an earful over the summer of the benefits of both places, and eventually – although I had a better recommendation and the ability to go to ACT in San Francisco to work – I decided to go to New York instead, for a number of reasons, including just a work opportunity. At that time I was working in a restaurant chain called Victoria Station, which was a prime rib house. A job opportunity with the chain came up outside of New York in a town called Darien, Connecticut. The combination of my desire to want to go to New York, plus this job opportunity, convinced me pretty quickly that that's what I was going to do. IGNFF: What did you actually do when you got to New York? SHIMERMAN: I waited tables in Darien, Connecticut. What I also did was send out a ton of letters to various regional theaters in that area, the northeast. Luckily enough, one of Ed Kaye-Martin's teachers, one of my mentor's mentors, got a letter and was kind enough to hire me for a very small part in my very first professional – after The Globe – professional theater experience. I went back to the restaurant, and a couple of months later I got accepted to go to a Shakespeare festival in Vermont, where I played the lead role – and that was great. Right after that, I was very fortunate. I got a general audition for Joe Papp's theater in New York, in the New York Shakespeare Festival. IGNFF: Which at that time, I guess, was at the height of its power. SHIMERMAN: Yes, it was. Just about that time, Chorus Line was about to open. Chorus Line, of course, made the New York Shakespeare Festival a Broadway entity after that. But I got a general audition and did a lot of Shakespeare for the casting people, and then I was very fortunate in that very soon after my audition they were casting for a production, a very avant-garde production of Three Penny Opera. The director primarily wanted to work with people who didn't have New York credits and had certain types of faces. So the thing that had always been to my detriment, which was my ethnic looking quality, was actually a benefit here for Richard Foreman, who was the director. That, plus my inexperience – which was also what he wanted – plus my having been in the right place at the right time, I ended up being in Three Penny Opera, and that was a very famous production with Raul Julia that ran for a year and a half at Lincoln Center. At that time, Lincoln Center was a Broadway house. IGNFF: When directors are looking for actors with no experience, what are the reasons why? SHIMERMAN: That's such an anomaly. It almost never happens, because there's an old cliché in New York theater that you can't get a Broadway show until you've done a Broadway show. It's a catch-22 situation. Richard, he's a well-known avant-garde director with ideas of his own. After Joe had put his stamp on certain casting, like Raul and Elizabeth Wilson, and C. K. Alexander, the smaller parts were up for Richard Foreman to cast. It rarely happens. Directors want to work with the best actors they can – Richard wanted to mold people. He wanted people who didn't necessarily have their own techniques already cemented in their psyches. So he picked a company of rather inexperienced people who had great potential and great looks, and molded us into a phenomenal cast and company. IGNFF: How would you describe your transition? How were you molded? SHIMERMAN: As a young actor, I had always thought that I was the be all and the end all, as far as choices. As an actor, I thought, "Well, the actor makes the choices and the director sort of shapes them." But Richard Foreman is a very powerful director and brilliant at what he does, and he gave us all the choices. We weren't allowed to make choices. In a sense, and I don't mean this to sound bad or critical, we were puppets and he manipulated the strings – which he's famous for, actually. He's famous for his strings. We were better for it. It was a brilliant production to watch and to experience. I was very honored, when I look back, to have been part of it. And it was, of course, the beginning of my career. IGNFF: What is it like to fully experience that grind once it actually kicks in? SHIMERMAN: "We're trapped in a hit." That was the expression the actors used to say. Because we'd do it day after day, week after week, month after month. We could get out, of course – we could quit. But then we'd go back to unemployment – or in my case, back to waiting on tables. IGNFF: Which is not really a valid alternative. SHIMERMAN: Yeah, but when Sunday would come, you'd say to yourself, "What did we do Wednesday? What did I do Tuesday? I can't remember. All I remember is being onstage." It was a grind, and it was a great education. By grind, yes, it was difficult work. But it gave me – one of the things anybody who's worked with me will probably say about me – a tremendous work ethic about doing the work as good as you can, and never complaining about the hours. Because that's what you signed on for. It's not so terrible to be caught in a hit, to be trapped in a hit. IGNFF: How do you keep it fresh for yourself every night? SHIMERMAN: Because it's a puzzle. You keep trying to unlock the puzzle, and even when you think you've finished the puzzle, invariably, you'll find that you missed something. So even during the year a half – and I've had no theater run as long as that – but in the ones that have followed, it's always a matter of trying to figure out how to make it better. It's always a matter of repainting the canvas so it's just a little bit better on Sunday than it was on Tuesday. IGNFF: Has there ever