Keating Sorely Misses 'Enterprise'

"You must be a nerd's wet dream," Australian radio talk show hosts Ian & Mikey told Star Trek: Enterprise's Dominic Keating (Reed), who lamented that he wished it were true.

"If only!" Keating told his interviewers at Radio 2, who cited his appearances in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Poltergeist and Enterprise. "I had great fun in the four years we did on the Trek show...it was a playground. We had a great cast and it was a really fantastic crew. I sorely miss the job, I have to say."

Keating called acting on Star Trek "a bit of high drama" and described his impressions of arriving at Paramount's Stage 8 to film: "Every week you'd go in there and they'd just miraculously turn half a hectare into a comet or a jungle with a waterfall. Planet Hell, we called it affectionately." He said that the budget was huge, like "a little film every week." The film Trekkies gave him "a pretty good understand from the get-go" about what fans were like, though he laughed, "I was never going to go see that dentist, that's for sure!"

Nothing, he added, could truly have warned him of the extremes of fandom until his first convention in Phoenix where there were a pack of Klingons in full regalia melting in the 120-degree weather. Asked by the hosts whether he could spend the rest of his life traveling the world to such gatherings, Keating admitted that at one convention he stopped himself while telling the story of how he got the role of Reed, protesting that he felt strange telling the story so long after the event. "A woman shouted out from the back, 'Try saying that in 35 years, honey!'"

Of more potential embarrassment is the story of how Keating got his Actors Equity card, which he explained, laughing: "I did a drag act to get my union card and I'm proud of it! Six months of drag!" He said that he did not have a drag name but played an awkward public school boy. "Winston Churchill always said that you've never been to public school until you've slept with at least five boys," he noted cheerfully.

Since Star Trek, Keating said that he had done a couple of movies and was about to start a third. "One looks set to go to Sundance," he said. "It's a mocku-documentary about Jonathan Winters, who is the granddaddy of modern funny in America." After that film he did "a little low budget horror movie", Hollywood Kills, in which he played "this John Waters-esque director that lures young hollywood hopefuls to his studio where I then entrap them and make snuff movies out of them. One for the kids!" And he was about to start filming on Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf, where he was loooking forward to working with Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich and Angelina Jolie, the latter of whom he said he hoped would "adopt" him.

The full interview may be downloaded here.

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