JohnBillingsley.Net
Star Trek Monthly #84
(UK) 2001
Pages 42-44
Living in a Phlox
One of
Enterprise’s more
intriguing characters is the ship’s doctor, the mysterious alien Phlox, as
played by John Billingsley. Abbie Bernstein catches up with Billingsley and gets
his perspective on life as an extraterrestrial medic and anthropologist.
John Billingsley seems a little hesitant to discuss why he was chosen to play the alien Dr Phlox on Enterprise. It’s nothing bad, it’s just, well… cute. “I hate to say this, but what they told me was that I had a twinkle in my eye,” the actor laughs. “Now, how do you respond to that? You go in the next day and you think, ‘Do I still have that twinkle?’ I made my wife look at me and said, ‘Twinkling or no twinkling?’”
Holding forth at a lawn party on the Paramount Pictures lot for the UPN line-up of autumn television series, Billingsley indeed exudes an elfin air as he expounds on what the Enterprise producers may have seen in him. “I think I basically am a pretty sunny person myself,” he muses, “and a pretty optimistic person, and I think they liked that I brought a certain buoyancy to my preliminary audition. [Phlox has] a tremendous amount of ease. This guy is not frightened by anything, he’s certainly willing to face whatever comes with a kind of blithe stoicism, if that’s not an oxymoron.”
This wasn’t Billingsley’s first audition for Star Trek. Some years earlier, he read unsuccessfully for a guest role on Star Trek: Voyager. “It was for an alien villain,” he recalls. “The scene was, I had somebody strapped in a chair and I was going to perpetrate some hideous alien torture. Of course, one does that gleefully as an alien. I thought it went very well, but I didn’t get it.” He surmises that his extraterrestrial evildoer was, “Either too gleeful, or not gleeful enough.”
From what Billingsley has seen of the Star Trek universe so far, Phlox doesn’t readily compare to any characters on other series, though he can’t say for certain: “I think on the shows I’ve seen so far, probably Data would come the closest. What I took away from watching Next Generation was that Data’s humanity rested in his fundamental good spirits. I think [Phlox is] probably somewhat similar.
Phlox’s origins are as much a mystery to Billingsley as they are to us: “[Phlox’s race is] never seen before, as ye unnamed, planet as yet unnamed, back story nil except what I’ve created for myself. I’m sure it will be explored. Because [The Enterprise creators are] swamped, they’ve not provided me with a detailed back story, so I’ve created on for myself, which doubtless they will contradict. Maybe if I say this enough times, they’ll subscribe to it themselves,” he laughs.
“For what it’s worth,” he continues, “my own sense is that I come from a species of hyper-intellectual philosophers, who have chooses the monastic life. They would rather look inside themselves then look outside to see what other species are out there. They don’t have truck or commerce with the universe any more, and I disagree with the philosophic attitude. My guy really wants to get out there and meet species. I’m open to anything. I go against the grain, so I’m more anomalous of my species than representative of my species. I’m one of the few from my species that’s actually out in space, which is why nobody’s ever seen [the species] before.”
There has been a brief discussion with the writers about this theory, “But the conversation we had was probably more about broader philosophical questions about how I come across,” Billingsley says. “And we’re in total agreement about that. I think my character is drawn to every species because he’s truly an anthropologist. I think probably what appeals to his the most about humans is that they have that impetuosity.”
Like the other chieftains of Sickbay before him, Phlox is a true healer, albeit with a slightly different take on his duties. “I think that this character is someone who crosses all disciplines,” Billingsley offers. “I don’t think my species tends to make what I would consider the artificial distinctions that we tend to make between disciplines. He’s as much anthropologist as he is doctor, he’s as much philosopher as he is doctor. I think the one thing I’m pretty sure of is I probably won’t get to have as much sex as any of the other characters.”
Does this mean that the other characters will be having a lot of sex? “Apparently!” Billingsley laughs. “No one’s talking to me about that. I’m sure that I’m not gonna get much.”
It also sounds unlikely that Phlox will be drawn into the direct confrontations that regularly flare up between some of the other characters. “There’s definitely a very strong conflict between T’Pol [Jolene Blalock] and the captain [Scott Bakula] and Trip [Connor Trinneer], the engineer,” Billingsley relates. “I’m an alien who is rather blithe and bonny, so I’m not a repository of much conflict.”
There are possible parallels to be drawn between Star Trek: The Original Series’ Captain/science officer/doctor trinity and their Enterprise counterparts, Billingsley speculates: “In that first series, [there was] a triangular relationship between Bones and Spock and the captain. Each of them personified a certain quality. I think that T’Pol’s hyper-intellectualism, divorced of human emotion, and the captain’s impetuosity are balanced by my ability to have an emotional response, tempered through my brain with a sense of balance. You know, that place where it’s not gonna do you any good to get too up or too down. Which is actually why I did the part.