been a time when you couldn't unlock the puzzle? SHIMERMAN: Yes – sometimes TV, because of the shortness of the preparation time. I look back on the performances and say, "What was I doing? My God, why didn't they fire me on the spot? That was totally the wrong choice." Including the first time I did the Ferengi. They were all wrong choices. And, unfortunately, me and the dozens of actors who followed me playing Ferengi all had to live with them. IGNFF: Was there very little direction from the outside, as far as interpretation? SHIMERMAN: There was very little direction, very little good direction. The direction I got was antithetical to anything that should have been given. The sort of gerbil-like quality of the Ferengi in that very first episode was the idea of the director. The Ferengi, almost instantaneously, went from being galactic threats to being galactic comic figures. I mean, if you watch TNG in the earlier episodes, the Ferengi were spoken of as some sort of vicious, horrible, competitive creatures. Then the moment you saw them, with me in the forefront, they became these sort of laughable idiots. That was the direction of the director, and the bad choices – admittedly – the bad choices by me. IGNFF: How much of the work that you did on DS9 was either hindered or aided by those choices? SHIMERMAN: Well, the thing you learn in life is the mistakes you make make you stronger, if you learn from them. There were many things that were set in stone because the Ferengi had been established on TNG, and many times I would have liked to have changed that. But, at the same time, I had to work twice as hard to improve, make them real, and still try to achieve some sort of three-dimensionality. Even though my work would have been a little easier if those earlier choices hadn't been made, I think my character, in the performance I gave eventually over the course of seven years, was stronger because of the handicaps that were given to me at the beginning of the series. IGNFF: In retrospect, what is the most glaring thing you would have done differently? SHIMERMAN: Well, I would have made them a little less obvious in that first episode. That first episode, I was pretty much playing over-the-top villain – that turned out to be very comical. I thought I was being serious, but obviously, it was not serious. It's because there was no subtlety to the performance, there was no attempt to try to give them some real cajones. IGNFF: How much of that lack of subtlety was aided and abetted by the makeup and costume? SHIMERMAN: Well, you know what, some of that can be attributed to that, but that's an easy way out. The real villain, as far as the bad performance is concerned, is me. And I take responsibility for it. It was bad acting. It was just bad acting. They liked it, god bless them, Star Trek liked it. But if you ask me personally, I will tell you that I could have done that a lot better if I'd had a little bit more time to think about it, and if I'd had a better, perhaps, director to say, "You know what? That's a little over the top. Can you bring it down a little?" IGNFF: How does it make you feel as an actor to look at any role where you feel personally that you made bad acting choices, but everyone around you thinks they were perfectly fine? SHIMERMAN: That happens often, actually, in my career. I don't understand it – I just smile and say thank you, and just keep my own thoughts to myself. It's not imperative, really, what I think. It's really imperative what the audience thinks. If the audience likes what I'm doing, that's really what's most important. IGNFF: Was there a certain point where you would beat yourself more so than you might do now? SHIMERMAN: Yeah, I mean, I've come to learn what my potential is and what I can't achieve, what I can. Before I learned the limitations on my own abilities, I would upbraid myself for not having done more. Now, I'm content to say, "Well, you've lived up to your potential. Perhaps Olivier could have done better, perhaps Rene Auberjonois could have done better, but that's the best I could do." IGNFF: What form would your upbraiding take? Would it be something that was sort of a depression, or would it be a quick shrug? SHIMERMAN: No, it's never a quick shrug. It's really a sort of little lecture to myself, inside myself, where I go, "God, what were you thinking when you did that? My lord, didn't you see what the other actor was doing? Didn't you look two or three times at that line to see what it really meant? How it fits in with the scene that was four scenes before?" When I haven't solved the puzzle completely, then I upbraid myself for not having done more homework. IGNFF: But you're not the type that would lash out in any way? Would it be very internal? SHIMERMAN: Yeah, it would be internal. I'm sure my wife says it's sullen. Probably sullenness is as bad as it gets, but I would never lash out, because in my mind, the person who's responsible for that is me. Nobody else. Can't lash out at other people. IGNFF: Was there any point where that kind of recrimination would sort of spiral out of control and affect the performance, or was it always constructive? SHIMERMAN: Well, sometimes it did. Sometimes it spiraled out. During the course of seven years on Deep Space Nine, there was one or two times when it spiraled out, and I got a little angry. But I think, for the most part, I kept it under control – under my hat, so to speak. IGNFF: What were the factors that contributed to it? SHIMERMAN: It's when I felt that that director was seeing me as a generic Ferengi, as