Recently, we had the chance to talk to Michael Dorn, who chatted about his passion for aviation, his love for directing, and his acting career, including his iconic role as Worf in the Star Trek universe and his new movie, Agent Revelation.
Horror Geek Life: Were you always interested in acting or did that interest come later, like a happy accident?
Michael Dorn: It was a happy accident, actually. Interestingly enough, I was in music for many years, took music lessons, piano lessons, did recitals and I was kind of fine with that but I had an issue with being on stage. It wasn’t stage fright but kind of an out-of-body experience I’d have, so I wanted to direct.
When I got in the business to be a director, I had done this little acting thing for some friends of mine who had a show, and they asked me if I could just stand-in for this guy and they were like, “Okay, Michael, the directing is going to be good but you’ve got to do the acting.” These were also seasoned professionals who were working, so I took their comments seriously. What they also said was, the directing thing might take some time so in the meantime, you could make some money (Laughs). For me, with my middle-class upbringing, it was like okay, I’ll do that for a while, and I absolutely fell in love with it. I decided well, I’ll make a little money and then I’ll do the directing, and that took about thirty years.
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HGL: You were able to direct some episodes of Star Trek. Was that the first time for you behind the camera? What was it like, getting to direct for the first time?
MD: You know, the camera, the shots, working with the cameras, it’s very easy for me, it’s always been like that. I took a directing course in college, I took a communications course as my major, and it was easy and it was good. I had some great ideas, but the tough part was the politics, not behind the camera but up in the front office. There were just major politics and each show has its own set of politics and I thought, very naively, that it was all about the work but I learned very quickly that it isn’t, so it was fairly difficult. Interestingly enough, these are people I’d known for seven or eight years and it was like they were not there to support me, which I found weird. (Laughs) These are people I’d had relationships with but once they got in there, in producer or whatever mode, it’s really a different animal. I thought for a second that if that was the way it was going to be in terms of directing, I had second thoughts. I did two other shows, though, and it was a joy, an absolute joy. Hard work, but they supported you, they were there to help you, and it turned out really well, so I understood that you really need to navigate each production.
HGL: Where did your interest in aviation come from? Did you always want to become a pilot?
MD: Yeah, I always did, as far back as I can remember. We grew up watching John Wayne, The Flying Leathernecks (1951), The Flying Tigers (1942), that was the kind of thing I watched and said yeah, this is cool. Through, a lot of different things that happened, like I’m old enough to have been drafted for the Vietnam War in 1971, and I had astigmatism so they weren’t taking people, it was kind of winding down, so they weren’t taking people at that point. However, I went to the Force and said look, I want to fly and they said if you’re not 20/20, no, I’m sorry, so I kind of put it on the back burner. I became a real fan of World War I and II aviation, Vietnam aviation, so I knew everything about airplanes. In 1988, I finally made the decision to see if I can fly; let me see if I’m just a lot of big talk. I flew and fell in love with it, the day I took my first lesson. I then got the opportunity to fly with the military a lot and in all that process, I flew with instructors who were Air Force test pilots; one guy had actually flown with Chuck Yeager. I was flying with him and he said Michael, you’re a natural pilot, which meant a lot to me, and luckily I was able to indulge my passion.
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HGL: Can you tell me a little bit about your audition as Worf on Star Trek: The Next Generation? What were your initial thoughts on the character and the show itself?
MD: Initially, it was kind of an easy transition for me because I loved the original show and absolutely loved the Klingons; I thought they were very cool. I knew what I wanted to do with the character. It wasn’t like I had to research it, but getting in there, I was at a point in my career where I’d audition for four jobs and get three of them, so I was doing well. This was just another job, and I approached it that way. I went in, played the character the way I thought he should be played, and walked out.
HGL: As an actor, how much fun was it to play Worf for so long, not only in The Next Generation but in Deep Space Nine as well?
MD: It was fantastic. Some people kind of dismiss or brush off television, but I like television and series because you get to grow with the character. You’re not on it for seventy days and then that’s it, you’re done. You have a chance to grow, change and add what you want. If the writers are good with it, they will write the stuff you are doing, so it’s great for them. Also, it was really a great character, it really was. I thought Worf was iconic in that he was not like anybody else and people like him a lot, just because of who he was.
HGL: You became part of different families along the way. You had The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and of course, the fandom of Star Trek. How have those relationships been and grown over the years?
MD: Well, The Next Generation relationship is different from anything else I’ve ever experienced. We still, to this day, and I’m not joking, hang out. We can’t do it physically, not just because of COVID, we are literally all over the place in different parts of the country. We still have, as of last year anyway, Christmas parties every year, where it would be us, our families, and whoever would want to show up. We text each other all the time and the texts…you could write a book about the stuff we’ve said. I mean, people would think we are nuts. Somebody says something, texts something, then it’s a whole day of back and forth and we still hang out as much as we can, we still talk. The difference between it and Deep Space Nine is Deep Space Nine didn’t have that kind of family feel, that kind of cohesion between the actors. But they are still great friends of mine and we still talk, we still hang out, it’s just a different feel but both of them have their charms, definitely.
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HGL: I wanted to ask you about the makeup. Did you ever get to a point over the years that you actually enjoyed the process?
