John Billingsley: Star Trek Interview

Review by Clint Morris
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Actor John Billingsley’s far from bitter, but he is understandably disappointed that his series Star Trek: Enterprise was hastily cancelled earlier this year. Like a gumboot standing flat on a newly planted strawberry patch, the series hardly got time to grow before it was put to rest, and everyone involved in the show is justifiably one glove short of a boxing match with the decision makers.

Fear not though Aussies – Billingsley says the best season is still to come. Clint Morris talks one-on-one with a veteran actor whose played everything from Shakespeare to an attorney, even a killer, but may be for the interim known best as the incessantly-likeable one-of-a-kind Denobulan doctor, Dr Phlox, on the short-lived sci-fi series.

“For my money, I think the final season is the best of them,” says the amiable actor. “It unfortunately got cancelled when I thought it was really beginning to hit its stride, but such are the vagaries of television.”

Enterprise – it was retitled Star Trek Enterprise for it’s third season – got off to a wobbly start, says Billingsley, with critics ravaging it from its conception. “The critical reaction was pretty negative,” he says, “Yet, amongst the fans, and those that stuck with it, they thought it improved as it went along. You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression [though].”

Season 3 saw the biggest changes – pre-existing storylines were abandoned in favour of newer, more exciting, stories, the title of the show was tweaked, even the theme song was jazzed up.

“The network was very strongly in favour of finding a more action-adventure oriented storyline. They thought Season 2 had become more slow and static, and that there wasn’t enough of a compelling storyline to keep viewers tuning in every week – and I would tend to agree.

“I think the initial storyline, the temporal cold-war, was never developed very well and I don’t think there was ever a strong enough grasp of where they wanted to go with that storyline and I think it became too attenuated over time. So the idea of telling a story that would actually have a beginning, middle and end that would keep people coming back week in – week out, was a good idea.

“The popularity of shows like '24' or 'Lost' or 'Desperate Housewives' suggest that people are eager to watch a serialised story, and I think that’s what allows the storyline to get more interesting and complex in the last two years.”

Though responses were favourable for the third season – and the show did attract a few more peeps – it was “too little late” for the show, says Billingsley. The show was on its last legs.

“You can’t re-invent something two years in. They’ve (the audience) already sampled the show and they’ve made their decision. People that were staying with it were probably going to stay with it regardless. So yes, it helped us creatively, but it didn’t make a difference to our ratings.”

One gimmick that the show’s producers tried to make happen was to have William Shatner, reprising his role as Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, pop up in the fourth season – but it didn’t come off. It was proposed that Shatner’s Kirk would pop up sometime, serving as a sort-of valentine to fans of the original series, and that might have helped ratings, says the actor.

“We did an episode in the fourth season, set in a parallel universe, that reflected back to a couple of parallel universe episodes that were done in the original series. One of the ideas was to have Kirk appear in that particular episode. [But] Bill Shatner has his own series now, so wasn’t that available, and I imagine he would have required a hell of a lot more money for a show that they knew was going to be going off the air [soon anyway],” he says.

“They bought Brent Spiner (Data from TV’s Next Generation) in the fourth season, they were popular episodes, and had some other interesting guest-stars,” but Shatner didn’t work out, says Billingsley.

Enterprise was one of a handful of pilots that Billingsley auditioned for in 2001, but as he was let down about not getting another recent role, he wasn’t counting his chickens on this one either.

“You never know, even if you get one [a series], whether it’s going to get made or picked up or if it’s going to succeed after it gets picked up. The Star Trek Enterprise pilot was the last audition I had in a long pilot season, I had thought the pilot season was over, I’d actually gotten close to a part on Alias which I didn’t get and got disappointed, and then Star Trek came through.”

Billingsley said he was rather surprised with how easy it was to get the role. Usually, he says, you have to keep going back to meet different members of the series, meet the network, audition another four or five times, and so on – but this, he says, “was relatively painless. I went in, Brannon (Braga) and Rick (Berman) liked what I did, they indicated through my representation that I was their only choice. I essentially got the thumbs up – quick and painless.”

Surprisingly, the actor admits not being a fan of science fiction and notably, Star Trek, before winning the role. “I watched some of the original series when I was a kid, and watched some of the Next Generation shows and I’ve seen some of the movies, not all of them, but I wasn’t any great aficionado. In all candour, I suspect my own aesthetic and what interests me about the medium of television does not lean towards Star Trek.”

The actor says he has his own theories about why the show failed “and why the franchise has taken what I suspect is a necessary hiatus,” but personally, he believes the show wasn’t gritty enough.

