Celebrate Cardassians With Robinson, Biggs

"Cardassians really work from their reptilian brain," Andrew Robinson (Garak) announced as part of a Cardassian Celebration to honor the release of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's fourth season on DVD.

"Our impressions of the Cardassians have grown from just seeing them as militaristic bad guys to a fully realized people with a unique culture and perspective all their own," noted StarTrek.com, kicking off festivities that include interviews with Robinson and Casey Biggs (Damar) in print and streaming video.

Robinson, who felt that he was typecast as a villain after playing the killer in Dirty Harry, originally auditioned for Odo but was asked to play the recurring character of Garak when "they wanted a relationship for the Dr. Bashir character."

Though the makeup made him claustrophobic, Robinson said he was thrilled to get inside the head of such a complex character, so he forced himself to ignore the prosthetics.

His Garak novel, A Stitch in Time, came about from a diary he kept for the character that he did not originally intend to publish. Quark actor Armin Shimerman's writing partner David George suggested the he pitch it to Pocket Books.

Biggs, who said he read for the role of Damar twice before being cast, credits an IMAX film about the Alamo with gaining him the attention of producer Ira Behr. Damar's death, he added, "was the way that my character died in the Alamo, pretty much."

Though Biggs claimed that he wanted to be William Shatner (Captain Kirk) when he was growing up, there was one enormous drawback to starring on DS9: no, not the makeup, but the thick Cardassian beverage Canar to which Damar briefly became addicted.

"I come in one day and they pour this stuff that I have to drink, and it's Caro syrup," he recalled. "I complained for a year and a half...then...I came in one day and instead of Caro syrup they had sugar-free maple syrup, which is even worse."

The Cardassian Celebration, which also includes a new image gallery, can be found at StarTrek.com, while the Biggs interview may be found here and the Robinson interview here.

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