Trek Actor Interviews

Michelle Erica Green at AnotherUniverse's Mania Magazine has put up an interview with Armin Shimerman, who starred as Quark on 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine'. In the interview, Shimerman mostly talks about his emerging literary career, though he also talks about DS9 and 'Buffy'. Here's how the article starts:

Armin Shimerman no longer serves drinks to Starfleet officers or plots against vampire slayers. These days, his head is in the Renaissance. Last month Pocket Books published The Merchant Prince, an historical fantasy that takes philosopher John Dee to the year 2099. Shimerman co-wrote the book with Irish fantasy writer Michael Scott via the Internet, working on it in between his television scenes. Now he's working on a sequel, and another Renaissance novel as well.

"I have always been a student of Elizabethan literature," explains the prolific actor, who did double duty on Deep Space Nine and Buffy the Vampire Slayer while he was writing the novel. The Merchant Prince's version of scheming scientist Dee bears more than a passing resemblance to Ferengi bartender Quark, both on the book's cover (an illustration of Shimerman as Dee) and in the character's temperament and wit. In fact, The Merchant Prince is filled with little nods to Shimerman's most famous role - a character named Jim Church gets drunk on Old Defiant liquor, and Dee calculates the fortunes waiting to be made.

Meanwhile, Steve Fritz at Fandom has put up a transcript of a recent TV interview by Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard), which of course mostly focuses on his new 'The X-Men' film, premiering today. In the interview, Stewart mentions that before taking on the role of Professor Xavier, he was as ignorant about the X-Men as he was about Star Trek 14 years ago. His children, however, told him that taking on this role would mean assuming the role of another pop culture icon:

They actually said this could be bigger than Star Trek. My son is a big X-Men fanatic, so I turned to him for most of my early information. And yes, I did have concerns about playing another icon. At the beginning, it felt like a lot of baggage.

"But the nature of this story, particularly that it's about a modern man in a modern context--because I wasn't involved in a lot of the sequences the way the rest of the cast were--I didn't feel like I was in a comic book movie. [...] I was in a real, modern movie with a real, serious theme. And it's so different from the tone and quality of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I ended up feeling hardly any conflict at all. I didn't feel any unease about it. I'm just proud of the work."

The Mothership also has a transcript of a Stewart interview, but this looks to be taken from the same TV appearance. The Mothership report does include the news, however, that Stewart thinks Professor X could "certainly kick the shit out of Captain Kirk".

Thanks go out to the Great Link for the first and Gustavo Leao for the last link!

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