PLUME: It’s interesting when you talk about the cultural difference – even television in the U.K. is very writer-centric…

SHIMERMAN: That’s right.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: 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.

PLUME: To some extent, would you say that your early Ferengi appearance on TNG was a stage performance?

SHIMERMAN: Oh absolutely. Yeah, that’s exactly right. And that’s exactly what’s wrong with it. It’s way too theatrical and not subtle enough for the TV camera. It suffers from that theatricality.

PLUME: How long of a learning curve was it for you to realize, or understand, the boundaries of TV or film performance, versus theatrical?

SHIMERMAN: I’m a very slow learner. It took me, I would say, approximately three years. It took me the three years I worked on Beauty and the Beast.

PLUME: Was that through outside guidance, or your own personal discovery by viewing it?

SHIMERMAN: I was blessed to work with two phenomenal actors, both of them stage actors, and both of them consummate TV actors – Roy Dotrice and Ron Perlman. Especially from Ron Perlman, who obviously was also in a ton of makeup, and what I watched over the course of three years was how subtle he was and how much he could convey with that subtlety and how much of that almost imperceptible stuff that he was doing that I saw, was very perceptible when you watched it at home on the television.

PLUME: So it was learning to work within the frame.

SHIMERMAN: Yeah. It was learning to see how much you could do with less and how very important it is to immerse yourself in the character so that you’re actually thinking like the character while the camera is running. Because those thought processes are some of the most glorious moments on TV, when you can see the actor’s thinking – or when the character’s thinking, I should say. Ron Perlman – and Roy, to some lesser extent, but mostly Ron – was an enormous role model for me to watch and learn.

PLUME: Do you think, as a film actor making that transition, you depend on others and have a lag time of actually seeing your performance before you get a handle on that?

SHIMERMAN: Yeah. That’s one of the great things about being a recurring character. You have the opportunity to see what you’ve done wrong and correct it the next time you play that character. That’s an enormous educational thing. I’m very grateful to all the recurring roles that I’ve had because I think I did watch past episodes and learn from them and then take what I’ve learned and bring that to the next time I perform that role.

PLUME: In your early career, when you’re talking about the big success in Three Penny Opera, was there a thought that you would eventually make a transition back to L.A.?

SHIMERMAN: No. No, I was a theater actor and I was working on Broadway. After Three Penny, I did three more Broadway shows. After the Broadway shows I did several years of regional theater. I was a consummate theater actor, and that’s all I wanted to do. I was happy doing it and I was making a career of it. I was very successful as a young person. I was enormously blessed that way. It’s just that I was seduced by the dark side of the force. I was cast in a pilot out of New York, and sent back to Los Angeles to do this pilot, and they paid me a ton of money. Just a ton. I came back to New York after finishing the pilot, told my newly married wife that I think we should try to live on both coasts, and I think we should try to work TV as well as theater – because I had been seduced. I saw the money. I thought, “Wow, it would be nice to have that on a regular basis.”

PLUME: Was there a conscious feeling that you had been seduced?

SHIMERMAN: Not then, but I certainly see it now. Yeah. I’m very grateful… I’m glad I was seduced. I’m very grateful that I was seduced and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But for someone who truly only thought that he was only going to be a stage actor, was happy doing it – was successful doing it – it was a seduction, yeah.

PLUME: Was it more or less difficult to find TV and film work in L.A. than it was to find stage work?

SHIMERMAN: The first year of our existence in Los Angeles were horrible years. We lived off the fruit trees that grew on the property where we had a guest house. We kept warm in the winter by burning logs in the fireplace, because we had no heat. I mean, these are funny stories now, but at that time, it was very difficult. Although I had an agent, it just took a long time for Hollywood to be introduced to Armin Shimerman. Again, I was still bucking the same things that were there when I went to college and high school, which was simply that I was a young character actor and there weren’t a lot of roles for young character actors. There still aren’t. When agents would look at me, they’d sort of say to themselves, “How am I going to make any money off this guy? There aren’t that many roles for him.” But some people, god bless them, they took a chance and things worked out for both of us.

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