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J G Hertzler - The honourable General Martok

Klingon jock
  What's the secret to playing a Klingon successfully?

The secret is this: I've said it before - Klingons are a race of linebackers. In American football you have the linebacker who is usually the most psychopathic, insane, fanatical ball player on the field.

I was a linebacker, because I had no real athletic talent, but I was insane, and I did very well. I brought that entire persona to General Martok. He was basically a linebacker in command. That's my particular secret.

You'll go spar
  Did you enjoy all that on-screen fighting?

I loved the fighting. I've often said if you could get the emotional participation of a crowd into watching a play or film or television show, the same kind of emotional participation that you have in a sporting event, then you'd be a multi billionaire. We don't know the ending, we don't know who's going to win, who's going to loose, the stakes are immense, the spectators' very worth is based on what their team does.

So that's what I attempted, [to] bring that passion, that emotional participation with me into the Klingon roles.

Martok was very much that way, and what I liked doing about him was he was both a volatile, angry, cranky Klingon but he was also extremely thoughtful. He had a perspective that most Klingons up to that point did not have. That basically came from the writers. They added and they added and they gave me the perspective which changed Martok over the five years that he was part of the show.

It's an actor's dream, and I'm sure that you've heard that from all Klingons, because you get to behave in the extremes of human behaviour.

Oh, you're my first Klingon.

Am I? Well, I'll be gentle.

Big appeal
  What do you put your cult tv popularity down to?

Mostly I believe it's pay scale.

My voice; I've done incredible damage to my voice over the years because I force it into all kinds of places to do various voices. I had a naturally good instrument.

I'm a big guy; I'm really big right now, about 230 pounds, about 6 foot 2 inches, but I'm physically very active. I have a volatility about me as a person that really doesn't fit into the way people normally behave with each other, so I gravitate toward the more extreme characters.

And I love passion before all else. I'm not the most cerebral person in the world and I've always walked a thin line between committing to total physicality versus Hamletesque pensiveness.

No room for Klingons
  Do you think Klingons still hold the same place in Star Trek?

Deep Space Nine still had some of the great influence of Gene Roddenberry, and had one of the great writers, especially Klingon writers, Ron Moore.

The story of Ron Moore is fascinating - as a fan he submitted a script, got brought in, and the rest is history. He's a genius. He has a couple of other series in development right now, Carnivàle [and] Battlestar Galactica, which he wrote the pilot of.

Ron and Brannon Braga had a separation of the ways, and when Ron left the show I think the writing for Klingons left with him. I don't think Brannon and Rick [Berman] are that captivated by the Klingon empire, whereas Ron, I think, really lived there. He added a poet's soul to the Klingon empire in terms of presenting everything about the culture.

So when Ron left it began to cut the Klingons out, and I think that was a mistake for the show. I think everybody needs Klingons. Almost every show on television, I don't care if it's Seinfeld or Everybody Loves Raymond [if] you put a Klingon on that show suddenly you have a little bit more action, passion, insanity, fanaticism, and people want to see that.

Writing Martok
  Tell us about how you came to write two books about your character?

They came to me and asked me if I wanted to write a book and I said, "Absolutely." I had spent the last five or six years before that time studying screenwriting and writing screenplays.

I've always directed on the stage, I've spent half my life in the theatre acting and half directing. It's that work that I've done as a director in classical plays that that got me into [that]. You're not really re-writing Shakespeare, you cut a line here and there but you interpret it from a different mountain top. So it's a short hop to get from that to writing. No, it's an incredibly long hop because you're still dealing with great writing, whereas to create it and then interpret it [is more difficult].

I pitched about fifteen or sixteen shows to the Deep Space Nine writers, so they knew that I could think in terms of a beginning, middle and an end to a dramatic piece. I think that's why they sent Simon and Schuster [publishers] to me to see if I wanted to write something, because they didn't have very many Klingon orientated books at that point.

It took me a long time to write the outline, which was about sixty something pages for the two books [The Left Hand of Destiny, parts one and two]. [It was] a very detailed, beat-by-beat outline of what the story was going to be, which I developed over time with the editor, Marco Palmeri. Then I wrote the manuscripts in about six months.

They said, "Well, you know in a first draft there's a lot of things that need to be rewritten." I said, "I don't have time, I have a two year old now," and they said, "Would you mind working with somebody else to get it done?" I said, "Absolutely, let's get these out there", so that's when Jeffrey Lane came in.

He's a brilliant writer and I said, "God, if you can get Jeffrey to work on this I'd be ecstatic!" So Jeffrey came in, did a brilliant job of rewrites and revisions and changed very few things really. We got it done in a hurry. We've got nothing but great reviews from everybody, practically.

When it was all done I went away from it for a while, came back and I read it and said, "This is good, this is the heck of an adventure." It completed a lot of thoughts that were set up by Ron Moore about my character. Well, forwarded them, anyway.

tlhIngan Hol DajatlhlaH 'e' DaneH'a'?
  Can you still speak any Klingon?

The very last line I said on [Deep Space Nine] was a line that was not written for me. At the very end Martoc gets together with Admiral Ross and Sisko to drink blood wine together as they had promised they would do when they defeated the Cardassians and the Dominion.

But there was so much blood on their hands metaphorically that Sisko realised he couldn't drink it. He just poured his wine out onto the floor and left, and Ross followed suit and I was left there holding the bottle of blood wine. Al that was written for me to do was to sort of shrug my shoulders and drink.

I said, "Man, if there's ever a time when Martok would say something in Klingon, at least to himself, it would be then." So I said, "If that's the intent then let me just say [barks out some Klingon]," which means, "Humans, go figure!." That's what I did, but I also sing in Klingon - the warriors' anthem. We sing it every chance we get.