Speaker 1: This is Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast.
Speaker 1: More what you Hear weekday Afternoons on the Drive.
Speaker 2: Robert Riccardo has known for so many wonderful roles on
Speaker 2: television and in the movies. You may remember him as
Speaker 2: mister cult Cutlip on The Wonder Years, also Doctor Richard
Speaker 2: in China Beach, the com remungently hologrific doctor of Star
Speaker 2: Trek Voyager. But I will always remember you, Robert, as
Speaker 2: the cowboy on Innerspace.
Speaker 3: Thank you my strangest role much Well.
Speaker 2: You know, I remember seeing you in that role and
Speaker 2: how facial you had to be in the close up scenes.
Speaker 2: I mean, I was convinced when you pulled at your
Speaker 2: cheek that that was a plastic cheek you were pulling at.
Speaker 2: They didn't just didn't look for everyone.
Speaker 3: Was yeah, the makeup the makeup artist. They asked him,
Speaker 3: how did you do that with you know.
Speaker 4: Pacardo's face, which of course was just me tugging on
Speaker 4: my own cheeks, and he, like any good artists, said
Speaker 4: trade secret.
Speaker 2: Your new project is called Space Command Redemption, available now
Speaker 2: on Amazon Prime and Google Play. Tell us about this
Speaker 2: new project.
Speaker 4: Well, Space Command Redemption is very much old school optimistic
Speaker 4: science fiction. Like Original Trek, there's a galactic battle between
Speaker 4: good and evil. And what made it really fun for
Speaker 4: me is I got to work with another of my
Speaker 4: Star Trek colleagues who I've always loved and admired, and
Speaker 4: that's Doug Jones. And also what made it interesting is
Speaker 4: it's very much like the issues that were dealt with
Speaker 4: on Voyager between me and artificial intelligence character trying to
Speaker 4: get the organic characters human or alien that worked on
Speaker 4: our ship to accept me is a full fledged member
Speaker 4: even though I was an artificial intelligence. It's kind of
Speaker 4: the same argument from the other side. This time I
Speaker 4: play the organic character who cannot accept the artificial intelligence played.
Speaker 3: By Doug Jones as an individual. To me, he's just
Speaker 3: a renegade machine.
Speaker 4: Designed to work in my mining colony who has somehow
Speaker 4: become sentient, and he you won't cooperate and do what
Speaker 4: he was supposed to do, and I have to befriend him,
Speaker 4: learn to understand him, and ultimately support his fight for
Speaker 4: personal freedom. So, as I said, it's some of the
Speaker 4: same themes from Voyager, but I got to visit them
Speaker 4: again working with a new actor that I love and
Speaker 4: really dealing with all the issues from the other end
Speaker 4: of the table, from the side of the person who
Speaker 4: didn't understand, and that is I think the theme of
Speaker 4: redem why it's called Space Command Redemption, is that all
Speaker 4: of the characters are struggling to redeem themselves in a
Speaker 4: different way. In my character's case, he has lost his
Speaker 4: wife in a tragic accident. It's very hard for him
Speaker 4: to open up and feel anything. And in this struggle
Speaker 4: in the movie and getting to understand Doug Jones' character
Speaker 4: really makes him alive again.
Speaker 3: So it's an exciting film.
Speaker 4: The visual effects are great and as if you're a
Speaker 4: fan of Doug Jones or me, or hopefully both of us,
Speaker 4: you'll really enjoy seeing us in these new roles.
Speaker 2: Doug Jones plays along with Robert Piccardo, along with Ruth
Speaker 2: Box Light or two and the new Redemption I'm Sorry.
Speaker 2: Space Command Redemption available now on Amazon Prime Video and
Speaker 2: Google Play as well. One of the things that has
Speaker 2: always impressed me going all the way back to the
Speaker 2: original Star Trek and then they seem to keep that
Speaker 2: writing style all the way up through Voyager, is that
Speaker 2: you didn't rely. I mean, even though there are more
Speaker 2: special effects available now to visualize what the crew is
Speaker 2: dealing with. The crew's dialogue is much like the dialogue
Speaker 2: of old radio drama, where you have to be very descriptive.
Speaker 2: Am I right in looking at it that way?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Well, obviously, Star Trek.
Speaker 4: When the original Star Trek came along in the late sixties,
Speaker 4: we were.
