PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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?”

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.”

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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 everyday, you try to improve.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

Continued below…

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