Vup To Something: Actor Dominic Burgess

PLEASE NOTE THIS INTERVIEW WAS CONDUCTED BEFORE THE CURRENT ACTORS STRIKE IN THE US

How many people can say that they have appeared in both Doctor Who and Star Trek?

You might jump immediately to mention Simon Pegg however there’s another name you should consider - Dominic Burgess.

Zapped by the Ann Droid during the first season of the Russell T Davies BBC reboot in 2005, Burgess would also add appearances in Batman Begins, The Flash and Agents of Shield to encompass the DC and Marvel universes plus a ton of others and more to come!

Hailing from my own neck of the woods in Stoke on Trent, Dominic would attend secondary school and go on to theatrical school before branching into TV and movies. Indeed, our conversations revealed a similar trend in TV viewing - Thunderbirds, Terrahawks, Knight Rider,  Lost in Space and The X-Files to name but a few. We may have diverted into memories of collecting VHS releases for the latter and THAT cliffhanger with Mulder in the buried box car. 

How about telling the Head of the National Theatre that your favourite media experience of the year had been Fellowship of the Ring and not Hamlet? He's even done that so yes, there was a lot of nerdy digression but let's stay on track here and now!

As a fan of Star Trek, nabbing a role in the franchise was always going to be on the bucket list and that’s exactly what came up for Picard’s first season episode Stardust City Rag. 

Born in Stoke, Dominic was brought up in Weston Coyney, schooling in Catterswall and Newcastle Under Lyme and having a summer job at nearby Alton Towers. Burgess remembers "...frequenting the haunts of Festival Park and Waterworld," as well as the Odeon Cinema where he saw First Contact.

Following that he chose to head off to Drama School; "there was no option to do GCSE drama or A-level drama. It was all very academically driven and I remember the career guidance counsellor pushing back saying I should do English with Drama...I was very adamant I would take a gap year, travel to the United States and work there at a summer camp and see the country."

"I'm very lucky to now be doing what I love," continued Dominic who is now working not only acting but writing screenplays and exploring the world of directing. "I had the best time at drama school and the way that mine operated was that the arts should sustain you and you should be working in a black box theatre on the Shetland Isles for £5 a night...and that wasn't my mentality. Los Angeles worked better for me than London because it was a business and network TV back then was eight day prep, eight day shoot, eight day post and a machine that you could quantifiably see a career. You could move from co-stars to guest stars and recurring guest stars and your career can get more elastic from there."

"Star Trek and Dr Who have parallels in how I went about getting them. I graduated from ALRA in 2004 and about that time they announced Dr Who would be coming back with Christopher Eccleston and I had grown up with the show. I tracked down the casting director, sent handwritten letters and that I would love the opportunity to audition. Andy Pryor the casting director brought me in for a couple of lines but that was enough to feed my soul!"

His memory of Eccleston is the complete opposite of how the actor was made out to be by the press at the time as he had stated that he would not be returning for a second series. "He was the first person I met when I got to basecamp. He was lovely and upbeat and ebullient. It was my only interaction with him but it was a delight."

However, his first job was actually in Batman Begins which he took a group of friends to see at the Odeon in Stoke, "only to find out Dominic was never in Batman." he recalled as the scene was cut from the final version however his name still remains in the credits!

Both these credits helped the actor to get his 01 visa to work in the US.  A visa that would lead to appearances in series such as The Thundermans, ANT Farm and also the recent Netflix drama, Dahmer.

Viewers may not know this but Burgess actually played the role of serial killer John Wayne Gacy. "I love working with accents and physicality. I watched a lot of video footage of the way he talked and moved. The way he processed information was so odd that right up until the end he denied any involvement in the murders and tried to pass them off on other people."

Not a subscriber to method acting, Burgess found it easy to separate himself from the part; "That first scene involved fight choreography and then next you cut to see Gacy holding a man's head in the bath...I was more concerned about safety and that I had it all down. There are other things which go through your mind while you're doing it so I can switch off."

But let's move forward once more to Star Trek. A self-confessed fan, Dominic's first introduction to he franchise was the films; "The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home. Then I remember school finishing quite late at about 4pm and the bus would take me 50 minutes to get back home. It was always a conscious effort to try and get back before The Next Generation started on BBC2 or Sky One. 

"I missed out on Deep Space Nine and whenever that was airing there was always a football match. When Voyager aired it was the first series I watched from pilot to finale and so it it always special to me and I got the whole Trek journey."

Dominic, like many Trek fans collected the Voyager VHS tapes and the films up to First Contact.  It then expanded into model kits of Enterprise, Voyager and the Klingon Bird of Prey "...which are still probably at home in Stoke-on-Trent. One of them might even be in the window!"

Even at home in Los Angeles he's not without the DVD sets of DS9 and Voyager and a model of Janeway's Intrepid Class starship in there to boot.

With Voyager as his favourite series, it must have been a lifelong dream come true to work with Jeri Ryan? Actually, I might have suggested it was like Christmas.

