Robert Picardo talks ‘The Howling’, ‘Star Trek’, and the Theater

Recently, we had the chance to talk with actor Robert Picardo about his career in theater, Star Trek: Voyager, The Howling, Stargate, and his work on his new official YouTube channel.

Horror Geek Life: You went to Yale as a pre-med student but ended up switching to acting. What happened that caused you to change your mind in terms of a career?

Robert Picardo: Yes, that’s right. I continued to do theater throughout high school and into college, just for fun. It was very hard at Yale because being a science major you had afternoon labs, there was no time to study. Then sophomore year, someone in the Yale school of music, who went on to be a very successful conductor, John Mauceri, for years he conducted the Hollywood Bowl Symphony, he does opera, but he was a recent graduate of the Yale School of Music and had seen me in a play that I’d done freshman year that had garnered a certain amount of attention. So, he cast me in a Bernstein Mass. Bernstein came to see the Mass at Yale, loved the production, took us to Vienna and Leonard Bernstein, who thought I was great in the show, asked me what I was going to do with my life. I told him I was pre-med, and he said, “I would think someone with your natural energy on stage would want to be an actor,” and I said, “Mr. Berstein, would you tell my mother that?” (Laughs)

So, Mr. Bernstein got me successfully sprung from pre-med into theater because opening night at the Mass, I introduced him to my mother and he remembered and told her I had real energy on stage, not phony Broadway energy. Now, in the intervening years, I’ve developed phony energy just fine but back then, I was complimented. At that point, I switched my major to theater, graduated from Yale in my third year, went to New York, and got a job waiting tables. Within two and a half years, I had my first lead on Broadway in David Mamet’s first produced play in New York, a non-equity production of “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” in a little off-Broadway showcase theater. That helped me get an agent, my first reviews, and shortly after that, I was cast in a play called “Gemini,” with Danny Aiello. We started in a regional theater on Long Island, moved off-Broadway to Broadway, so by the time I was twenty-three years old, I was playing the lead in a Broadway show that ran four years. I left ten months after the opening, did another lead opposite Jack Lemmon in a play, so the most exciting period of my career was over when I was twenty-four. (Laughs)

HGL: Tell me a little about how singing entered your life and career.

RP: Well, I sang in the Bernstein Mass and I did take singing lessons for a semester at Yale, it was not offered as part of the curriculum so it cost extra money. As a scholarship student and working, I didn’t have a lot of cash available, but I did study with a wonderful voice teacher named Benjamin Deloache. When I went to New York, one of the first showcases I did was a musical, and I was spotted in that and was cast in the Mamet play, “Sexual Perversion in Chicago.” You know, one thing always leads to another and the interesting thing is before I graduated Yale John Mauceri, the conductor of the Mass, who helped me meet Bernstein, which helped me decide to become an actor, Mauceri said in my third year, if you’re willing to drop out of school you can be in a production of Leonard’s Candide, I would have been in the ensemble and played a bunch of little roles. I told him I can’t do that, I’d break my mother’s heart, and honestly, she was already in shock from me switching from pre-med to acting, so I didn’t want to kill her altogether.

It’s funny, if my first Broadway credit at twenty-two and a half had been a musical I might have had a whole different career. I’m glad it wasn’t because I sing well enough to be in musicals, but I don’t move well enough. You have to give me a lead role and sort of curate whatever dancing ability I have to look good enough. If you’re going to put me in the chorus, I’m going to be the guy who’s not doing what everybody else is doing, so it’s probably better I turned that down and my first Broadway credits were in straight plays.

HGL: Besides singing and the theater, you’ve also done work in television and film. Do you have a favorite medium or do they all have their own individual charms?

RP: I would say for me, they really do have their own individual charms. Film has been around for 120 years, the theater has been around for what, 6000 years or longer, so for most of human existence acting has been live theater. In the last twenty years, we have this parallel art form, acting on film or television. When you study acting, it’s all about doing theater and at Yale, it was a relatively new undergraduate theater program and most of it was studying. There were one or two acting classes, a couple of movement class but it wasn’t rigorous training. The Yale Drama School, for graduate students, was very highly-regarded and people have asked me throughout my career why I elected not to go to the drama school. It was really because, once I had sort of broken my mother’s heart by saying I was going to be an actor, we made a deal that if by twenty-five things weren’t going well, then I’d go back and finish my pre-med classes and become a doctor.

