- Trek Galaxy's Voyager Tribute -


By Gregory L. Norris & Laura A. Van Vleet exclusively for TrekGalaxy.


Day 09 - Getting Wild With Harry!



There's an infectious, rowdy energy to Garrett Wang who, like the formerly-green Ensign Harry Kim he has portrayed on Star Trek: Voyager for the past seven years, admits to growing up right alongside his television alter-ego.

"It's been very educational for me. I've learned quite a bit," says the actor, who greets us stage-right on the Bridge at the Operations Station, our second-to-last stop on our tour of USS Voyager. "I've matured over the years, just as Kim has matured over the years. And it's been great to be part of something that's lasted this long, something that has a history that goes back more than three decades."

The last time we talked with Wang, he had just adopted a ten-month-old black lab mix named Bruno who, most times, he simply refers to as Dog. "Come here, Dog," we recall Wang bellowing in his best Klingon accent during a recent conversation. Dog, we learn, is still doing just fine, and still very much a fresh puppy. His adopter, however, momentarily contemplates what the last seven years have meant, knowing that the Star Trek universe will soon bid Voyager farewell.

"There's a lot of sadness that this voyage is ending, but at the same time, elation that I'm now able to move on and tackle some other projects," muses Wang. "It's kind of a mixed bag. I think seven years is a long time to be doing anything, and it's time to reacquaint and reintroduce myself to Hollywood, because they have forgotten about who I am, that's for sure," he laughs.

Laura says, "The fans haven't."

"No, the fans haven't, but the powers that be who green-light films and what not, they definitely have. They automatically assume I'm not available because our schedule is so jam-packed. We have one of the longest shooting schedules in Hollywood, if not the longest. That always makes it difficult to do anything else other than Trek."

"Longest in what way?" I ask.

"The time put in," answers Wang. "You're talking about a lot of it, much longer than any sitcom. An actor on a sitcom gets about four or five months for a break. We get two months. Most one-hour shows, which are in the same category as we, they only shoot twenty-two episodes. For the past seven years, we've shot twenty-six. That's four more episodes, a good month. So we've had the shortest vacation time of all working actors in TV."

I add, "Your hard work is very much appreciated!"

"Thank you," Wang enthuses.

"How would you sum up the experience of being on Voyager as a whole?" Laura asks.

"I was literally here from Day One," Wang says. "The first scene ever shot for Voyager was with Paris and myself in the Mess Hall when he orders hot tomato soup from the replicator. Then we moved over to the Deep Space 9 set and shot the one with Armin Shimerman, the scene between Quark and myself in the bar when he was trying to sell me the crystals. I was there at the beginning, and I'm sure I'll be there the very last day of shooting," he laughs. "First in, last out!"


Garrett Wang as Ensign Harry Kim. "I think seven years is a long time to be doing anything, and it's time to reacquaint and reintroduce myself to Hollywood, because they have forgotten about who I am, that's for sure."
The conversation segues to the many story pitches over the year we've made to the producers of Voyager - many featuring Harry Kim - and the two that made it through to become actual episodes. Wang is aware of our past work on the show and comments we'll now have a new show, the highly anticipated Star Trek: Enterprise, to tackle. We discuss science fiction as a whole, a topic we all can appreciate.

"Were you a fan of the genre before landing this role on Voyager?" I ask.

"I did grow up on science fiction," Wang says. "If I was born when Tim Russ or Ethan Phillips were born, I would have been a major original Trek fan. But I wasn't born when they were. I was born when basically the original series was getting on the air in reruns. I didn't watch it then because I was too young. The first piece of science fiction that caught my eye was the original Star Wars movie at the theatres, and it blew me away! Only after seeing the original Star Wars did I then see the original Star Trek series, which paled visually in comparison. If you look at the original Star Trek and the original Star Wars movie, Star Wars blows it away when it comes to special effects, and to a seven year old, that's what it's all about. I wasn't really interested in story or anything along those lines. But I did watch the original Star Trek in reruns when I was young. It wasn't my favourite show, but I watched it because I was into anything sci-fi. I watched all the Trek films that came out in theatres. I saw the very first one - Star Trek: The Motion Picture - in theatres, and every movie that came out in succession after that.

"When Next Gen premiered, I was very excited. I was like, wow! This is going to be a new, updated version of the Star Trek series! I tuned in to one of the first season episodes, the one called 'Code of Honor', the one where all the aliens are dressed in turbans-"

"I remember that one," I quip.

