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May 2005 Starburst Issue 69 |
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LIEUTENANT REED OVER AND OUT!
"They have nearly two decades of Star Trek to tie up," adds Keating, referring to the fact that Star Trek: The Next Generation stars Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis are back in action as Riker and Troi, as These Are the Voyages... controversially folds the last Enterprise story into an episode of Next Gen. "So they've nicely woven our series into a bigger picture. I did a scene yesterday with Jonathan and I know Marina. She, like myself, is the queen of convention circuit. So we're kind of the two queens. And I'd met Jonathan before, when he was on the lot doing Nemesis. He's great, just an actor's actor, straight in with the jokes and the quips."
Lt. Malcolm Reed started out as the ship's armoury officer and,as the show fades to black, he's pretty much the same guy in the same position. "I think he's a little wiser now," says Keating, as he relaxes in his trailer during a break from shooting These Are the Voyages , which will wrap production a few days after this interview. "I don't know that my character changed in any great discernable ways in the four years. They played him as a type. He was fleshed out nicely here and there, and he had a couple of runs. This last run with Harris (Eric Pierpoint), the Special Ops guy, was fun. I guess he's just not as green as he was at the beginning. When I look back to the pilot (Broken Bow) and the first episodes, he's grown alongside me, as the actor who was playing him. I was two shades greener. But I kind of made my peace back at the end of season one that this show was never going to be about Malcolm Reed in any kind of in-depth way..It was always going to be about the captain (Scott Bakula) and Trip (Connor Trinneer) and T'Pol (Jolene Blalock), the babe."
Despite drastic changes and improvements to Enterprise over the past two seasons, viewers dropped like flies. Though this season's ratings have been stable and in fact spiked up a bit after UPN's announcement that it would bring the show back for a fifth season, only about three million fans tuned into Enterprise on a regular basis, thus sealing its fate. "I'm not entirely sure what the figures were, but my understanding is that this year we were heading up in the ratings, incrementally, in tenths," the British actor notes. "We were getting 100,000 people or so more each week than the week before for the most part. But, really, the big drop-off happened in season two. And once that happened, it was impossible to get those people back. We did everything that was humanly possible. We came in here week after week and did absolutely the best job we could. (New executive producer and show-runner) Manny Coto did a great job of reinvigorating the show, the scripts, but I guess it was too late already. No matter what we did we couldn't get back the fans we lost and we weren't able to pull in new viewers. So there you go."
And here Keating goes. It's time to look forward to the rest of his career. The actor grins mischievously when queried as to how, in a perfect world, his post- Trek career might play out. "In a perfect world?" he asks, repeating the question. "In a perfect world...in a perfect realistic world or a perfect imaginary world? There's a big difference. In a perfect realistic world I would segue into a really snappy comedy and show that feather in my cap. I did five years in a British sitcom and I did a film here with Tim Allen called Jungle 2 Jungle, for which I got a bit of notice. The respected American film critic Janet Maslin actually said I was the funniest thing in the movie - but a lot of f***ing good that did me or the film! Tim Allen paid to have her shot. So I would like to do a comedy. But, realistically, unless it was a completely horrible script, I'd do anything. I want to work. Actors want to act. It's what we do. It's how we make our money."
Keating turns in his chair and reaches for a script on the table before him. It's not a Trek teleplay. "This is a funny half hour show," he says, brightly. "If I get the part it would be a series regular. It's very funny. I read it last night. It's called Don't Ask . I'd be auditioning for the role of Garrett, the gay psychologist who steals the lead husband away from his wife - who he is also the therapist for. And the whole story is told from their 12-year-old son's perspective. It's very witty. I don't think anyone is cast yet. So I'm already looking ahead. You have to."
FAVOURITE EPISODES # 1
STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE may never have been mistaken for The Malcolm Reed Show, but Reed and Keating enjoyed the occasional moment to shine. Keating points to "Shuttlepod One" and Minefield , as well as The Shipment, Harbinger and Countdown as personal favourite episodes. "Shuttlepod One was cracking fun, just that little mini-play in a shuttlepod with Connor," the actor says. "He's such a good actor and we had a blast doing that. And then Minefield was my first venture working with Scott, really. We'd gone a whole season and really had nothing to do with each other than the perfunctory scenes on he bridge and a couple of running around the corridors with phase pistols scenes. But Minefield was the first one that Scott and I, as actors, had some real scenes to play together. I got nervous beforehand, I remember, going into that. But we bonded. It was the first time we discovered our actor camaraderie. So that's one.
