At the time of being interviewed, after 7 years Armin Shimerman looks forward to the day when he will not have to wear Ferengi make-up. As he explains, it has made his days a lot longer:
"The make-up takes two hours to put on, which has come down from four hours. It takes an hour to get off, which is the longest time because one wants to go home after 15 hours, and one has to sit there for another hour while it's painstakingly removed. How much will I be relieved tht I don't have to wear it any more? How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky. It is a shock to most people who put on make-up. The closest analogy I can give yo is that it's very much like having a head cold. Your head is all sort of stuffed up, you're not quite on top of your game and, like a head cold, you lose your energy about halfway through the day. You don't know how it disappeared, but it's gone and somehow you have to find inner reserves to get you through the rather long other half of the day. For [the Ferengi] it's very hard to hear, and there is always this conscious, sometimes unconscious, awareness that there's something on your face and you want to get it of. It's just a little nagging voice that constantly reminds you that there's something there. In my case it was impossible to lay down; my head was so large there was no way to make my neck comfortable. My neck, my shoulders, my back were all somewhat in spasm because of that. There was no way to relax. I've gotten used to working with masks. I have found that it was a freeing element. It allowed me to be enormously free because it wasn't me, it was my alter ego. Actors tend to feel a little worried about what they look like on camera, even the least vain of them, and because I was so encased in make-up I was freed from that particular worry. It made me free to do some obnoxious, perhaps creative, things."
Applying Quark's Ferengi make-up.
Red alert: The picture below is 280Kb.