Speaker 3: Not that far.
Speaker 4: We were a mere you know, television was only in
Speaker 4: everyone's house for about fifteen or at most about fifteen years,
Speaker 4: right or at most twenty if you were an early
Speaker 4: adopter technolology, So we were much closer to the radio
Speaker 4: drama generation, and a lot of your audience had grown
Speaker 4: up with radio drama from the twenties, thirties, forties, whatever.
Speaker 4: Because here you are with television show in the sixties. Remember,
Speaker 4: the original Star Trek is one of the first shows
Speaker 4: shot entirely in color in ero when a lot of
Speaker 4: shows were still in black and white. So I understand
Speaker 4: what you're saying, and but it's also kind of a
Speaker 4: it's a style.
Speaker 3: Of writing that that.
Speaker 4: Where I mean, you know, you might say, well, it's
Speaker 4: it's very expositional, but.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of story. There's a lot of.
Speaker 4: Story packed in a very short amount of time. So yes,
Speaker 4: you do have to have exposition. And one of the
Speaker 4: keys I think the great science fiction acting and Shatner
Speaker 4: showed us the way is to really enlive that kind
Speaker 4: of dialogue with your performance. You know, Shatner really went
Speaker 4: out on a limb in a way that you know,
Speaker 4: I only now understand and appreciate as an actor, having
Speaker 4: been you know, an actor for nearly five decades. He
Speaker 4: went out on a limb to really bring that to life.
Speaker 4: In my particular case, I speak extremely quickly through the
Speaker 4: expositional material and voyager. I remember when I met the
Speaker 4: Italian actor who dubbed me into Italian. That was his
Speaker 4: job was to look at the screen and then change
Speaker 4: my words into Italian.
Speaker 3: When I met him, he said to please sometimes not
Speaker 3: the talk of.
Speaker 2: Well. One of the things that I think was important
Speaker 2: with Shatner's delivery and has always been very diverse with
Speaker 2: your delivery in all of your roles is voice. How
Speaker 2: much do you rely on voice when you are projecting
Speaker 2: a character?
Speaker 4: Well, you know, I remember I was a theater actor
Speaker 4: who had done Leeds on Broadway, came to California and
Speaker 4: got my first television drama, and I remember the sound
Speaker 4: man coming up to me and saying, you don't have
Speaker 4: to talk that loud because I was still playing. I
Speaker 4: was still playing to the balcony right and the microphone
Speaker 4: was off camera about three feet from me. And you
Speaker 4: can use the dynamic range of your voice. Once you
Speaker 4: understand how you know, the freedom you have so that
Speaker 4: you can go down to a whisper things that you
Speaker 4: can't really do on stage, or you have to. You
Speaker 4: have to use much more voice on stage even to
Speaker 4: create the illusion. That's why they call it a stage
Speaker 4: whisper versus a real whisper. So I think that I
Speaker 4: like to think of myself as an actor who really
Speaker 4: plays a lot of different notes. In I try to avoid,
Speaker 4: you know, any kind of boring vocal quality, and in Voyager,
Speaker 4: because my character was a newly activated technology, I had
Speaker 4: to start out with a very sort of motionless, boring,
Speaker 4: mechanical kind of a cadence, so that it gave me
Speaker 4: a place to grow over the course of seven years
Speaker 4: as the character became more human life. So so there
Speaker 4: was a sort of an artificiality by design in the
Speaker 4: way I spoke early on, very much like Data did
Speaker 4: in a very different way. But Data also had a
Speaker 4: very kind of, you know, childlike, you know, Pinocchio like
Speaker 4: way of speaking in his artificial intelligence character. I was
Speaker 4: simply much crankier than data.
Speaker 2: Gotta wrap.
Speaker 3: So yes, I think voice is really important.
Speaker 4: And as I said, Shatner really blazed the trail because
Speaker 4: he played a lot of notes, a lot of different
Speaker 4: high and low notes as Kirk Robert Piccardo.
Speaker 2: The film is Space Command Redemption, available now on Amazon
Speaker 2: Prime Video and Google Play as well. We thank you
Speaker 2: for joining us and for bringing us to great stories.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Lee, It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee
Speaker 1: Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live
Speaker 1: weekday afternoons from five to seven and iHeartMedia presentation