FAVOURITE EPISODES # 2
Season Three provided more fun for Dominic Keating, as he explains. " I really was the action man in that season and I loved all that stuff with Hayes (Steven Culp)," Keating continues. "Steve was so much fun to work with, and I knew him before. We'd done a radio play together years ago and we'd stayed friends. We go to the same gym together. So when he came in to play my nemesis I was great fun. It was fun to work with him and I felt like I was part of the acting community in LA. 'Oh, I'm working with my buddy.' So that was great fun, and the action sequences were great fun. And the death scene (in Countdown ) was quite moving. Steve is now in Desperate Housewives . He's playing the ginger-haired girl's (Marcia Cross) sort of sappy-soppy husband, and I can only hope I'm as lucky finding roles after we finish up here."
Submitted by Jo Healy. |
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May 2005 TV Zone Issue 63 |
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Reed All About Him
As the curtain comes down on Star Trek: Enterprise, Dominic Keating talks with Steven Eramo about the show’s final episodes and looks back fondly at his tour of duty as Lt. Malcolm Reed.
His favourite food is pineapple, he tends to be shy around the opposite sex, and he takes great pride in doing a job well done. Over the past four years, fans of Star Trek: Enterprise have gotten to know a bit about what makes the Enterprise NX-01’s tactical officer Lt. Malcolm Reed tick. Recently, he was even forced to reveal a part of his life that he’d previously kept well-hidden. But the lieutenant’s TV journey has come to an abrupt end with Enterprise’s cancellation.
"I was in the parking lot of the YMCA when Rick Berman called to tell me that the show had been cancelled," says Reed's alter ego Dominic Keating, referring to the series' executive producer. "I more or less took it on the chin. Deep down, I think we all knew. It’s quite sad, really. I mean, there are people I know at the gym who ordinarily wouldn’t watch a show like Star Trek. However, because they know me, they’ve been watching and have become fans. Over the past few months, these people have come up to me and said, ‘This year has just been incredible.’ They’ve been genuinely excited to tune in each week, especially as Enterprise seemed to have finally found its stride this season. But, of course, now it’s all over."
There’s no denying that the first half of Enterprise’s fourth year was very much Malcolm Reed-lite. Except for his bridge scenes and the occasional rescue mission, the character remained off the radar. However, Keating was of the mind that good things come to those who wait, and he was right. "I did hardly anything in the first 11 episodes of this season," says the actor. "That said, they were terrific stories in terms of Star Trek lore, and I was just happy to be working. I’m not an actor who reads the scripts week after week and says, ‘Is that all I get to do?’ I’m lucky in that I got off to a good start with Enterprise and had some neat Malcolm stories in the first three years. That sort of satiated my actor’s vanity and need to be ‘recognized,’" he laughs.
"As for this season, things started to pick up for Malcolm with Observer Effect, in which his body is among those taken over by an alien life form. I had some fun scenes in that one, including the opening teaser where Malcolm and Ensign Mayweather [Anthony Montgomery] are playing chess. That was an actual chess game that Anthony and I played for every take. It was shot in a fairly wide angle so that you could, in fact, see each move."
Reed's other moment in the spotlight - albeit a very shadowy spotlight- came in the two-part story explaining the differences between the smooth-headed Klingons of the original series and the bumpy headed models of more recent years.
"I can’t tell you how excited I was when I received the scripts for these two episodes," says Keating of the episodes which revealed Reed to be an agent of the black ops unit Section 31. "Funnily enough, I’d actually pitched a story not unlike it back in season one. It was an idea for a Manchurian Candidate-type episode apropos the Suliban. So when Affliction and Divergence came along I was thrilled that my character had this 'boiled sweet' as it were at the back of his mouth that nobody knew he was sucking on. I didn’t even ring Manny Coto to ask for any backstory. I just figured that Malcolm was a member of some skull and crossbones society that he joined years ago and that it had now come back to haunt him.