"Yeah, when the Away Team goes down to the planet and one of the ambassadors tries to hand Picard a gift, Tasha Yar flips him over her shoulder. And their leader guy says - 'Your security chief is a woman?'" Wang bellows, mimicking the scene in 'Code of Honor'. "It was the stupidest line! And they have this gladiator scene at the end. God, I laughed. I thought it was so ridiculous. I thought this was the biggest piece of shit!"

We share a good laugh. "I thought the same thing," I add, mentioning the big finale scene where Yar and her opponent fight on a trumped-up set of monkey bars.

"Yes, the monkey bars!" Wang declares in a boisterous voice. "I thought, what are these guys doing? It was worse than Buck Rogers! This is the worst episode of anything I've ever seen in my life! I was in college at the time and told my friends the show was a piece of junk! What was up with this Jean-Luc guy, who speaks with a British accent and he's not even French! Eventually, I decided to give it another shot, so four months later, I turned on Next Gen. 'Code of Honor' came on as a rerun. I turned it off. Six months later, I tried to watch the series again, and 'Code of Honor' was on. So three times I tried watching The Next Generation and the worse episode of the whole series was on all three times!"

"It's the episode that would not die!" says Laura.

"Exactly! But thank God I didn't get into Next Gen, because that really helped me in my audition for Voyager, because if I was a huge Star Trek TV series fan, it would have placed more pressure on me to get the role of Harry Kim. I would have been, 'oh my God, Star Trek is my favourite show! And if I can only be a member of my favourite show I'll be set for life!' and likely I wouldn't have gotten the role. To me, when I went on the first audition for Voyager, it was just another audition. I had no preconceived notions about it. I wasn't extra excited about going on it. It was just another job for me. But once I got on the show, I started watching episodes of The Next Generation and DS9 and some of the original stuff and I started to see what it was that people were so crazy about. I got to see the underlying messages, the multiple layers. I started to look beyond the dialogue, because if you sit there and try to focus on the techno-babble, you'll get lost, especially if you're not a sci-fi fan. But if you let that pass you by and you go a little bit deeper, your eyes are finally opened. You have this revelation, this ascension. A lot of people who say they don't like Star Trek that I come across, they've never even watched an episode! I've had people say to me, 'I've never seen your show because I don't like Star Trek. I'll ask them why. After needling and interrogating these people, I usually find out that 'here's the deal. It was my husband who always had to watch Star Trek, or my father, or my uncle, or my brother, and they wouldn't let me watch Beverly Hills 90210 when it came on because it was on at the same time as Star Trek: Voyager and that pissed me off! And I tried to watch Star Trek once with him, but I couldn't get into it.' See what I'm saying? And that's where it comes from. Some people just don't get it."

"What's so silly about that is, if you've missed seven years of Voyager, you've missed some great television," I say. "They've also missed seeing Kate Mulgrew put a mature, strong woman in the captain's chair, something almost unheard of in Hollywood."

"Exactly. We have a really good cast," Wang agrees. "They are all extremely talented. I'm very proud to have been a member of this cast of individuals. When I've watched our actors work, there's never been a time when I've felt, 'oh, what are you doing! Gosh, you stink as an actor!' That has never crossed my mind. The only person in the cast who hasn't done any theatre is probably Jennifer Lien, and Jennifer was only on really the first three seasons. But other than that, everybody else had a background in theatre. I don't want to sound elitist, but to me, nine out of ten times, your strongest actors are people who started in theatre, period. There is one exception, and that's when people who are very strong in theatre tackle a first project outside of theatre, either TV or film. It is usually not that good because they haven't figured out the transition from being extremely big," Wang says in a thunderous voice, "so you can play to the back of the audience and the theatre. You've got to pull that back a bit for TV, and even further back for film. That's where I'd say theatre actors are not so good, their first project if they've been doing theatre forever."

"There is great chemistry in the Voyager cast," I add. "You all play so well off each other."

"We do work well together," Wang continues. "And it's one of the funniest group of people off camera. This is really Rick Berman's loss here. If he said - and he's the only person who could have said this - if he said, 'I want three digital video cameras running at all times, filming shots of the actors and their interaction between each other', you would have a sitcom that would blow away Friends or any other show out of the water because it's real, improvised, off-the-cuff stuff. It's just us interacting with each other, but there are times when I've been laughing so hard I've literally fallen onto the floor. I had to run out of the room. You know when you've laughed so hard that you swear your stomach's going to burst, you can't breathe?"

