Bakula Talks Set Camaraderie

As he embarks on Enterprise, it's good to see that Scott Bakula (Jonathan Archer) has a healthy respect for his fellow cast members.

"I think they're all clowns, actually!" he jokingly told Gregory L. Norris and Laura A. Van Vleet at Trek Galaxy. "No, really, they're a wonderful group, and we really got started without any big bumps in the road. It's just been a pleasure that they're all so very excited about doing this. Nobody acts like they wish they weren't here. They're all thrilled to be part of Enterprise, and everybody seems to be very supportive of each other. It's a very good-natured group."

Hot on the heels of the infamous Voyager cast pranks, the latest crew seem to be embracing the spirit of on-set fun. "There are a lot of laughs and jokes, sometimes at each other's expense," Bakula said. "But it's all in good taste and in good fun. You know, we are all still kind of figuring each other out to a certain extent. And they are all nicely and happily all very different individuals. But they are all talented, and just jazzed about doing the show, which is what you need when you are looking at a long run like this. You need people that are really ready for it."

Despite all the fun, Bakula noted that there's always the fear that you're going to look stupid on camera. "I think our biggest fear at this point and time," he said, "which kind of amuses us - Dominic [Keating - Malcolm Reed] and I were sitting in the Shuttlepod last week. Our characters were in the middle of a huge electrical storm with rain and lightening and all this shaking and trembling. And we just both looked at each other and said, 'I hope that what we're doing doesn't make us look like we are both total idiots.' The director told us not to worry, that our shaking is going to match that of the camera."

The long hours of shaking on set are something that the cast have yet to get used to. "After making ourselves tremble and shake for a few hours, we started to feel really stupid," Bakula said. "And I have to say that I hope they make us look good, because when you do effects like that you are so at their mercy. Obviously, the people here at Star Trek certainly know what they are doing, so Dominic kind of said it tongue-in-cheek. But we got laughing just about how silly it was to be bumping and shaking, and then having different versions of it. This was only our fifth hour and we already had eight different levels of turbulence where we had to know what's a jolt and what's a shake and what's a tremble. We're getting accustomed to those kinds of things, though, sometimes we still deal with, 'you're not shaking the same way I'm shaking - will you shake the way I'm shaking, please?'"

For the full interview, in which Bakula also talked about his character and science fiction experience, head over to Trek Galaxy.

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