It’s hard to argue with the idea that, if you could get Rene Auberjonois, you should get Rene Auberjonois. On the other hand, it’s also hard not to sympathize with someone who lost out on a role to him. Andrew Robinson had auditioned for the role of Odo on Deep Space Nine. Which, obviously, he didn’t get. When he was then approached with the role of Elim Garak, he almost didn’t take it, because he was still annoyed at not getting Odo. Apparently, he took it because he needed the money—it wasn’t out of love of Star Trek, which he had never watched.
As with so many others, Andrew Robinson had spent years bouncing around various TV shows and movies. He’d been the killer in Dirty Harry. He’d been the lead in Hellraiser, I suppose depending on how you define “lead.” (I haven’t seen Hellraiser.) He was one of any number of people who played multiple characters on Barnaby Jones as part of his Standard TV Career. He was just another working actor, someone you probably recognized if you saw him but not someone you likely thought of very often.
In fact, his career was so minor that, for fifteen years, he didn’t play a single recurring character. He had been on Ryan’s Hope ending in 1978, and Garak was his return to regular television. He hadn’t been completely gone from the screen that whole time, but he did take five years off to raise his family, during which he taught acting and worked as a carpenter to make ends meet. But during that stretch, he didn’t do more than four episodes of anything, usually playing multiple characters, and more likely only did one or two.
It is true that his favourite of his own roles was in that time—he played Liberace in a made-for-TV movie, which it seems was enormous fun. He liked the glitter and the camp. The camp, at least, he would bring to his role of Garak, but one of the things he liked about playing Liberace was the jewels and the furs, and there’s not much call for that on most variants of Star Trek unless you get to play some glittering barbarian. Not that I don’t believe Garak might have enjoyed being a glittering barbarian now and again.
It must be very strange going from being two steps above a nobody to being an internet meme. Garak was apparently explicitly intended to be a foil to Bashir, and goodness knows he did that well enough. I’m not sure ninety percent of the fans would’ve blinked had it gone beyond being foils. Probably no few people online who have never seen the show just assumed that it had. It’s also true that Robinson’s minor directing career includes a Cyrano de Bergerac-inspired episode of the show that tangles up its romantic interests still further, because DS9 was an awfully thirsty show sometimes.
