I was scared to death. You’re suddenly thrust into a room with Paul Newman and Roland Joffe and you’re . . . scared. This was my first feature film. I hadn’t been given time to relax with the role. It was a baptism of fire.
I’ve been into video games all my life. I had the original Atari, and now we’ve got a PlayStation. My first computer was a Commodore 64, and I had all the games for that, but now I only allow myself one game: Medal of Honor
I can’t play games that I’m involved with, though I do like to watch my daughter play Spider-Man. We used to play against each other but we had too many fights. But yeah, Medal of Honor is the only game that I allow myself.
My daughter is already asking me, “When are you getting the game, Dad?” “Are they sending you the game?” She just loves games if I have a voice in it. She likes taking them over to her friends’ house and making them figure out which character is me.
I wasn’t onstage projecting to the back row. I was acting for the lens, which was right in front of me. I learnt a lot from that job.
I would say to others in show business is: Think of your last bad review. What could possibly be worse than that?
I’ve been blessed with some lovely scripts and a character that people could truly identify with. It’s one of those surprises in life that makes you think, ‘God was smiling on me that particular day.
If they’re traveling at the speed of light, their month is perhaps the equivalent of twenty of our years. So they’re just buzzing around having a good old time, continuously looking.
It rolls off my back. Ridicule doesn’t mean anything – even from people you’re supposed to wear knee pads around, like the scientific community.
The director calmed me down and told me I was being too hard on myself. He went on to say that I wasn’t quite as bad as I thought, but needed to tone things down a bit.
The New York Times’ was enigmatic: ‘Some unimaginable gravitational force is pulling our entire galaxy in the opposite direction.’ End of article. If you stop and think about that, we are recreating ourselves.
They really do identify with Barclay because he has difficulties. He’s not the super perfect Starfleet Officer you often see in Star Trek and the audiences loves him because of that.
They’ve discovered that, where all the other galaxies are moving in one direction, ours is going in another. Now, the Big Bang theory says that we’re all moving outward.
This is a scientist, but he wasn’t making an inquiry. This was an attempt to debunk. But why debunk something that is so patently stupid?
This kind of speculation is healthy. It’s like H.G. Wells – if you go back and look at his work, he is remarkably accurate in everything he predicted.
Today’s particle physics describe light as a crumple in space, and we may have deformed space in such a way that they noticed something peculiar – and they had the ability to investigate it.
When I saw the rushes the next day, that was it. I was humiliated. I thought, ‘if that’s the sort of actor I am, then I’m a complete fraud.’
With science fiction I think we are preparing ourselves for contact with them, whoever they may be.
Dwight : He (George Peppard) would say to me he has been through more money than most human beings would ever see in a year and he was so stupid the way he had wasted his money and he was changing his ways. He was though very proper and he did understand structure of scripts. He knew when a script worked and when it didn’t. And he worked with the writers. Long before I ever saw the script he had already put in his two cents as to what worked and what didn’t. So he helped the formula of the show I think a lot. He was difficult to work with in a sense and this I don’t miss about George: You would walk in and he would cross out most of lines and most of your lines were a reaction to his. So he was difficult to work with.
Dutch Star Con, 2007
Dwight tapping with his marker.
Dirk looks at him
Dwight: Am I annoying you ?
Dirk: Well I can do that better
Dirk wants to throw is marker at Dwight.
Dwight: Oh yes ? Can you do this ?
Dwight starts tapping faster.
Dirk now taps his marker and his hands on the table, like music.
Dirk is signing autographs and Dwight gets woodenshoes as a gift when he sits behind his signing table:
Dwight: Look Dirk what I’ve got.
Dirk: you can walk on water with those!
Dwight: now look, look Dirk (than he, holds the woodenshoes up high in the air so Dirk can see them. Finally after some persuasion Dirk walks over to Dwight with his hands like: calm down I’m on my way! And than he inspects the woodenshoes himself.)
Guy at the front of the line hands Dwight an A-Team DVDbox to sign, which he had previously had signed by Dirk.
Dwight: Dirk, could you have signed this any bigger?
Dirk: What?
Dwight: Could you have left me some room?
Dirk: I need space!
Dwight: Just a little room?
Dirk: I got a little room for you…. It’s got padded walls….!
Other pages:
Murdock’s T-shirts | Murdock’s Psychological Tests | Barclay’s Biography | Did you know? | Dwight’s Collectables