"We've heard about some of them," Laura admits. "Tim Russ and Kate Mulgrew's ongoing war of pranks, Ethan Phillips-"

"It's all different types of stuff. Ethan's not a prankster. The prankster is Tim Russ. Both Ethan and Bob Picardo are one-liner guys, and also to some extent, Robbie McNeill, who usually does his one-liners in character. It really is a symphony to watch all these different facets. You've got the cello, you've got the base, and you've got the French horn, all these different types of instruments. They're all beautiful in their own way, then when they come together, you have this beautiful symphony of humour that's a joy to be around. For instance, one day a few of us were joking around in the Delta Flyer shuttle. It was Ethan Phillips, Robbie McNeill, Robert Beltran, and myself. In the episode we were filming, our characters were on the Flyer for a long mission. Between takes, somebody started doing this little takeoff of the movie Deliverance," says Wang. Then, in a purposeful, hick-style voice, he adds, "'You look real good in that spacesuit. Why don't you take that spacesuit down, take your panties down!" The whole thing from Deliverance," the actor laughs. "We've done that as an ongoing joke for the whole seven years, but on this day in the shuttle, and I don't remember who it was, somebody said - 'hey, what about Deliverance: the Musical?'" Ethan Phillips had bought his own little digital video camera to the set to record stuff, and he happened to have it on the Delta Flyer set that day. He set up to film and started doing this little dance for Deliverance: The Musical. He videotaped each one of us as we came up with a different musical number. Beltran sang, 'I want to hear you squeal!' When it got to me, I sang, 'like a pig, like a pig - oink, oink.' It just kept going between takes. It was so bad!"

Laura is doubled over. Pinching the corners of my eyes, I ask, "Is that your favourite memory from your seven years on Voyager?"

Wang contemplates. "No, I'd probably say that my favourite memory would be when we shot the pilot, when we were working on 'Caretaker' in the El la Mirage dry lakebed. The Director of Photographer had arrived on location via his helicopter - he had his own personal helicopter at the time, so he had flown in there. There we were on location on this very expansive set. I mean, for miles and miles all you had was this dry lakebed. And let's face it, the pilot was really an excellent vehicle for Harry. Harry Kim and Tom Paris, both of those characters were utilized thirty of the thirty-one days it took us to shoot 'Caretaker'. We were there more than Kate was there! The captain was there for sixteen days of filming; the Doctor was there for two. So really, we were the mainstays. It was magical, just going on location, walking around and realizing, 'my God, I'm a series regular on a Star Trek show right now!' It almost overwhelmed me."

"Was 'Caretaker' your favourite episode?"

"One of them. For my character, I'd have to say that 'Timeless' [Voyager's landmark 100th episode] is my favourite, just because it was the one chance I got to play a different side of Harry Kim."

Laura, who has recovered from Wang's recollection onboard the Delta Flyer, poses, "Could you take us into the daily world of life on Star Trek: Voyager?"

"You mean, give you a sample day?" Wang asks. "Let's do one of our typical Mondays. Every Monday starts out the same. The earliest call times range from 4:00 am to 6:00 am, depending on who has prosthetics to wear and who doesn't. So Neelix definitely comes in at four, Roxann also. I'll show up around six, and we'll all be ready and on the set by seven. If I get in at six, Roxann and Ethan are usually passed out asleep in the makeup chairs." We all share a laugh. "Either that, or they're awake and they're extremely grumpy. And then I waltz in at six. I start in hair then I go to makeup, or vice versa, depending on how backed up it is based on how many actors are present. Usually, I start getting my hair done, and from there, makeup. It takes an hour, thirty minutes each on both. Then, we go in for the first rehearsal. The first rehearsal is to figure out blocking. We figure out the movements of the characters and where we're going in the scene. After blocking is set up, then the scene can be lit properly. Lighting technicians come in and make sure everybody looks good and there's no shadows where there aren't supposed to be shadows. Then the camera also practices with the second team, which is comprised of our stand-ins. They come in and do the moves that we did after they watch the first rehearsal, then the camera team practices moving around them, depending on whatever moves they decided they want them to do in that particular shot. Anywhere a half an hour to an hour later, they call the principle actors back in, then we do one or two rehearsals for the camera, and we shoot it. There really is no rehearsal for acting. That's sort of up to us to bring that to the show. We have to already be prepared. When the director watches the first take, if he sees something which is absolutely what he doesn't want or that's completely opposite of what he had envisioned in his mind in that scene, then he'll say something. If it's in the ballpark, then he usually leaves it alone. He doesn't touch it because we have such a quick shooting schedule. Each day, we're shooting anywhere from five to eleven pages of script. Compare that to a major studio feature film - they're shooting one page to a page in a half a day. So we're on a quick time here, and we don't have the leisurely pace that a feature film has."

