PLUME: What kept you from moving back out to New York?

SHIMERMAN: Poverty. I couldn’t afford to move back. I’d given up my apartment; I had bought a number of things that it would have been a great loss to have sold them, at half the price or a quarter of the price. I was sort of caught between a rock and a hard place. I kept thinking that perhaps the tide would change, and I was right.

PLUME: If the means were there, you would have made the move back?

SHIMERMAN: Yes. If someone had said to me, “Armin, we’re doing a Broadway show in Lincoln Center and we want you to do this. Will you come back and do it?” I certainly would have done that. In fact, in some smaller sense, I did do that. During the three years of poverty in Los Angeles, I was lucky enough to be cast in some regional theater productions, which I was very grateful to do, and left Los Angeles for seven week periods to go off to the Guthrie, to go off to other theaters, in order to just pay for the bills that I accrued while I was in Los Angeles.

PLUME: When did the tide begin to turn?

SHIMERMAN: The tide turned, really, at Beauty and the Beast. Beauty and the Beast came at an opportune time, and the fact that I became a recurring character – which it was never supposed to be in the beginning – did the trick, because then I began to have more confidence in myself as a TV actor, as I began to learn from Ron and Roy. It was easier to go to auditions, knowing that, “Okay, if I don’t get this, it’s very likely that in a couple of weeks they’ll call me up for Beauty and the Beast and I’ll come back and do another episode.” So every audition didn’t become a life or death situation, which it is for many actors. That was the turning of the tide. Not only did the finances change, but more importantly, I learned how to act on TV – which made my auditions better, which made my reputation better, which eventually lead to more work.

PLUME: Is it a palpable feeling as the acceptance level and your visibility level increases?

SHIMERMAN: My visibility level, you know… many of your readers will know who I am. But, in the industry, science fiction is a stepchild, and my visibility – although it certainly has increased – it’s still not what you think it is, because most people never watched Star Trek. A lot of people watched Buffy, and I get a lot of my work now through Buffy more than Star Trek. But even so, in the film world, I have relatively no credits at all because I’m totally invisible in that world.

PLUME: Would you say that Buffy was a boon more so in the fact that the role was without makeup?

SHIMERMAN: Yes. Yeah, I have gotten, in the three years since both of them ended for me – they both ended for me the same week – Buffy has been much more instrumental in me getting further work because one, yes, no makeup. Also, because more people watched it – well, at least more people in the industry watched it.

PLUME: Would you say the majority of your roles now have come out of the audition process? How much of it comes out of somebody saying, “We want him” ?

SHIMERMAN: I’m very happy to say it’s probably fifty-fifty. That’s an incredible pronouncement to say. Most actors spend their lives auditioning and only getting work through auditions. I continue to do that and I continue to enjoy that. But I must say, half my work does come from simply people saying, “I know him from Buffy,” or “I know him from Star Trek,” or “I know him from one of the other projects he’s done.” I’m about to do a Crossing Jordan, and I’m sure there are various reasons for why I’m about to do this, why I was cast, but certainly one of the reasons has to be because the director is Michael Gershman, and Michael Gershman happened to be the DP on Buffy for the three years that I was there. I did audition for the thing, but I certainly got cast, I would think, partially because I worked with Michael before. And partially because the people on Crossing Jordan were aware of my work. In Buffy, I was just cast. I had auditioned, but not for Snyder. I had auditioned for Principal Flutie, I think about six months – or maybe even longer – prior to doing Snyder. So, in a sense, I did audition for Buffy, but in a sense also they just offered it to me, because I didn’t audition for Snyder. I’m sure people did.

PLUME: Which definitely must be a confidence booster.

SHIMERMAN: It was and it is, and one of the great, great delights. I’ve lived a gifted life, although people could find dark things about it. But the idea that I was doing two TV shows for three years, in a sense, in repertory – for me, it was repertory – very few actors could say that. Playing what I considered to be very different characters. So that was an enormous blessing. Very few actors can say that.

PLUME: And they’re shows that were not flash-in-the-pan, but that continue to live on even past their expiration dates – they didn’t disappear quickly.

SHIMERMAN: I did Girls Club last year, and we know how quickly that disappeared.

PLUME: When you talk about something like Beauty and the Beast ending, is there a sense of loss when a project like that ends? And a sense of “What next?”

SHIMERMAN: There was a sense of loss when Beauty and the Beast ended, because it was the first of the many jobs I did. But, at that time, I didn’t know what my future held. I only knew what dire straights I had been in before the show started, and I didn’t know whether I was going to go back to that, or proceed onwards. So there was a great regret when that ended because they were taking away my meal ticket.

PLUME: But you had money at that point …

SHIMERMAN: I had enough to live on – it wasn’t enough to sustain me for more than a couple of months.

PLUME: Was there a thought of moving back to New York with it?

SHIMERMAN: No, because at that point, after three years, it became obvious to us that this is where we needed to stay. But I will say – and I have told younger actors this many times – when a TV show ends, it ends. You have to expect that. The advice I give them is the advice an old character actor gave me – the actor’s name was Truman Gaige. Truman said to me – and at that time he was in his ’70s and I was in my ’30s – Truman said to me… because I had just said to him, “It’s really sad that this play is closing.” He said, “Armin, I’ve been in hits and I’ve been in flops. They all close.” You can have some regret that you’re not going to see the same people again for a while, but you have to expect that it’s going to close. Everything closes.

PLUME: So you can’t delude yourself into thinking otherwise…

SHIMERMAN: Yeah. Nothing lasts forever – especially in our business. Nothing. Unfortunately, a lot of people who thought they had their jobs in other industries and they thought they’d have them for a lifetime, they’re losing their jobs, too. That’s an unfortunate situation. But, in our work, you can assume that your job is going to end relatively quickly. Certainly compared to those other people.

PLUME: And sometimes without warning.

SHIMERMAN: And sometimes without warning. I mean, Girls Club, it was a David Kelly show. I expected that to run for at least a couple years. I expected Brooklyn Bridge, which was winning all sorts of awards, to continue on for a long period of time. But it disappeared relatively quickly. There’s no rhyme nor reason. A friend of mine used to be on Lou Grant, which was the number one rated show at the time, when it was pulled of the air.

PLUME: So you can’t bank on anything.

SHIMERMAN: You can’t bank on anything.

PLUME: How much of a shock is it when something like DS9 runs for seven years?

SHIMERMAN: Well, that wasn’t a shock because TNG had run for seven years, and it was syndication, after all. We were on syndication. Anybody who’s done some homework and has studied how the TV business works – and certainly my experience and my responsibilities for the Screen Actor’s Guild have taught me a lot – but, because it was syndication, there was nobody to say, “The ratings aren’t good enough, therefore we’re going to take you off.” It was only up to Paramount. I just assumed, and I was right – I said it for the entire seven years we were there – “We’re going to run for seven years.”

Continued below…

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