opposed to Quark. By that I mean that the Ferengi before me were, as I said, very sort of obvious, very sort of comical, very sort of – in my mind – one-dimensional. I was trying my hardest to turn Quark into a three-dimensional character. When the director would sort of ask me to do really sort of shallow things, for shallow reasons, I would lash out. But that really didn't happen – if it happened it happened very rarely. IGNFF: Was it just because of the duration of the run – that incredibly long span – that those kind of things would compound themselves? SHIMERMAN: Yes, and I would say, "My god, I've been doing this show for three years, or four years – I'm not the Ferengi I played on TNG. Nor am I like any of the other Ferengi." It wasn't just me. Just like Aron's character and Max's [Eisenberg & Grodenchik] character, Rom and Nog, they were both equally three-dimensional characters, and it would have been wrong for a director to make them act as though they were an old-style Ferengi. Most of the crew and most of the writers, for the most part, agreed with me. So when I got upset, it was briefly. If it was anything, it was that... plus probably it was a warm day and I was getting a little hot under the makeup. IGNFF: So just a whole slew of factors conspiring towards a certain end... SHIMERMAN: Yeah. I mean, until an actor has worn makeup 16 hours a day for months on end, you have no idea of the subconscious claustrophobia, the subconscious lack of sensation that you have, and it begins to eat away at you. I have great admiration for all the actors who played Klingons and who played Cardassians and played Ferengi, because I know how difficult their days were. They had to daily perform and keep up with the actors who were playing more human roles, who had none of the handicaps that the makeup actors had. So I have great admiration for all those guys and women who did that. IGNFF: Is there any way, as an actor, that you can prepare yourself for a day like that? SHIMERMAN: No. No. I don't know... it would be like diving. When you go diving, you realize you've encountered a totally different experience that only people who have dove understand. I'm sure there are other things like that, parachute jumping or something like that. But, until you've done it, you have no idea what you're going to get into. IGNFF: Was there ever a point where you regretted your decision to accept so many make-up roles – even prior to DS9? SHIMERMAN: I did make-up in Alien Nation, and I did it in a picture called Arena. So, those roles prior to Deep Space Nine, and of course all the Star Trek: TNG roles. There was never a regret. Never, ever regret. My wife gave me a valuable piece of information, which was simply, "If you want to be a knight, you have to wear the armor." If I wanted to work in Star Trek – and I certainly did and I was grateful and honored to be part of Star Trek – this was the role that was assigned to me, and if it meant that I had to get up early in the morning and do two hours of makeup before I got ready – yeah, it was worth it. Was it difficult? Yes, absolutely. Was it energy sapping? Yes, definitely. Would I have changed it? No. IGNFF: How would you compare – when you talk about a seven year run on a series and how a character evolves – how would you compare that to doing theater work, even on a long run? SHIMERMAN: They were very similar in that sense. Because, in the theater, each day you have a performance and you try to make it better, you try to improve upon it, you try to get deeper into the character. Over the course of seven years, I think I explored every part of Quark's psyche. In that sense, trying to solve the puzzle became a sort of seven-year puzzle-solving process. Most TV, you don't get that opportunity. I was very fortunate to do that. Again, in the long-running theater shows, it's pretty much the same thing. You go to work every day, you try to improve. IGNFF: Is it more or less difficult when you consider the fact that on a theater run, the text is static and immutable? SHIMERMAN: Well, it's a different sort of puzzle. Because the text is the same, then you begin to make minute observations about each word, each pause, each relationship, each moment in the chain of events that happen between 8:00 and 11:00. Each one gets explored on a nightly basis, and each one is investigated and hopefully deepened. On TV, you have different words every week, but then you're dealing more with solving the emotional makeup of the character. Because Deep Space Nine, unlike most TV shows, had a historical background, you also had to deal with that. The history of not only the show, but each of the races. It's a different puzzle to solve, but it was equally exciting. IGNFF: I would also assume that there was a different proprietary nature to your DS9 character – where that character, for all intents and purposes, was owned completely by you. SHIMERMAN: Yes, and when you play Claudius in Hamlet, you know that hundreds of actors have played that role. But when you're playing it, you feel very proprietary toward it. You feel that that's my character, and among the other actors you're working with in that particular production, you're Claudius – nobody else is – and you're very proprietary towards it. There's really no difference between that and the proprietary feeling I had towards Quark. And eventually, you know, perhaps somebody will play Quark in the future. Star Trek is quite capable of lasting another hundred years. Eventually, they might have to bring him back, and I may not be available to do it. IGNFF: