PLUME: As a learning experience, what kind of energy do you take from working with young actors?

SHIMERMAN: Well, I just learned about different cultural things. It took me a year to figure out why Joss wrote the way he wrote, and now I’m a major fan of his. He’s an incredible writer. But he was just tuned on to young people’s patois. He wrote it brilliantly. But I didn’t – being older and not having any children, this was sort of slightly different language to me. But, when I saw it on the screen, I went, “Oh god. Yeah, it works perfectly. Look at that.” So that was part of it. Working with young people, just their energy made me feel better. They were always up, they were always excited about being at work. They were always exploring and laughing and that was just different than most of the sets I’d ever been on. I loved that. Sarah was just brilliant. In the three years that I worked with her, I don’t think I ever saw her flub a line. She’s just phenomenal that way. And she was capable of just joking, joking, joking – the sound man would say, “Speed,” she’s still joking, the director would say, “Action,” and she’d be back to being a very serious Buffy, doing what she had to do. I’m just blown away by her talent. And Alyson’s talent, and Nick’s, and Tony and everybody else. Seth Green. They were brilliant, brilliant actors, and I was in awe of them.

PLUME: Would you say that there’s a risk of an actor, the longer they stay in the business, of becoming somewhat jaded?

SHIMERMAN: Yeah. Yeah, and that was what was wonderful about working Buffy. It reminded me how much fun it could be. Yeah, because you begin to think about other things. You don’t think about the work so much, you think about your career, you think about your paycheck. You think about how long the day is going to be. As you get older, you get crankier, and there are more things to be cranky about. So yeah, you can fall into that trap. Working on Buffy reminded me of how much fun it could be.

PLUME: To some extent, do you think that’s why the constant discovery process of doing new theater productions appeals to you?

SHIMERMAN: Yes. In fact, I’m doing a play right now, The Hostage, which is half made up of young people, and I’ve been telling people it’s that same feeling as Buffy. I’m watching people learn to fly for the first time, really, in a professional situation. It’s just so exciting to watch them learn and grow. Every now and then they ask me for a little bit of advice, which I’m glad to give them, but I’m learning much more from them than they’re learning from me.

PLUME: Do you think that, to be effective as an actor, it has to be a constant learning process?

SHIMERMAN: Yeah, otherwise you get very sullen. Because there are very, very, very few actors who have a career that lasts a lifetime and who do good work, constantly. Therefore, because those criteria aren’t met most of the time, you have a lot of regrets, and a lot of anger towards the business and the people that do or don’t hire you and the situations you find yourself in, and you get very sullen. Unless you find the joy that you had when you first started in your career, you’re going to end up a very sort of morose human being.

PLUME: How often have you fallen into that trap?

SHIMERMAN: Many times. More often than I’d like to think. It takes working on Buffy, or doing this play, or working on a project that gives your spirits a boost again to remind myself why I went into this profession. The profession’s been enormously good to me, there’s nothing for me to really be sullen about, but you know what? You just can’t help finding yourself there on a lot of occasions.

PLUME: Do you find that those moods increase in frequency, or decrease, the older you get?

SHIMERMAN: It really depends – not so much on your age, but on how much work you’re doing. The more work you have, the less likely you are to be sullen. Although an overabundance of work can also make you sullen.

PLUME: How so?

SHIMERMAN: Well, then you have too much on your plate. You should’ve said no to a couple things and you didn’t, and now you’ve got too many lines to memorize and too many early mornings and too many balls to juggle.

PLUME: Is it a frustration because you feel that you wouldn’t be operating at your fullest potential?

SHIMERMAN: No, it’s just that you feel like you’re not getting enough sleep. You know what happens when you don’t get enough sleep? You just get sullen. You get cranky. That’s what it is, “I’m not getting enough sleep.” It can be as simple as that. If you’re like me, yes, you’re thinking, “I’m not doing the best job I could be doing.” But also, you’re also thinking about, “I just can’t take it.” As you get older, I just don’t have the ability to burn the candle at both ends any more, and therefore it’s just too much.

PLUME: How much of that desire to take as much work as possible if it comes in equates back to your upbringing?