MD: No, never. There was never any enjoyment in that process. The first two years were rough because makeup really hadn’t changed in seventy years. I guess the difference is nobody’s ever done that every day and the second season (of Next Generation), I actually almost quit because the makeup was destroying my face. It was literally burning my face. In fact, Gates McFadden (Dr. Beverly Crusher) had a picture of me with her son when he was just a baby and you can see my face was in really, really bad shape. I went to the producers and said guys, I love the show, I love the character, I love the people I work with, but I can’t do this anymore. They just kind of looked at each other and said well, what are you talking about? (Laughs) The one thing I do know is producers do not want to lose characters, that is the one thing they don’t want to do so they actually took the time to change things. The other thing was the hair was always a problem because they never could get it right, not until maybe the fourth or fifth season and I said, Worf has long hair, he gets up in the morning and ties his hair back. They weren’t convinced so I said you know, this would also take about twenty minutes off the makeup time and they said you know, that’s not a bad idea. (Laughs) It equated to them not having to pay me a lot of overtime, so suddenly that was a great idea.
HGL: Let’s talk about your new film Agent Revelation. How did you get involved with this movie?
MD: Yeah, I just got a call. The director/star Derek (Ting) thought about me for this character and asked me if I’d like to do it, that’s really how it turned out. They sent me a script, I asked if I could read the script first, so I read it, liked it, liked what he was doing, and said okay. You know, you never really know how anything is going to turn out until you do it and actually see it on screen. When I was working, we were all kind of looking at each other going you know what, this might be something. You never know, it might be a bomb or something people like, so you do the best you can, it’s all you really can do, and then you go home, which is how I approach it.
HGL: You play Alastair, who was an interesting character in a movie with some interesting ideas.
MD: Yeah, he was. Like I said, when they give you a role to play, the thing I think about is what can I do with this. Not how can I change it, but what can I do to add to this character. When you start thinking about it and things come very easily, then you know you are on the right track. A lot of it was actually written on the page, and there wasn’t a lot where you thought well, I don’t know about this or that, it was all on the page. I like the idea that he was tortured basically, and that’s where I put a lot more into it than maybe what Derek wanted. He was tortured about what he had done and he was trying to make up for it. The thing I kind of added in the back of my mind was that you can’t make up for really, really bad decisions. He’s trying, but he’ll never get there. That’s the kind of little thing I would put in when I read lines. I was doing stuff on the outside, of course, stuff that he wanted, but I always had this idea that was there and that I thought would be interesting for the character.
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HGL: Agent Revelation has a lot of things going for it; it has such as a good score, interesting ideas, and it looks great. Is that combination hard to find these days, especially with so much content being pushed?
MD: Somebody asked me one time, with all the advent of digital, new technology, what do you think, and I said well, it’s good and bad. It’s good because anyone can make a movie and it’s bad because anyone can make a movie. What happens is that people concentrate more on the bells and whistles than the story, and the CGI that we see is really the driving factor and not the story. You know this, you can see a movie with a $200 million budget and come away thinking, I have no idea what that was about, or you see monstrous, gaping holes in it. I always say, there’s got to be one guy in the screening room going um, excuse me, but that makes no sense. The good thing about movies without a huge budget is no matter what you can do CGI-wise, you really don’t have a lot of money for that, so you have to have good stories. You don’t have the luxury to fill up half the movie with CGI and explosions, big battles with thousands of ships, there is no money for that. The other thing, when working on a smaller scale, you don’t have the $30 million per film egos. The actors that you get really love the craft, that’s why they do it, and that’s always a real pleasure to work with.
HGL: Do you look for smaller films to work in or is it simply choosing the project by what you read on the page?
MD: Yeah, I go by what I read on the page. I get better roles in the smaller movie; the big movies can afford Denzel Washington so that’s it for me (Laughs) but I like it, I like the smaller movies. The other thing is the biggest movies that made them the most money, are these small movies that no one expected. The original Rocky is a movie nobody wanted, and that movie is still going on, that franchise is still going on, and that film was made around forty years ago. The other one I always cite is My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which cost five or six million dollars to make, and it made $300 million. The Matrix, while they spent a bunch of money, made almost half a billion dollars, and surprised many, many people. I’ve done a lot of those smaller movies and we always in the back of our mind, oh, is this going to be our Matrix, so yeah, we always have that hope, I mean we’re not stupid. (Laughs)
HGL: So what other projects do you have coming up?
MD: Actually, I’ve been trying to get somebody in the Star Trek world to do a Worf TV series, and if not a series then a movie like Rogue One, a kind of one-off, because I love Rogue One, I thought it was brilliant. It’s funny, people were going yeah, but everybody died, and I said yeah, I know, I loved that. I wrote a script for it many, many years ago, sometimes there is interest, then it goes away and I thought the Star Trek world is missing out on a character that can definitely make them money. I thought this would be an easy sell, a really easy thing to do because the script is written, I’m here, I’m in great shape, not broken down and crotchety or anything. I’d love to direct and I’m kind of a Santa Claus when it comes to acting. I’m not interested in having Worf the focus of every scene, I just love the character and want to go to work. I mean in the end, it’s their call, I’m sure they have a reason, I just don’t know what it is. The other strange thing is we have all of these Star Trek shows and Worf isn’t in any of them. It’s strange, it’s not like I’ve done anything to anyone, at least I hope I haven’t, but who knows?
The other thing is I love westerns, always loved westerns. Brent Spiner and I are big western movie guys, and my manager had read a couple of things that I had written and she said Michael, you’ve got to do this. So, I had an idea and I just finished my western opus and hopefully we’re going to see about getting that done. My dream is to direct and star in a movie, but not produce, just those two. It’s funny, I think the first show I directed, was about three days in, and they came up to me and said Michael, you’ve been doing really well, but you’ve got to stop giving yourself so many closeups at the end of the scene (laughs), I said, what are you talking about, and went and looked at the dailies and said yeah, okay, I did that.
I want to thank Michael for taking the time to talk with us!
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