By twenty-four, I had my second lead on Broadway so I was off the hook there, but I would not have been able to had I gone to the Yale Drama School for another three years of training. I elected to study in New York at a theater workshop called Circle in the Square, where one of my Yale instructors also taught, so I kind of followed him there and they had a program where you were allowed to work while you were studying. I got my first equity job while I was in my second year of training, I got my equity card at twenty-one, I had my SAG card I believe by the time I was twenty-three, and I kind of needed to work right away because of my personal situation. I don’t regret it, but sometimes I wish I had more classical training, I’d done more Shakespeare; these things would have been cool, but it’s too late for that now.

HGL: Do you recommend every actor try theater, working without a net so to speak, or is it just not for everyone?

RP: I think it’s important. First of all, you really learn how to plot the arc of a performance in the theater because you’re doing it in sequence and you have a true rehearsal process. You get to spend at least three weeks working on the play, you sit at the table and read two or three times to get on your feet, you start to stage it and you learn the lines as you’re developing the character’s physical life, so I think that is really important to have that training. Suddenly, when you are shooting film and television it’s all jumbled, out of sequence and if it’s a big movie part the director, if he’s smart, will have several days of rehearsal, especially for the big scene. You really have to plot your own course so to speak, in movies and television, you have to have plenty of ideas of what you want to try because you aren’t in control of your own performance. In theater, you are the custodian of your own performance, you rehearse in front of a director, you have a certain responsibility to maintain your performance, but you are the person doing it  No one is editing you, covering up for you, fixing a mistake, giving you a second chance. In film, you can always do it again, you have that fallback and it makes it in a sense, a safer environment.

HGL: Your first feature film role was in Joe Dante’s The Howling. What was that experience like?

RP: It was an odd part to play. The character was clearly a psychopath, I didn’t have anything in my background to prepare me for that role, other than the fact that I loved horror movies as a kid, watching the classic Universal horror films. A large part of the performance was working in a mask, the prosthetic appliances, and the genius of Rob Bottin, the young guy who designed the makeup, and realizing how much of the performance was me. Then, there was a certain point it turned into these articulated puppet heads for the transformation. A lot of my performance was just convincing him that I was the guy to put the makeup on, so I had to do a couple of test things with him.

The director, Joe Dante, is great to work with; he has a terrific sense of fun. He has been a great supporter and friend to me throughout my career and I’ve done at least a dozen things with Joe, in film and television. It’s been one of the great professional relationships and great friendships in my career. In that respect, I’m really glad I did The Howling. If something went wrong, this was pre-CGI and all practical, I would joke on set, even sing, and Joe realized from that experience that I was a really funny guy and he started to cast me in comedies. Joe’s career, after The Howling, went really towards comedy and he used me very creatively in different roles, so I’m very happy I did The Howling, as it was the beginning of a great relationship with Joe.

HGL: You were on the TV show China Beach, which gave you the opportunity to develop a character instead of simply being a guest star, but I don’t think anything can prepare you for taking on a regular role in the Star Trek universe. What was that transition like, taking on the character of The Doctor and working on Star Trek: Voyager?

RP: First of all, China Beach was an actor’s show. It was all about performance, it was very dramatic. There were moments of humor, but it was really about honest and truthful acting. Star Trek, of course, is genre acting and sometimes you are called upon to do difficult things that involve your emotions or comic timing, but more often than not, you are spewing a lot of technical information, you are doing a lot of high-paced expositional storytelling, so it kind of exercises different muscles. Sooner or later, you get to show your stuff, as an actor in Star Trek, you get some wonderful things to do, but there are many episodes where it seems like you are simply kind of serving the story.