"Voyager has certainly never looked harried," comments Laura.

"I guess that has to do with the fact that, after all this time, we're on auto-pilot with these characters. We've been doing them for so long. The crew, they're that way, too. They know that when they get to the bridge, they're going to have to light this certain area, or that one, etc. We get to the Mess Hall, they know that these are the problems that they must encounter in the Mess Hall. Most of the crew have been working since the Next Generation days, so we're talking fourteen years of experience on Star Trek. That's the basic format: Blocking, lightening, rehearsing, shooting, then blocking, lighting, rehearsing, shooting. When we get the stuff done, we go home. That's the basic day."

A few days earlier, in a memorabilia shop on Hollywood Boulevard, we came across several Star Trek: Voyager action figures. We ask Wang how it feels to have one modelled after him.

"When they first told us we were going to have action figures, I honestly didn't think twice about it. I thought it was great, but it wasn't until somebody knocked on my trailer and said 'here it is, stop the presses!' that it actually sank in," he answers. "They handed me this little six inch, plastic action figure with moveable joints. I grasped hold of it and my entire body started shaking. I was so freaked out by the fact that this little thing represented me. It was definitely a moment! I didn't know how to deal with it," he adds. "I was looking at it, this little plastic Garrett Wang when Beltran walked over and said, 'hey, man, he sort of looks Mexican!' That broke the ice. Also, up until the point that they handed it to me, my friends were kidding around and saying, 'yeah, we're going to buy your action figure and do voodoo to it! We're going to burn it, blow it up, put it in the oven.' I laughed along with them until I saw it up close and in person. It was very surreal, and almost overpowering."

"Throw it in the oven and burn it?" I joke. "Did you ever see that old Trilogy of Terror movie by Dan Curtis, the guy who created Dark Shadows, about the little African voodoo doll that comes alive and runs around stabbing people?"

"Oh, Lord, that's right!" Wang exclaims. "I do remember that movie. Thanks for giving me yet another reason to be freaked out by my action figure!"

Somewhere in the course of the chuckles and small talk that ensues, we mention one of the Voyager spec scripts we brought along with us to Hollywood to show to various producers we have meetings with, including Richard Hatch from Battlestar Galactica. Hatch is a good professional friend of ours, and is currently hard at work on a new science fiction project, The Great War of Magellen. Wang's interest peaks.

"Somebody told me Richard was looking to have me do some voice-over work on Magellen," he says. "Are you going to be seeing him before you leave?"

As a matter of fact, we've been invited to Hatch's home later that night for drinks.

"A friend of mine gave me Richard's number on a tiny scrap of paper, and it's sitting buried somewhere in my house. If you see Richard, can you tell him I'd love to talk about what he has in mind?" Wang asks.

We promise we will, and later that night, follow through. But now, with our time at Ops running short, Laura asks the final question of our interview.

"We've been asking the cast to name the one item, no matter how small or big, that they'd most like to take home with them from the set. What would yours be?"

"Probably my station, the entire Ops station, because I could use it as a bar in my house. Hell, I could mix you a drink on it, then use it to launch Photon torpedoes," he chuckles. "I've often thought about approaching the people who build our sets and saying, 'If I build my next house from the ground up, how much would it cost me to have you guys come in here and construct a whole Star Trek room, complete with consoles, counters, view screens, the whole nine yards.'"

"That would be too cool," I agree. We shake hands with the actor, say our farewells for the day, and head out of Stage 8, out into an overcast, sultry Hollywood afternoon, struck by the finality of it all. We walk beneath the swaying palms and past the ornamental shrubs that line the various alleyways at Paramount, and from there, make our way back to the hotel to refresh for the for-mentioned date with Richard Hatch.

Tomorrow, our visit ends. Tomorrow, we say goodbye to Voyager.