Robert Picardo Thought He Made A Big Mistake With Star Trek: Voyager
When an actor joins the cast of a Star Trek series, they join a small and surreal club that only a few of their peers have ever experienced. It’s bound to be an overwhelming prospect: the fans, the conventions, the expectations, it’s a bit more daunting than signing on for yet another cop/doctor/lawyer show. Robert Picardo felt a lot of that pressure when he first entered the franchise.
Robert Picardo spoke to StarTrek.com, reminiscing about his time spent playing the Emergency Medical Hologram on Star Trek: Voyager, and revealed that, at first, he thought he’d gotten the worst role on the show.
Robert Picardo told StarTrek.com that he initially auditioned for the role of Neelix, the quirky chef and “chief morale officer” eventually played by Ethan Phillips.
In retrospect, Robert Picardo was glad that didn’t work out saying, “My life would be less happy and I’d have spent 4,000 hours in a makeup chair.”
But with the role of the Doctor, Robert Picardo was the last of Voyager’s main group to be cast, so he felt like a bit of an outsider. The other actors had already formed something of a camaraderie. He also felt like the Doctor might be the least interesting character on the show, which is never a good place for an actor to begin.
Robert Picardo went on at length, saying in part, “…I just had so little to do in the pilot. I remember, when I first got the role, I was telling everybody, ‘I got the new Star Trek pilot. I’m sure it’ll run. I’m sure it’ll put my kids through college. But I’ve got to tell you, I’ve got the worst part on the show.’ That was an irony that I’ve lived with ever since.”
And he added that starring in Star Trek meant bringing in and also using a whole set of acting skills he didn’t think would be needed. Robert Picardo said, “I thought I’d gotten the dull role in the show and that made the experience so much fun for me. I discovered the genre doing Star Trek. I’d done a little bit of it, but just a little. Doing Star Trek, I got to learn about it from the inside out. I got to learn what appealed to them, why sci-fi meant so much to people, why Star Trek meant so much to people.
Plus, it took some time, but Robert Picardo also realized that he’d stumbled into a very different kind of Star Trek character. He said, “Also, I just learned that I’d gotten the outsider character without being smart enough to realize it. I assumed the Spock character on our show would be the Vulcan, would be Tim Russ. I didn’t know enough to realize that the artificial intelligence character, at least on Voyager, was the heir, the successor to that kind of role on our show. And that was very cool.”
Of course, Picardo’s character ended up becoming one of the show’s most popular and interesting, so that just goes to show that first impressions aren’t always everything. Picardo looked back fondly on the show and the fact that once you’re a part of the Trek universe, you’re always part of the Trek universe.
Of course, Robert Picardo did reprise the Doctor role in the Star Trek franchise when he appeared as an animated version of the character on Prodigy. It was his first time back with Star Trek since Voyager went off the air.
