"It was fun to play a xenophobe," announced Peter Weller, who is better known for playing a RoboCop and Buckaroo Banzai, although it was his role on Enterprise executive producer Manny Coto's Odyssey 5 that brought him to Star Trek.

"Manny Coto had been after me to appear on the show for a couple of years," Weller said in the new issue of Dreamwatch (via Sci Fi Pulse). ""I don't get that much time to watch television, and had never seen an episode...Manny kept saying, 'Peter, you've got to do one, for me,' and I agreed, but then beat around the bush for a while."

Weller said he accepted the role in part because Coto told him the character had been written with him in mind. "The head of Paramount television is also a friend too and they finally beat me up enough to get me in," he joked, saying he studied previous Star Trek villains for background. "Seriously, they also knew at this stage that Enterprise was going off the air and not coming back, so it really was a case of 'now or never.'"

"I really liked the way that Star Trek has continued to offer parallels to what's happening in the real world," he added. "This theme of racial intolerance really resonates. It was also great fun, and makes me indelibly the last heavy of Star Trek on television."

Though he is sure that Paramount will bring back Star Trek "in one form or other", he said he empathised with the crew working on the final episodes. "What a great crew and a stellar bunch of actors - some of them have been working together on Star Trek for 18 years," he noted. "I totally empathise with it feels to know that your show is going off the air [but] I couldn't get into the swing of the melancholy because this show was all new to me."

The complete interview is in issue #132 of Dreamwatch. These excerpts are from Sci Fi Pulse.

Discuss this news item at Trek BBS!
 Add TrekToday RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fan? Then visit CSIFiles.com!