INTERVIEW: Andrew Robinson on the joy of playing Garak on ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’
Image courtesy of Creation Entertainment / Provided with permission.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine regularly ranks at the top — if not the very top — of most polls for best Star Trek series of all time. And on the show, the character of Elim Garak, portrayed by veteran actor Andrew Robinson, proves to be a fan favorite, even more than 20 years after his debut on the series.
Robinson, an accomplished actor who has appeared in everything from Dirty Harry to Hellraiser, will talk about Garak and his experiences on the DS9 set today, July 18 at 12:30 p.m. PDT (3:30 p.m. EST) at a special virtual Q&A courtesy of Creation Entertainment and StageIt. For those fans who want to go even deeper with Robinson, there are auction tickets available for an exclusive virtual meet and greet, set for Wednesday, July 22 at 3 p.m. PDT (6 p.m. EST).
“It’s a unique thing,” Robinson said in a recent phone interview about the whole convention scene. “I came to it fairly late in my career. Up until when I started doing Deep Space Nine and being asked to conventions, I had never done anything like this. It was a unique situation to get to meet the people who basically support you.”
When Robinson signed on the dotted line and agreed to portray the Cardassian known as Garak, he thought it would be a one-time-only performance. The character was meant to have a tiny arc and essentially be relegated to a guest star; however, the role and the storyline proved to be such a favorite amongst fans and the creative team behind the show that Robinson was invited back and eventually logged dozens of episodes.
“The thing is I didn’t know that I was going to be on the show beyond the very first time I was on it,” he admitted. “I thought it was just a one-shot deal, and then gradually, it was maybe two, maybe even three years when suddenly they started asking me back. And I realized that this character I was playing, Garak, it blew my mind that he became so popular, so it took awhile for me. Once it hit home, I realized that things would never be the same again. … It exceeded my expectations. I had no idea that this character would figure in so importantly at the end of the show and in terms of how things turned out.”
Robinson said he loved the mystery behind the character and the obvious secrets he was holding back. The fact that Garak is not easily categorized as good or bad made him a joy to play — a real challenge for a veteran theater actor like Robinson. Helping him along the way were cast members like Armin Shimerman, Nana Visitor, Alexander Siddig and the late, great René Auberjonois.
“Some of the people, like Armin, like René Auberjonois, these are people that I had known before and worked with before, and I only got to do the show more than once because Siddig and I really got along very well,” Robinson said. “Basically they brought Garak in to give Siddig’s character, Dr. Bashir, a storyline, and they were only going to go with me as long as Sid and I had some chemistry. And we did. We became very friendly. I mean, we still are good friends.”
The legacy of Deep Space Nine continues to grow, with old fans ranking the series as one of the best, and new fans binge-watching the show in record time. There was even a successful documentary a couple years ago thanks to series showrunner Ira Steven Behr. What We Left Behind looked closely at the impact of the seminal show and in particular at the Garak character.
“For me, I always thought it was the best show,” Robinson said. “The show as a whole was ambiguous. It was an ambiguous universe, unlike the other Star Trek shows. You couldn’t identify the good and evil quite so clearly. It wasn’t that clearly delineated, and I think at the beginning a lot of people were upset because we weren’t following that standard procedure of a Star Trek show. But I think over the years as we’ve become as a society more complex and certainly ambiguous, I think people appreciate the kind of world that was created on Deep Space Nine.”
Many fans have interpreted Garak as an early Star Trek character who was gay. Although his sexuality was never explicitly mentioned throughout the series, Robinson believed there was an obvious connection between his character and Bashir.
“That was always my choice,” he said. “That was part of my little shtick, that when he first meets Dr. Bashir there is as much a sexual attraction as there is a stratagem of a spy.”
Working on the DS9 set was fun, but difficult. Robinson talked about being in makeup and costume for 10-15 hours per day, and the series cast members were a “pretty serious lot.” But the hard work paid off with thrilling episodes and multi-episode arcs, like the Dominion War sequence. For Robinson, the long hours and grueling time in the makeup chair all helped him carve out a believable (albeit alien) character.