"This was a solid story, very gritty, and a nice little arc for me. I thoroughly enjoyed the scenes I had with Scott Bakula, and Eric Pierpoint, who played Section 31 chief Harris, was a pleasure to work with as well. The two of us really hit it off and we had a lot of laughs together on set. Eric has guest-starred several times on Trek, including the year one Enterprise episode Rogue Planet. This season, his character of Harris recurs almost right up to the end. In fact, there’s a scene in the episode that LeVar Burton directed Demons where Harris and Reed meet in a dark alley and he suggests that my character go work for him. During one of the rehearsals I asked, "Why, what have you got? A TV pilot? A movie?’ That brought the house down, especially as we’d already heard about the cancellation."
It was while filming the second half of the alternative universe episode, In a Mirror, Darkly, that Keating along with the rest of the Enterprise cast and crew learnt of the show’s imminent demise. " Supervising producer Merri Howard had announced she was leaving while we were working on the first part of this story," says the actor. "That was a bit of a belly blow. It was like, ‘Oh, God, they’re all jumping ship.’ Merri kept saying it didn’t mean anything, but it was difficult not to imagine that it did. And then we got cancelled. The news was tempered by the fact that for this episode they’d built a replica of the original Enterprise bridge as well as its corridors, and our characters were dressed in classic Trek costumes. Still, it was an odd time. As I mentioned earlier, we all had a feeling this was coming, so it was like a dark cloud was suddenly hanging over us."
Not surprisingly, shooting Enterprise’s finale, These Are The Voyages…, was an emotional experience for all concerned, including Keating. "We shot our last scene in engineering on Friday night [25th February]," he notes. "It was Connor Trinneer and me, and it’s quite wonderful, really. I think it’s one of those moments that fans will play back over and over in their heads. Basically, it’s a thinly disguised allegorical scene for the end of our stint on Enterprise as both characters on the ship and actors on a TV show. It’s very moving. There were a couple of times that night where I welled up. That Friday it really hit home for all of us that this was it."
Although he has no idea what fate has in store next for him, Keating is sure that he’ll be OK. "I truly believe that, generally speaking, things happen for a reason," muses the actor. "I remember at the time I was gutted when my contract wasn’t renewed on the UK sitcom Desmonds. Nonetheless, I went ahead with my plans to visit friends in San Francisco. I ended up going to Los Angeles, which wasn’t planned, met some people there and six weeks later I moved to the States.
"Had things not turned out the way they did on Desmonds, I wouldn’t be here today. I love living in Southern California and best of all, during my time on Enterprise I’ve learnt how to really act in front of the camera. I’m a different acting animal than I was four years ago. The show was an amazing luck of the draw for me. It may take some time, but I’ve just got to wait for the right part in the right project to come along again. I’m confident that will happen."
Celestial Bodies
Among the final episodes to be shot for Enterprise’s fourth season was Bound where three Orion slave girls use their feminine wiles to persuade male crewmen to do their bidding. "Let me just tell you, the dance that the three actresses perform in the episode is very sexy," says Keating "The choreographer they worked with had also worked at one time with Janet Jackson. There were no wardrobe malfunctions, but there was quite an energy on set, green or otherwise," chuckles the actor.
"Cyia Batten, who played the lead Orion slave girl, was one of the original dancers in The Pussycat Dolls. She’s just beautiful, as are the two women who played the other two Orion gals. William Lucking, who guest-starred as the girls’ owner did a terrific job as well and gave a very Marlon Brando-like performance. The set for this episode was great, too. It was a sort of space-age Sci-Fi tent where our characters were seduced with food, drink and foxy chicks."
Taking the High Road
Looking back at his time on Enterprise, Keating has nothing but good things to say about the show’s cast, in particular, Scott Bakula. "One of the times I welled up on the Friday that I previously spoke of was while we were shooting a scene in the shuttlepod launch bay," he says.
"It was me, Scott, John Billingsley, Linda Park and Anthony Montgomery. I remember watching Scott at work and thinking, ‘Scott, I can’t tell you how great these past four years have been. I’ve learnt so much working with you, not only about the craft of acting and how to carry oneself on a film set, but also about being a human being.’
"Scott is an extraordinary individual and one of life’s true gents. Without sounding too full of myself, there are moments in my daily life when I’m not prone to take the high road, and I’ll ask myself, ‘How would Scott Bakula behave in this situation?’ That’s the kind of positive affect he’s had on me."
Submitted by Jo Healy |
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