Neighbors and friends as well as co-stars, Dominic Keating and Connor Trinneer did not have to work very hard to portray the relationship between their characters Malcolm Reed and Trip Tucker, Keating explained in an interview given just before he received word of the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise.

"Connor's my mate now," he told Star Trek Magazine (via his official web site). "We got the dynamic more than ever, because we're friends outside of the show now...he's the guy I rang to help me take my car to the shop today. So yeah, the chemistry - we don't even have to think about that now."

Keating said that he was pleased with how the fourth season had unfolded, since he "finally got a little bit more to do" and was pleased with the way new executive producer Manny Coto had developed storylines for which fans seemed to be clamoring. "I'm not the one best really to say this - but I understand that he has righted some of the wrongs that some of the stalwart fans felt were made by the show in our early episodes," explained Keating. "Some fans felt that we took certain liberties and apparently he's righted those and made it look like the liberties were taken for a reason. So that's fairly clever."

Though happy to have more screen time, Keating was less thrilled to be asked to wear an EVA suit for so much of the filming of "Babel One" and "United." Of the "blessed spacesuit", he laughed, "Man, I tell you, it grates! A long day in that spacesuit is a long day. Even when you take the helmets off, the suits themselves are so thick, with the rubber they use, they creak and crinkle, so you have to loop it [re-record the dialogue] anyway."

The positive side of this was getting to work closely with Trinneer, recreating their dynamics from "Shuttlepod One." And in the Mirror universe episodes, "We're all bad mother******s. I played my first scene as a badass Reed with aspirations to - I can't tell you what - and it was great fun!"

Though the series' fate had not yet been revealed at the time of the interview, Keating admitted that "financially and otherwise, I'm moving ahead like [a fifth season is] not going to happen." He felt that no one at UPN or Paramount had any interest in Star Trek, so no one would listen to people who did. He said that he was interested in directing and had spent more time of late studying the directors on Enterprise, admiring LeVar Burton's passion and David Livingston's attention to detail. But he expected his next project to be acting, not directing: "Going out auditioning like a nutter!"

The original interview may be found in issue 121 (June/July) of Star Trek Magazine. These excerpts are from DominicKeating.com.

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