I had been in horror movies, and science fiction was a relatively new genre for me to perform in, but I think it served me that the character had no precedent. I mean, Data is kind of a precedent, Brent Spiner’s character because he was an artificial intelligence and an android. My character was a new piece of technology, he’s sort of supposed to learn and develop a bedside manner through this new kind of algorithmic interface, but that didn’t mean it had to work correctly. My new feelings, instead of being directed towards my patients, were mostly focused on me. I was more concerned how I felt, then how you felt with me treating you, so it was fun and I kind of got to establish my own rules in a way, which was really great. I think it surprised and delighted the audience that I didn’t have to behave in a familiar way. I could rise to be my better self, but also have a lot of negative qualities, and that was fun to play.

Over the course of seven years, I got to grow into a person and my character is generally acknowledged by all the cast as the best role on the show, simply because he started at nothing and grew into something. I feel very fortunate that I lucked into that part without fully understanding how they were going to use me and where it was going to go.

HGL: How did the ability to sing get incorporated into your character of The Doctor on Voyager?

RP: Actually, Star Trek was where I began singing again. Through my own fault, I recommended to the producers, wouldn’t it be funny that a character, who is a technological creation, who has no emotions whatsoever, chose to be a fan of listening to opera, the most emotional form of human expression. My suggestion was really to just listen to opera while I was working in sickbay which as it turns out, they misunderstood. About a year later, after not saying really much about it, there was suddenly a script where I’m singing opera on the Holodeck. I ran across the lot to the producer’s office and said, “No, no, no, you misunderstood me, I wanted to listen to opera, not sing it!” They asked, “Can’t you sing?” and I said, “I can sing, but I’m no opera singer,” so they said just to try and if I suck, they’ll replace my voice. So, I sang in about five or six episodes and in all of them except one, it is always my voice. There is one episode I did so much singing, and I’m a baritone and also not a trained voice, so when you give me five pieces of opera to sing, good luck. The last episode, I did heavy singing in called Virtuoso, my voice is abruptly replaced with a real opera singer, but the other episodes I did all the singing myself.

HGL: I think sometimes people forget that a show like Star Trek: Voyager was doing over twenty episodes a season, not the usual ten to twelve episodes we are used to seeing now. As an actor, was that challenging? There must have been some very long days over the years.

RP: Yeah, when the show featured you, the hours could be very long, sixteen to eighteen-hour days. On China Beach, we also worked long hours, especially the first season because a lot of it was outdoors. The hours can be very long, yeah and when you’re featured in an episode you don’t do anything else except learn lines and sleep, a little bit. Honestly, I liked it, but Kate Mulgrew, our Captain, she was the one who had the most demands on her time because she was featured in so many episodes. I think that part was extraordinarily challenging. In a season, I might be heavily featured in six to eight episodes out of twenty-five, so I did have more downtime, but when I was featured I had a lot to do and sometimes, I played both my character plus his programmer, and that’s like doing your own major role and then a guest star at the same time. It can certainly be exhausting, that’s for sure.

HGL: After Star Trek: Voyager, you entered the Stargate universe and I don’t think many people realize just how popular that franchise is. Were you surprised and also ready to be part of another big sci-fi show with a huge fandom?

RP: I didn’t know the show very well, I think the producers were fans of my work on Star Trek. They hired me to be a one-off, a bad guy that would provide some filler material, kind of a narrative connection, as it was a clip show and they needed a narrative to weave it all together. I was supposed to be some kind of Washington think tank guy, not in the military but like a bureaucrat, whose job is to come in and conduct an investigation of a tragic death that has happened and then assign blame, someone’s head is going to roll. I had no charisma, no sense of humor, nothing. I was kind of a corporate personality- cold, ruthless, searching for who is going to go down for this mistake. I shot all ten pages very well, I worked very hard that day and the producers, Joe Mallozzi and Paul Mullie, and they took me to dinner and said we really like this guy. However, they had painted themselves in a corner by introducing me as such a colossal prick, but they had me back and every time I came back, I was the same guy but slightly less of a prick. I started to show hints of a sense of humor, some self-awareness, so they slowly began to rehabilitate the character and then eventually, they made me the Commander of the whole Atlantis expedition. It was kind of miraculous, that transformation from how I started to growing into a leader was really fun to do, and a real tribute to the writers that they pulled it off.