In your theatrical roles, which character or part would you say most benefited from your analysis of the puzzle during the run? SHIMERMAN: I wouldn't say one in particular. I would say most of the Shakespearean roles that I've done were better because of the investigations I did. In fact, so that your readers know this, I teach this process to other actors. I'm a very well-known Shakespearean teacher here in Los Angeles, and I approach the roles through what's called Elizabethan rhetoric. Elizabethan training at that time was primarily interested in how you put words together, the science and art of language. They studied classical rhetoric in order to write and to speak well. I teach that process that the Elizabethans learned, to modern day actors. Once you have learned that, you have an enormous Rosetta stone into understanding Shakespeare. So what I'm saying, basically, is over the course of my lifetime I've been solving these puzzles. I've worked out a technique about doing it, and it just so happens that it turned out to be the same technique that the Elizabethans did when they were teaching their young about the language. IGNFF: So it's not so much a cheat sheet, per se, as it is a process... SHIMERMAN: Yeah, it's a process and it's a rediscovery of a process that has been lost for many, many, many years. People are aware of it, but only academic scholastics – people who are studying in the ivory tower are aware of Elizabethan rhetoric. Most actors, most directors, for the most part are not as familiar with it as I am. IGNFF: Would you say, to some extent, that there's a lack of appreciation for language today? SHIMERMAN: Yes. Especially in our visual arts. Language came late to the party, as far as films are concerned. Remember that we didn't have talkies until, what, the '20s? So movies originally were made with just pictures. To this day, movies and film are primarily the bailiwick of visual makers, where we all discuss the shot, how it looks, how it moves, what size lens you use, how is it framed... All these are references to what a shot looks like, and in fact you can tell a very good story just by giving people images. And our generation today is a much more visual generation than the one in Elizabethan times, which was an oral one. They went to hear a play. In the chorus of Henry V, he says, "Gently to hear, kindly to judge our play" – not to see it, because there really wasn't that much to see on the stage, but rather to hear it. When you go to Ireland, for instance, or England, the heroes there are writers. Writers are not so much heroes in the United States. We have sports people who are heroes, and we have actors who are heroes. The writers sort of get short-shrift, and the actors are only interpretive vessels. The true genius, the primary artistic force is always the writer. He's the one who sits down at the screen and fills up his page with words. The rest of us just interpret those words – whether it's the actor, or director, or the scene designer. IGNFF: It's interesting when you talk about the cultural difference – even television in the U.K. is very writer-centric... SHIMERMAN: That's right. IGNFF: With the actors that you see today – what are the hurdles that most of them have to overcome? SHIMERMAN: I don't know, because the truth is that most of the younger people who are successful, I don't come in contact with – except perhaps some of the people on Buffy. I sort of got some lessons from them. But most of the young people I come in contact with, the biggest hardship is just finding an agent, getting a job. That's a very simplistic thing to say, but that is the primary problem for most young actors trying to find work in Los Angeles today. For young actors who are successful, I would assume what's hardest for them would be continuing their careers. Oftentimes, people at a young age get to play parts that are really quite wonderful, and their career lasts for another five, six years and then they disappear. I'm sure they still want to continue to act, it's simply that the business has chewed them up and spit them out and no longer wants to see them anymore. IGNFF: In young actors you've encountered in TV or in film, who have made their success within TV or film, do you often see a reticence or fear of doing stage work? You don't often see that line being crossed when they start out in film or TV... SHIMERMAN: I'm not going to make a broad statement about that, because I haven't met most of the people in that situation. It's hard to do theater once you've done film and TV. One is the hours. It's a tremendous amount of commitment. You spend four to five weeks in rehearsal without ever seeing an audience, you have to memorize tons of lines, and there's a time commitment. You say good-bye to your family and to your routines for that period of time, four to five weeks. Also, it takes a very mature and wise young person to say, "I'm being offered a role in a film where I might get a quarter of a million dollars – but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do a play instead where I might make a couple of thousand dollars over the course of seven or eight weeks." So I don't think that they're fearful of theater – they may be. I think simply that they're succeeding quite well and they don't want to risk that by going off to do a play. I'm sure there are many people who are more than happy to do that, but I think the majority of people would probably fit the description I just said. IGNFF: Do you think that plays a bit into the lack of understanding that people have