"It was kept top secret and they had accidentally sent me the script to the episode to mine and with the cliffhanger I was thinking 'Where am I?'

"It's still one of my career highlights just to be in that show and to have a scene with Patrick Stewart and Jeri Ryan and to be directed by Jonathan Frakes was incredible. I went up to Santa Clarita to get fitted for the prosthetics and wardrobe and the team asked if I'd like to meet Jonathan Frakes as he was just in the dining hall.

"Just in the middle of the canteen he stood up as I walked in, threw his arms out and said 'There he is, there's Mr Vup! Welcome to the family!'

"There was no feeling of those are the main people over there and I need to sit in the corner and not get in the way. It was so wonderful and so warm. Just a treat from beginning to end. The whole thing is something I will always, always cherish."

In regards to the prosthetics, Dominic thought it wasn't too bad; "I worked on a show called The Magicians and they took about five hours for that but the Star Trek one was about an hour and a half. It was designed by Neville Page and it was effectively a foam cowl over your head with your face visible. Then there' a single piece they put on for that. The hands were effectively gloves. They took moulds of my hands for those so it was overall a very quick process. Probably the quickest prosthetics I've ever been in."

In a similar fashion to his interest in appearing in Dr Who, Dominic contacted his agent to start the ball rolling the second he heard Patrick Stewart announce that Picard was returning. "I found out it was through a casting agent called Liz Dean with UDK and luckily they knew my work already from Feud."

The actor wrote her a handwritten card recalling his weekly rush home to watch TNG and how much it would mean to get on Picard which was not something that was the done thing. "Normally you're told don't send cards saying you would love to be on a show, you have to be specific on a role. On this occasion I just said I'll be a sliding door, I'll be whatever you want me to be!"

But it worked because Dominic was asked in for auditions; "Again I had an existential crisis because there was such limited information on the character, not even saying what species I was."

It was only when he walked into the audition room that it was revealed he would be playing a new alien species, a 600 pound, rock solid individual. "I'd got to  point where I could go to auditions, do them, get past them and go and do something else for the rest of the day but with Star Trek I just wanted it so much that in the audition room I could feel the pressure. I kept falling over the technobabble and tripped over it four or five times. Liz asked if I needed to step outside because she could see I wanted it so much. Bless her, she took a shot and wrote the technobabble down for me behind the camera.

"I left kicking myself and thinking I blew it but then I got the call saying that I had it and I'm pretty sure there were happy tears. When I met Jonathan Frakes I'm sure that Liz had told him I was a fan!"

The scenes for Stardust City Rag, were filmed at a nightclub in Universal City. "In between takes Patrick and Jonathan would sit down and talk about old times. Everyone was included.  talked to Patrick and when I said I was from Stoke on Trent he remembered playing at the Victoria Theatre."

One of Dominic's best experiences was getting to sit in video village which is where all the monitors are set up for directors, producers and writers to be able to see what's being filmed. This gave him the chance to see how Jonathan Frakes worked ("If you're not sure what to do, my advice is low and wide!")

"I did the voice as I did on set with prosthetic teeth which helped lower the voice. Four or five months after I went back to loop and do all the lines all over again at different octaves to try and overlay it to try and show that I had several vocal folds. For a time there was a thought about doing this fun layering of his vocals.

"In the cowl there wasn't much room to move my neck so you have to move very purposefully and you have to really move it so that it reads through the prosthetics. I really enjoy that and find the physicalities in the role."

No longer a time for physical scripts, Dominic does regret one thing; "When I went in for the makeup test I was given a set of teeth to practice with and when I went back I returned them. I wish I'd kept them when they gave me the set I used onscreen."

As for the future, Dominic has some TOP SECRET projects coming up so watch out for those and if they're ever remaking Battlestar Galactica he's definitely available.

Reviewing where he was in 2003, Dominic certainly sees a big change in his answer; "Back then I would have given a flowery answer in terms of something that is fun and creative but now having had the experiences of The X-Files and Star Trek that's where I want to be."

While fans might hope Mr Vup's exit from the episode wasn't quite so final, one might hope the Beta Anorian has a brother but that might not be the case. So, what about if Jonathan Frakes called him tomorrow and gave him the option of coming back for more Star Trek? Any series, any character?

"I would love to do Legacy because that's where my heart is as a fan. I love Strange New Worlds and I think that there are a couple of writer from The Magicians who have gone over there. I would actually love to do a Star Trek show where I'm not in prosthetics. You get there early to get made up so I never met Patrick Stewart or Jeri Ryan as me. Jonathan Frakes didn't see me out of prosthetics until three weeks after shooting and he'd forgotten what I looked like!"

"Your call time can be 3am so you can start shooting at 9am. There are always bits falling off and you need touching up so you don't necessarily get a chance to interact in a "normal" way. If Rainn Wilson doesn't want to play Harry Mudd again in Strange New Worlds, I'd be there!"