HGL: Tell me a little bit about how you got involved with The Planetary Society.

RP: They reached out to me while Voyager was in its first run, in the late nineties and I did a fundraiser for them and the occasion for the fundraiser was the legendary Ray Bradbury’s 60th birthday. It raised money for this organization, so I started to find out about The Planetary Society, which is a space advocacy group.

In the late seventies, Carl Sagan felt that the public interest and engagement in space was waning after the sixties, the landing on the moon, the Apollo missions, and that the public in the seventies was becoming less interested. So, he founded The Planetary Society with two colleagues to re-engage the public. Sadly, we lost Carl Sagan way too young, so when I started to work with them in the mid-nineties, I met the two surviving co-founders and they asked me to work on the Advisory Council and sort of bring their message to Star Trek fans, specifically young Star Trek fans. I would bring their message to conventions, talk about the group and then I would also spearhead some of the educational challenges for young people that they were involved in.

About three or four years ago, they asked me to be a part of the Executive Board that I now sit on with some incredibly cool people that know the most about the history of space policy, and our current plan to get to Mars. People who are primarily Astrophysicists, Astrobiologists, and then there’s me at one end of the table trying to understand fifteen percent of what’s going on, but I really love being part of that organization.

HGL: I watched your “Spent My Life An Actor” YouTube video, which was a lot of fun. Where did that idea come from?

RP: It came from Brent Spiner himself, actually. About six weeks ago, he uploaded a hilarious video to his Twitter page mocking himself, I just thought it was great. In the video, he’s on a Zoom interview with a young woman who clearly runs a fan website and was saying, “Hey Brent, we didn’t see you for years and now all of a sudden you’re on everything, Star Trek: Picard, Penny Dreadful…” and Brent is doing his kind of false modesty thing, poking fun at himself. The moment he thinks the interview is over, he jumps up from the desk and bursts into this hilarious song and dance. It’s a joyful, colorful, celebration of an actor later in life going, “Hey, I’m back, I’m working like crazy and I’m at the top of my game!”

A mutual friend of mine and Brent’s, he has a little film crew that he has on salary, he asked me if I would like to make a video to kind of answer Brent’s, and I said, “How do you answer that? It’s perfect.” So, I thought, well, if Brent was joyful and colorful, I’m going to be black and white and depressing. I basically did a lament that I’m not Brent Spiner, the joke being if I was Brent Spiner, my career would be great and then there’s me, the number two artificial intelligence in Star Trek. I purposely wanted to fool the audience as much as possible so that when it begins, you think it’s going to be serious. It’s kind of dramatic and moody, then suddenly it gets goofier and goofier. Also, actors have a long tradition about bitching about their own career (laughs) but really, it was all about playing off of what Brent had done and turning it around. I had a ball doing it, we shot it in five and a half hours and I wanted that drone shot at the end so when the camera went straight up, I looked like a little squashed bug.

HGL: What projects do you have coming up next, or projects that need to be finished after the industry shut down?

RP: I was out in L.A. shooting a number of episodes of The Family Business, Ernie Hudson is in it, it’s kind of a black Sopranos and I play his friendly rival who’s Jewish. He looks like a sweet old man, but I’m a very bad guy and its fun to play a lethal guy who looks like you’re Uncle Morty. I was also out to guest star on Grace and Frankie, presumably I will do that when I pick up production.

In this downtime, I started the YouTube channel, I did the video we’ve been speaking about and I’ve started to do a lot of original content, on my own with my spouse/helper. She runs the camera and we make little videos. I do a character named Alphonso, who is the world’s oldest gigolo and gives you terrible advice about romance and love. I would not take a single word he says seriously, but it’s great fun to play a buffoon who is completely self-absorbed. It’s a little running series called “Your Future in Love with Alphonso,” where he tells you different things about what your love life could be if you were just more like him. (Find the YouTube channel here!)

I want to thank Robert for taking the time to talk with us.

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