about theater work, either positive or negative, about it being somehow more rewarding than film or TV? SHIMERMAN: Yeah. I love the theater, and I always think of myself as a theater person first, primarily. I'm trying now to actually change my career so that I go back to the theater. But I think people think of doing a play, once you've gotten through all the work, is a wonderful, wonderful experience, and it's so much better than doing TV or film – and that's not true. There are wonderful TV shows, and there are bad plays. You're not necessarily going to have a great, rich, spiritual journey in a play – you might even get that in a film or TV. I think that's a misconception. I think another misconception is that if you've done TV or film, it should be relatively easy to crossover to theater. There are other tools, other abilities you have to mature in the theater – just simply voice projection, for one thing. Concentration. For instance, on a sound stage, everybody must be very quiet while the actors are working, and many times, actors will yell and scream that somebody's in their eye line, and you have to move them away. "That person's in my eye line and I can't concentrate." Of course, when you're doing a play, you've got anywhere from 100 to 3000 people in your eye line, and you have to continue. You can't yell, "Cut! I want to do that over again." You've got to continue. Sometimes, mistakes are made on the stage and you have to think very quickly how to deal with that mistake. An actor hasn't shown up for an entrance, a cue isn't given, a wrong cue is given, a piece of scenery drops from above and it's not supposed to do that – you not only have to do the performance, you also have to deal with the contingencies that happen. IGNFF: So there's a great deal of flexibility that's required... SHIMERMAN: Yup. And you can have that flexibility on TV and film, except you have the luxury in TV and film to say, "Cut. Stop. Let's do it over again." So you have to be brilliant the first time every night on stage, and you don't get a master to sort of start the process working and eventually get to your close-ups. IGNFF: Would you also say, to some extent, doing theater work is like running a marathon? SHIMERMAN: Yes, absolutely. That's one sort of race, and running a sprint is another sort of race. They're both races. They both have their athletes, and they're both comparable and equal – they're just different races. IGNFF: What was the biggest challenge in learning how to run that marathon? SHIMERMAN: Theater was my original one – the challenge was actually in dealing with the sprint. Learning to work in the theater was a natural process, because I'm an analytical person. So it's just about analyzing, analyzing, analyzing and making the emotional choices to match your analysis. Sometimes that's done in a moment. I mean, something happens between two actors and immediately you go to something that isn't necessarily conscious analysis, it could be subconscious, but you immediately go to that and you learn from that. Sometimes, it's an analytical process and you think, "Well, I need to be less angry here for this reason." But the hard part for me was the sprint, was learning how to work in TV, by not having the rehearsal and learning those new lines as fast as I could, and dealing with the fact that I had to bring my performance down for the TV. Being a theater actor, it tended to be a large performance. Working on TV, you have to bring the size of the performance down. IGNFF: In some respects would you say running that sprint is about compromise? SHIMERMAN: No, I don't think it's about compromise. I think it's simply about learning the limitations and boundaries of the medium you're working in. It's not a compromise at all. It's qualifications, that's all. IGNFF: So realizing it's a slightly different skill set. SHIMERMAN: Yes. It's a realization that it's a different medium that requires the use of many unique, different tools for that different medium. IGNFF: Do you think that some actors don't fully understand the differences in skill set that are needed? The learning curves involved? SHIMERMAN: The people who, like myself – who came from the theater – have to learn to be smaller, to make their performances fit inside the camera. People who've done film and TV have to learn to make their performance larger when they work onstage. --IGN http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/432/432051p1.html What do you think of his role in the Star Trek Universe? Master Q StarTrek_Master_Q@yahoo.com Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
VaBeachGuy 12 Posted August 7, 2003 What do I think of his role? I think he was essential in the development of the Ferengi into a race that Star Trek fans could enjoy and even root for. Sometimes bad guys some times good guys always an enigma. Without Quark I don't know that the Ferengi would be as well liked as they are. (By those of us that like them) Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
master_q 0 Posted August 7, 2003 I would generally agree I think he was a fine addition to DS9 and really pushed a reform on the Ferengi. TNG failed when introducing the Ferengi. When DS9 came it changed them for the good. Master Q StarTrek_Master_Q@yahoo.com Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Klingonmike 0 Posted August 7, 2003 And Armin Shimerman is one of the coolest and friendly people to sit and chat with and Max Grodenchek (Rom) is also a very nice guy and very funny in real life. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