SHIMERMAN: Yeah, very much so. Very much coming from a world of poverty, the idea that I might turn something down, which might put an extra dollar in my pocket, is from my early child years, absolutely. Also, from those three years I told you about, after my success on Broadway, and getting my foot into the television world. A lot of that is still there. But, I must stay, in the last nine months or so, I’ve been pretty good about saying no to things.

PLUME: When did you begin teaching?

SHIMERMAN: I began teaching during those starving years. There was a theater group that I had belonged to before I moved to New York, called Theater 40, and I offered to Theater 40 to teach my Elizabethan rhetoric class and they accepted. I had about six students a week, and they paid, I think, $10 a class. So it was $60 a week, which was my primary source of income for a number of months. Then, after doing Beauty and the Beast, I met an actress named Ellen Geer, who had a theater in Los Angeles, and she also had a school attached to the theater. It’s sort of a summer camp sort of school. She had asked me to teach, and I’ve been teaching for Ellen for 15 years now. It pays not very much. I do three weekends of work for anywhere between 10 to 20 students each weekend, and it doesn’t pay much of anything. But I do it for two reasons. I love to teach, and I love to learn from the people that I’m teaching. Also, I have never forgotten those years of desperation, and Ellen helped me get out of them. So it’s a way of paying her back.

PLUME: How have the lessons evolved over the years?

SHIMERMAN: They’re pretty much the same, actually, except what I learn from my classes and from my research. But the Elizabethan rhetoric is 400 years old, so it’s pretty much the same. Those lessons are just teaching what Bill Shakespeare would have learnt in his school.

PLUME: What are the differences you’ve learned since you first started teaching 20 some years ago, as far as making the information palatable to students?

SHIMERMAN: I have better examples for things, so it’s easier for people to understand, because the examples are better. My terminology has gotten slightly better, so although I don’t use the Elizabethan Greek terms for the rhetoric, I use modern terms, and the analogies are from modern times. As I’ve learned more and more about those analogies and new terms. It makes it easier for the students to understand. Also, just a lot of patience. I’ve always been a patient person – certainly no one can sit in make-up for a long period of time without having patience – but I always had patience, and my patience for teaching is even more so.

PLUME: Would you say that these sort of methods are something that have to be taught on a one-on-one basis, or is this something that could be secondhand?

SHIMERMAN: It has to be on-on-one – you have to hear it. It can’t be something you read out of a book, because in a book it’s very dry and very academic. The moment you begin to actually show them with acting examples, and with vocal intonations, they get it. I always tell them at the beginning of class, “Okay, this first 45 minutes is just going to be Greek. You’re not going to understand anything I say, I just want you to take notes and learn the terminology that I’m using here. Then, when the 45 minutes is up, I promise you, the 2 hours that follow it,” because usually what it is is a three hour class, “you’ll begin to understand.” That’s usually what happens. They look at me with doe eyes after the first 45 minutes, because it’s just a lot to take in, and it’s all sort of foreign sounding. Then the moment I start showing them the examples, they learn by example and they get it themselves. That, to me, is such a joy. When I see someone who didn’t know anything about this previously, to all of a sudden start doing it in his work or her work, is a great, great pleasure to me.

PLUME: Is it something you ever thought of preserving on video?

SHIMERMAN: No, because – there is a video. It’s very hard to get, of a man named John Barton, the great dramaturge of the RSC, who teaches the same thing. He did a number – I think there are about 10 videotapes – working with people, great English actors, and doing it. So it would be ridiculous for me to try to follow John Barton’s footsteps. He does it brilliantly already. If somebody really wants to see something on videotape, I tell them, “If you can,” because they’re very difficult to find, “if you can, find the John Barton tapes and you’ll get all you need from that.”

PLUME: But, as you said, they’re difficult to find.

SHIMERMAN: They’re very, very difficult. They’re produced by BBC, and they’re not sold here. You somehow have to get in touch with people in England, or dub the ones that are in America.

PLUME: So it’s almost an underground network…

SHIMERMAN: Exactly.

Continued below…

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