“I think that my character is not blind, but extremely unconcerned about whether or not he’s popular,” Billingsley elaborates. “He’s happy. I think probably the crew will accept me and get to like me, because I’m sensing that in the second episode, there’s already a bit of bonding going on with some of the other characters, because [the lower ranking] characters can’t really go to the captain. And I’m not like the Vulcan, difficult to approach. I would suspect I might fulfill some of the function that Whoopi Goldberg [Guinan], for instance, fulfilled on Next Generation. I hope I have a bar, actually,” he quips.
There’s not a lot the actors are allowed to reveal about what happens in the Enterprise two-hour opener, but Billingsley gives this hint: “It’s a series of events that make it necessary for us to essentially tell the Vulcans [off] and take the ship out. This is the first shi in space manned by Earthlings.”
As for the overall feel of the show, Billingsley says, “I think what they want to do is hearken back to the spirit of the original show in all ways. It’s messier, things screw up, the technology is not as refined, there’s no Prime Directive, we can land on a planet and actually make it worse.”
Despite his carefully thought-out history of Phlox, Billingsley is prepared to find that the doctor’s roots are entirely different than what he’s invented: “The hardest thing I think about doing a series is, you make all these decisions and then you read an episode that it like, “Oh! Throw that out!”
Doing homework on a character’s background is nothing new for Billingsley, a well-traveled Pennsylvanian by birth who spent nearly two decades acting and directing in US regional theatre in Seattle, WA, where he founded the acting studio Freehold. He believes that a stage background may come in handy for actors called upon to perform sci-fi scripts: “I honestly think in part it’s just because stage actors can get their mouths around a lot of polysyllabic language and learn it quickly. In TV, you have to spit out [technobabble], and do it with a certain amount of credibility. I think if you’re a stage actor, you probably, one, can learn things pretty damn quickly and two, you can wrap your tongue around it with a certain amount of verisimilitude.”
Billingsley moved to Los Angeles five years ago, where he continued to work in theatre while expanding into film and television. “I’ve guest-starred on a lot of stuff,” Billingsley notes. “X-Files, NYPD Blue, Profiler, Six Feet Under, Arliss. I had a quid arm grafted onto my arm on Freakylinks.”
One guest slot on the series G vs. E found him working with future Enterprise co-star Jolene Blalock. “I was the villain,” Billingsley remembers. “That sow was about the war between God and Satan on Earth, fought between two very raffish undercover operatives and whoever the guest demon of the week was. So I was guest demon one week, a sports promoter a la Phil Knight, and Jolene was my henchperson. I’m embarrassed to say that when I actually went to the first [Enterprise] cast reading, she walked across the room and gave me a big kiss on the head, which sort of took me aback – I didn’t know who the hell she was.” In his defense, Billingsley adds, “She’d changed her hairstyle! Connor Trinneer I had met on a number of occasion at parties.”
Enterprise is both Billingsley’s second turn as a series regular and his second steady job on the Paramount Pictures lot, where he’d previously played Miles Ballard, the lone non-psychic character on the short lived DreamWorks/NBC supernatural drama The Others. He’s delighted to be back at the studio: “Oh, yeah! I was so bummed [when The Others was cancelled], I had to give my Paramount drive-on pass away. I used to bring people here to show them around. I also live five minutes away. So it’s like living the Hollywood dream, to roll out of bed in you pajamas and drive to work.”
A regular role in a Star Trek series also comes with the near-certainty of steady work. “I don’t think you could get more job security than this,” Billingsley observes happily. “It’s great. I came from almost 20 years of theatre, where not only do you have no job security, but you have no money.”
This makes Enterprise a wonderful experience on both the day to day and financial levels: “One, I think everybody that I’ve come in contact with is great. I’m having a blast with everybody. Two, at the end of seven years, I’m set for life. I don’t know what I want to do, whether I want to go back to the theatre, or produce, but I don’t see a downside to this experience.”
The specter of possible typecasting holds no dread: “I think that’s a risk. But on the other hand after seven years, the worst that could happen is I go and have a stage career again, and I love stage. It’s funny – you chose to be an actor, on some level, your ambition is to get to a point where you’re able to make enough money to make the choices you want to make. And this will give me the freedom to do that.”
Meanwhile, Billingsley is glad to be working on a series that, he feels, espouses an outlook he shares. “What I really like about the show and its world view, is that it is fundamentally optimistic. It’s hard sometimes to be optimistic looking at the paper, On the other hand, if you’re not able to summon the kind of optimism that envisions a future for the world, and envision us getting healthier and stronger, you’re dooming us to perdition. So I think this show is one of the few shows out there that really tries to speak in a positive way.”