“I have to go deep on a character with any performance,” he said. “The challenge here was the fact that nobody knew much about Cardassians, and so how do you play an alien for one thing, someone who is not a human being. … Klingons were there from the beginning. Romulans were there from the beginnings and so forth, but Cardassians were fairly new. There were just a couple before me, and so I had to create a whole thing about Cardassians. And that’s one of the reasons that got me writing my book about Garak [A Stitch in Time]. It started out as just a personal bio of the character, and then it expanded into a book that eventually got published. But the entire instigation to write that book was to find out who this character is.”
Robinson was a trailblazer with A Stitch in Time, the 27th book in the Deep Space Nine canon. He was an actor writing the backstory to his Star Trek character, which is fairly unprecedented. Today, although the book is out of print (though available in e-book form), back copies sell for northward of $100 on Amazon and eBay.
One might think Robinson would make a good memoirist as well. After all, his career has spanned decades and included so many memorable roles, both in front of the camera and behind the camera. His film work actually started with Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry.
“It was great,” he said of the job. “It was insane because it was my first movie, and then to play somebody who was so obviously over-the-top insane and evil. … I came directly from doing an off-Broadway play into that movie, so it was like going down the rabbit hole. … I knew what to do. I was nervous as hell, but I knew how to do my job and how to create a character. So that was really important. If you walk into one of those situations, and you don’t know what to do, you’re cooked.”
Other movies included The Drowning Pool, Mask, Cobra and 1987’s Hellraiser with Clive Barker. “I go to the occasional horror conventions, and Hellraiser I find a lot of people who love that movie, especially if conventions gather together a lot of the cast,” Robinson said. “A whole bunch of fans come out of the woodwork for that.”
The directing for Robinson began with Deep Space Nine, and then he helmed a few Star Trek: Voyager episodes. His longest stint in the director’s chair was for Judging Amy.
“I love that show,” he said. “The cast was great, Amy [Brenneman] and Tyne Daly. The production, everything about it was superb. As a matter of fact it was such a great experience — because I eventually ended up on the roster of directors — that after seven years when the show ended I didn’t want to direct any more television because I knew it was not going to be as good as Judging Amy. The experience wasn’t going to be as good.”
Much of Robinson’s professional life has been upturned because of the coronavirus. He has not been able to appear in any theatrical productions, which is his preference nowadays, and his convention appearances have been moved online. He’s hoping that the country and the world get back on track at some point.
“The thing is, if you’ll pardon the expression, our leaders, our government f—ed up,” he said. “It’s a killer, literally a killer. So many people have died unnecessarily, and people are going hungry and out of work. It’s just been so mishandled, so I have no idea. I’m hoping that we’ve learned something, and that the resurgence of this virus is going to teach us that now we really have to buckle down and get rid of the f—er. Otherwise we’re going to be doing this until they come up with some type of vaccine, and I ain’t holding my breath for that either. … This whole thing about blaming China and us pulling out of the World Health Organization, this is f—ing insane. It’s insane.”
Art and artists can help pave a path forward. Robinson knows that writers will be responding to this pandemic for years to come. (He even admitted that he has been writing some essays and thinking about another fiction project.)
“While they’re going underground at this point, I think a lot of writers are going to be coming up with stuff,” Robinson said. “They’re going to be projects that are going to be dealing with the changes that we have to make. I feel very positive about that, and I think the artists and the industry can be and will be enormously helpful. It won’t be business as usual.”
For Robinson, at this point in his life and career, he likes to look ahead to better days, but he’s also protective of the past and still cherishes his time with his fellow Deep Space Nine cast members.
“I really move ahead, but the thing is at my age I do cherish my memories,” he said. “And I find the older I get the more grateful I am for the memories I have. That sounds a bit corny, but it’s true. I do try to keep moving forward.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Andrew Robinson will appear at a virtual Q&A today, July 18 at 12:30 p.m. PDT (3:30 p.m. EST), courtesy of Creation Entertainment and StageIt. His exclusive meet and greet is set for Wednesday, July 22 at 3 p.m. PDT (6 p.m. EST). Click here for more information.
