STARTREK.COM:: Who are you and where are you from?

Casey Biggs:: My name is Casey Biggs. I'm originally from Toledo, Ohio. I went to school at Julliard in New York City, lived there for many years, and I was going back and forth quite a bit. And when I got DS9 ... I was living out here for about two years when I finally got the first episode that I did. Before I started working on Star Trek ... I started in the theater. I mean I was classically trained, and when I grew up I couldn't believe anybody would pay me to want to act. I only really wanted to act on stage. I wasn't really interested in film or television. Then I did a little bit of television and film work and of course it gets under your skin and you can't stop. I did a lot of episodes of bad guys in a lot of episodes on television. What's interesting, too, is that I ... it was an interesting change because when I came out here ... I mean, I was always the hero on-stage. I mean, always cast as the hero, the leading man. When you're out here you're like unless it's your show, you're always the bad guy. So you're the bad guy guest of the week. But what was neat about DS9 was that I started out as a bad guy and ended up as a hero. So that's what was great about that.

Q:: How did you get the role of Damar and how did the role develop?

CB:: I got a call to come in and audition for this part. I looked at the script, and I literally had two lines. They were: "In range, Sir" and "Fire." I'm sitting there with a room-full of people thinking, "Why am I here? Anybody could do this." So I went into the room, and I really didn't know anybody in the room, and Ira Behr — who's the executive producer — was in there. Then I got a call back! I had to come back and read those same lines again! I walked into the room and they'd said, "Oh, that was a very intelligent reading you did last time." And I thought, "Well, four words, that's pretty intelligent." What I didn't know — and I didn't learn this till about a year later — that Ira Behr, who's a great guy and has become a great friend, is an obsessive fan, historically, of the Alamo. I did a huge film about the Alamo. It was a huge literally and figuratively. It was an IMAX film called The Price of Freedom. It was the very, very first dramatic IMAX film ever shot. He had seen that. So when I walked into the room and he saw me, it was like, "Oh my God, William Barret Travis is in the room." But to answer your question whether I knew this role was going to go this way, no, I didn't, and neither did the writers. I remember talking to Hans Beimler and Rene Echevarria and all the guys that were writing the show around the last episode that we were doing and they didn't even know where it was going to go. They liked me, which was great, and they liked what I was doing with the character, and I think Rick Berman liked what I was doing with the character. It just kept getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. For those of you out there who really know about the Alamo, you can really pick out all these Alamo references through the end. The way I died was the way that my character died in the Alamo, pretty much. It was all ... it was fascinating. But no, I had no idea. I think the first season I did two episodes, the next season I did six or seven, and then did fourteen per year after that. That was fantastic.

Q:: Can you describe a typical day?

CB:: A typical day, coming in to shoot... It usually started with me the night before realizing that I had to get up at three o'clock in the morning to be at Paramount at four o'clock in the morning to sit there and get all the makeup on. In the beginning it was rather exciting because it was all new, but by the second year I was like, "Oh, my gosh." The worst thing for me was putting those big things on your neck. Think about it: four o'clock in the morning, and they're rubber — they're very light, but it's always surgical adhesive that they have to paint on you, and it's cold, and it's four o'clock in the morning. The thought of that still give me shivers of having to put that on. So you get there at four o'clock, you're supposed to be finished by seven, you rehearse from seven to eight, and you start shooting. Then — what a lot of people may or might not know — is that shooting a television show or a film is so much about hurry up and wait. You're just waiting to shoot. You'll get ten minutes on screen or on camera in an eighteen hour day. So you finish seven, eight o'clock at night, from four o'clock in the morning, and it will take an hour to take the make-up off. So that's another hour or so. I think more Cardassians got overtime in this show than anybody else that had ever been in Star Trek. Then you go and start all over again, you know? Get up at four o'clock the next morning, or three o'clock, and come back in. But you know, I wouldn't have changed it for anything.

Q:: What was it that Damar was always drinking?

CB:: I did an episode, or scene with Armin Shimerman where I was in the bar, and for some reason all the producers liked the way I looked sitting in that bar. Well, from then on there was rarely a scene that I didn't have a drink in my hand. It's a very funny story, too, because that stuff ... you know, the prop people go to the producers and say, "Well, what do you want this to look like?" And somebody just happened to say, "Well, it should be very thick." They go away, "Thick, thick. What is thick?" So I come in one day and they pour this stuff that I have to drink, and it's Caro syrup. Now, it makes me gag the thought of it — anybody who's tried drinking Caro syrup — and I complained for a year and a half about this stuff, because I would drink it. I had to drink it all the time. And then the last season I finally said to the producer, I said, "If I have to drink this you have to drink it. I mean, something has to change here." So I came in one day and instead of Caro syrup they had sugar-free maple syrup, which is even worse to me than Caro syrup. Anyway, I was very glad when they led up to this episode that Rene directed where Damar turns and he decides he's had enough, and he's going to become a rebel. And I take that Caro syrup and I look in the mirror, and I catch a glimpse of myself. I'm disgusted with what I've become, and I just take it and I throw it into the mirror and it drips down. I never had to have a drink of that again, the whole last half of the season. So that was good.

Q:: What was your favorite episode?

CB:: The cool thing they had with Weyoun and Damar. The Vortas. Somehow they could keep making them. They are cloning these things. I guess one of the episodes when Worf and Dax were ... we had captured them or something, and Worf kills Weyoun — and I sort of set it up. I come walking into the scene and I see that he's done that. I look down and I sort of chuckle, and I say, "Well, you should have killed me because there's only one Damar." In the next scene I'm sitting in my office on the starship or wherever we were, and in walks Jeff again. I look at him, and I said, "Oh, well, Weyoun number fifteen, or whatever you were." I say, "Yeah, you be careful. I'll be saying hello to Weyoun number sixteen pretty soon." So I really liked that a lot.

I wanted to be Bill Shatner when I was young. I don't want to be him now, but I wanted to be him when I was young, because I thought, "That's the kind of actor that interests me. Someone with that kind of passion, that kind of delivery." The one episode that I couldn't do, that I would love to have done was the one when they all run a baseball team, and everyone is out of makeup, and Jeff and Mark were cops. What they did do nicely is that —I think because they knew I wanted to be in it and I was in New York, I couldn't do it — they made me Avery's psychiatrist in one episode. I was Damar and the psychiatrist. That was really a cool thing to be — those two characters in the same episode.

Q:: What do you enjoy most about working on Star Trek?

CB:: One of my favorite parts of this piece, doing this particular work, is two or three-fold. When you do this kind of work, and I've said this before in interviews, that you really have to sort of be of Shakespearean proportion to be able to do this kind of dialogue, because it's so incredibly melodramatic. Now, in order to make that kind of stuff work and be believable, you really have to have great actors. You know the first time they open their mouth that you don't believe them otherwise. That's what's great about Avery, and Nana, and Mark Alaimo, and Jeff, and Armin. These are all incredibly well-trained actors. I spent four years in a classical school at Julliard myself. In order to do this — a lot of times sounds like gobbledygook — but to really still make it sound like it's coming from some kind of a being, you really have to be well-trained. I think stepping on-set, or the stage with these people who are incredibly well-trained, you feel like you're in rarified company and that's one of the things that I enjoyed most about it.