PLUME: What was the casting process for Deep Space Nine?

SHIMERMAN: I was the first person read for Quark, and I waited about a month and a half, two months to get feedback. I had always been a big Star Trek fan. I was very honored to have been on Next Generation – even though I wasn’t happy with my performance, I was very honored. When I heard that they were casting a Ferengi for Deep Space Nine, I did everything I could to try and get an audition – and as I said, I was the first person seen. Two months went by and I began to get depressed about the fact that it wasn’t going to go any further … because nobody was giving me any feedback. Nobody was saying, “Yes, we’re interested/No we’re not interested.” The agent said they would call, but there was no feedback.

PLUME: Are those the difficult times?

SHIMERMAN: Yeah, especially with a part that I wanted. I really did want it, for all sorts of reasons. I thought I had had a good audition, but the situation would have been better if the agent had called and said, “Armin, they loved your audition, but they’re going a different way.” Which is what you hear often.

PLUME: Were you doing anything else at the time?

SHIMERMAN: At that time I was doing a production of Richard II at the Mark Taper Forum, with Kelsey Grammar. So I was doing a play, and I was thinking about it, but my mind was focused on the play. But I was thinking about it. Also during that time, I think I finished Richard II and started doing a production of Hamlet as well … Then after two months they called me in for callback, and I read. While I was sitting in the room waiting for the audition, I saw another actor who I recognized from TNG, Max Grodenchik. I never met him before. I waited for him after he had finished reading, he was reading for Quark as well. We went out and had a long, 45 minute chat about the audition, about the script and about the roles. When I left, I sort of said to myself, “I guess it must be between me and Max.” Then there was a third audition about a week or ten days after that one. I walked in and there was no Max Grodenchik – however, there was Rene Auberjonois, there was Avery Brooks, and there was Nana Visitor… I think Sid was there, too …

PLUME: So, essentially, the cast was there.

SHIMERMAN: Yes, essentially the cast was there. I didn’t know that, of course, at the time. I looked around, and there weren’t any other short actors there. That gave me pause. I thought, “Well, maybe they’re coming in later.” Of those people, I was the first one to read, and I read all of Quark for the “Emissary” episode for the suits in Paramount. When I was finished, Rick Berman came out and chatted with me for a little while. I told him I was very nervous about it, and he said, “There’s no reason to be nervous, Armin, we wrote this role for you.” Now, I wish they’d told me that at the beginning of the audition process, but as it turned out, everybody that Rick had handpicked for that day’s audition, he got.

PLUME: And it’s quite a confidence in you as an actor – even in your performance, which you don’t look back to fondly on in Next Gen, for them to say that they did that.

SHIMERMAN: Yeah, I’m always amazed when I tell that story, because obviously Rick and Michael Piller must have liked that performance in Next Gen and hired me for that reason. Max, who eventually ended up playing Rom, we had come at the role of Quark two totally different ways. Obviously they decided to go with what I had given them, but they could have chose Max. Quark could have been a totally different character. Totally different – much closer to the Next Generation Ferengi than I think my Quark ended up being.

PLUME: How much of your reading of Quark in those auditions was a reaction to your original performance?

SHIMERMAN: A lot of it. We talked before about seeing subsequent episodes and learning from that… I had watched not only my own performances as a Ferengi, but I had watched Max’s and the other people who had played Ferengi. Watching their performances, because I was and still am a very big Star Trek fan, and that taught me a lot. So, when I went to play Quark, I wanted him to be closer to a deeper character than what had been exhibited so far by Ferengi on Next Generation. I also, when I did that first Ferengi episode, I had a chat with Brent Spiner, who I knew before having done the show. Brent said something to me that day that never left my mind – that was the first season of TNG and, at that point, nobody knew where Data was going to go. But Brent said to me, “Armin, my intention here is to take Data and move it from the character with the least amount of potential to the character with the most amount of potential.” That was always my motto while playing Quark – was to take what is basically a rather shallow character and try to make him as deep as possible.

PLUME: To some extent, was that inherent in the writing in those initial scripts, or was there a lot of interpretation that went into it?

SHIMERMAN: There was a lot of interpretation, although in some of the scripts there was the leeway to do that. Primarily, I’m thinking of an episode called “Move Along Home” in the first season. It was about a whole race of people who played games. That script allowed Quark to, for the first time, realize his connection with the Star Fleet people who had taken over Deep Space Nine. It gave him the ability or the opportunity to show how deep his feelings for them were. Instead of playing it comedically, I chose to play it dramatically. Which might be a plus, might be a minus – depending on how you look on it. But that’s when I started to fulfill my agenda, trying to deepen the character.