“I wish it had gone a little farther in it’s few seasons – been a little grittier, and a little rawer, a little dirtier – say, weapons exploded in our faces, the transporter really didn’t work, and we got our arses kicked by the aliens. Space exploration’s a mother fucker!” he laughs.

Though he got on well with the cast, Billingsley says he’d be lying if he said they were all still good mates and regularly caught up. “Though we liked each other and we certainly bump into each other at conventions or parties, or what have you, I can’t say there’s a ton of socialising that takes place.

“We liked each other but we all ran in very different circles and had very different interests and led different lives … it always makes me laugh when I hear others talk about ‘the family’ and ‘Oh, we’re so close’ and ninety percent of the time it’s like ‘Uh-huh, sure’,” he explains.

One cast member’s movements that Billingsley is aware of is Scott Bakula, who played ship captain, Jonathan Archer.

Bakula was actually rumoured to be returning to do a new series – and a possible telemovie kick-start – based on his '80s hit 'Quantum Leap,' but Billingsley says his co-star is exhausted after Enterprise, and has no plans to return as time-travelling Sam Beckett in the future. “No. My speculation is that Scott’s going to lay low for a while.

“He’s got a big family, and certainly doesn’t have any financial need [to do Quantum Leap] and it’s exhausting doing series television, particularly if it’s an action/adventure show.”

Some of Billingsley’s co-stars – that include Jolene Blalock, Scott Bakula and Linda Park – have been pretty vocal about their discontent over the handling of the series, but where do his feelings lie? Were there tears on that last day of shooting?

“I have mixed feelings about it. It didn’t come as any great surprise; I can’t say that there wasn’t any deep emotional response, because most of us, frankly, saw the show getting cancelled after the third season. We were fortunate to get a fourth season, but frankly, the only reason we did is because from Paramount’s point of view they make a lot more money if they can make a certain number of episodes – approximately 100 - because that’s the number, at which point, it’s possible to sell into syndication nationally.

“Paramount essentially made a deal with UPN, the network that showed Enterprise, that they would sell the show to them for half of what we were selling it to them at before – just to keep us on one more year. I think all of us understood what the economics were and that this had been essentially an economic decision, even though the fourth season was the best season of the show creatively, but the hand-writing was on the wall.

“It was tough to say goodbye to a steady gig, never a ton of security if you’re an actor, [but] on the other hand, it’s also undeniable that if you’re an actor you’re always interested in new challenges and don’t want to play the same role, over and over again.”

The character of Dr Phlox never got to do a lot on the show, says Billingsley. For instance, he never got to “throw the punches or sleep with the alien babes.” But that had more with the fact that he was essentially a ‘character actor’ and not because of the writing, he adds.

The final episode of Star Trek Enterprise – which recently aired in the states – bought back a couple of familiar faces from the Trek legacy, Next Generation regulars Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirits. Some of the cast of Enterprise, however, weren’t so hot about others crashing their party – and neither were the fans. Billingsley wasn’t happy either.

“I did not care for the last episode very much, though I didn’t respond with as much emotion or vitriol as some fans did, or candidly, with as much negativity as some of the other actors. [Because] It’s not my job to review or critique the individual episodes. I personally didn’t think it was a very strong episode and I thought we could’ve ended the show on a more interesting note.”

Billingsley, who’s just shot an episode of 'Nip/Tuck' (playing a man who wants to have his leg amputated and has a condition called body integrity identity disorder) and hopes to film a small role in a new Virginia Madsen/Forest Whitaker movie called The Ripple Effect, believes Trek will return – but with a change of guard. “At some point, under new management. The landscape of television and the world’s culture has changed that much that I think Star Trek needs a bit of a re-tooling.”

Billingsley says there was never any talk of bringing the cast of Enterprise to the big screen.

“I don’t think anybody could have projected that far forward. Certainly the idea of keeping the movie franchise alive was, and still is, I suspect in Paramount’s head, but I don’t know that when we got our show that there was any particular speculation that we would be the next movie franchise.

“Obviously, the first step was to find out whether our show was going to be popular - popular enough for movies to get made. Realistically, 'Deep Space Nine' and 'Voyager' did not enjoy that kind of success either. 'Next Generation' did, but I think that was only because it was the first Trek show after a long hiatus, and you can’t replicate those conditions,” he says.

“I suspect the movie franchise will continue – if I was a betting man I’d say in two or three years there’ll be a new movie. It’ll be a brand-new cast, it’ll be a brand-new chapter of Star Trek and if that’s successful then that cast would spin-off into a TV show.”

Conclusion: Interview 85% Extras: 15%