PLUME: Was there a sense that the writers were very much in flux with where the character would go?

SHIMERMAN: That’s a question you’d have to ask the writers. The writers, sometimes, would give me very deep stuff to do – for which I was always grateful. Sometimes, they would give me not-so-deep stuff. During the course of many years I often said to them, “If you’ll just tell me where his I.Q. is, it’ll be easier for me.” Because sometimes it would be 60, and sometimes it would be 160.

PLUME: Rom was pretty consistent.

SHIMERMAN: Yeah, Rom was pretty consistent, and had a great a arc to it. His I.Q. pretty much stayed the same, but his heart grew bigger and made Rom a phenomenally good character. I’m not at all upset with what they did with Quark. Quark turned out to be a great character as well, but had different criteria during the course of different episodes.

PLUME: Did that allow you to interpret it in a much broader way?

SHIMERMAN: Yeah. What I learned was, “Okay, like any human being, some days are better than others. So, in this episode, he’s a little bit smarter than he usually is. In this other episode, he’s a little big more greedy than he usually is. In this episode, he’s a little big dumber than he usually is.” That’s a normal thing. That is how humanity lives from day to day. Once I learned to accept that, it made the work that much easier.

PLUME: How tentative was the interpretation of the character during “Emissary”?

SHIMERMAN: “Emissary” is a different character than Quark. “Emissary” is me trying to deepen the character I played on Next Generation. In fact, in “Emissary” and only in “Emissary”, Armin Shimerman uses a voice for Quark. In it, I’m using the Ferengi voice that I auditioned in, that I did the TNG in …

PLUME: A broader interpretation…

SHIMERMAN: A broader, theatrical interpretation. Rick Berman brought me into his office after “Emissary” was done and said, “Lose the voice, for two reasons. One is we don’t need it, and two is it will wreck your throat.” Starting from the very next episode after “Emissary”, Quark spoke like me only sounding slightly different because of the teeth in my mouth.

PLUME: Which opened the character up a bit more for you?

SHIMERMAN: Yeah, absolutely, and it didn’t give me throat problems, which I’m sure it would have. Seven years of talking like that would have been horrible.

PLUME: I would imagine Max had some throat problems, because he affected a voice, right?

SHIMERMAN: Yeah, he did. He was able to deal with it better, and of course he had a lot of more rest periods than I.

PLUME: Aron, I guess, affected a voice…

SHIMERMAN: No, not really. Again, their voices are slightly changed because of the prosthetics in their mouth. When you put a whole bunch of teeth into one’s mouth, you’re just going to talk different. You just are. It has nothing to do with your throat – it just has to do with the vocal quality coming out over the teeth and your tongue dealing with all those teeth.

PLUME: How difficult was the first season, getting used to the prosthetic process?

SHIMERMAN: Very difficult. As the hours became obvious to me, as it became a 16 hour day – and although the heads are very light and the teeth are easily removable, there were many, many times during the first season that I was in extreme agony from muscle tension in my back. I guess from trying to carry the head, which was ridiculous. You don’t have to carry the head, it’s very light. But I think my shoulders wanted to compensate for that. I had a lot of muscle problems in the first season. I’m not quite sure why, but I did. The second season I think I learned to relax with the head and the muscle problems went away. Invariably, twice a year I would have some major mouth problems, mouth pains from the teeth. I guess my jaw would get a little upset about the way it was pivoting around the prosthetic teeth. That would happen about twice a year, and did continue to do that for the rest of the six years – but it would only last for about two weeks each time. The rest of the year I was fine.

PLUME: In any way affecting the performance?

SHIMERMAN: No, just my jaw got very tight and my teeth got enormously sensitive, so that anything that wasn’t exactly room temperature – if it was just a little bit hotter or a little big colder than room temperature – sent ice picks into my mouth through my teeth when I ate or drank.

PLUME: Yeah, that’s not pleasant.

SHIMERMAN: No, not pleasant. So, during that two week period when that would happen – and I never quite understood why it happened or why it disappeared – I would just lose weight. I just wouldn’t want to eat, because every time my teeth would touch anything, it was like the dentist hit you in the wrong way.

PLUME: I can’t even imagine maintaining a work schedule with that.

SHIMERMAN: It was difficult, but again, I quote to you what my wife said, which is, “If you want to be a knight, you have to wear the armor.”

Continued below…

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