It pays to have friends in high “Trek” places. Just ask “Newsradio” star Andy Dick.
“Brannon Braga is a friend of mine,” Dick says, referring to “Voyager’s” writer-producer. “I told him that I wanted to get in on the `Star Trek’ action.
“It’s a whole other genre, an eclectic, different style of acting, and it opens you up to a completely different audience.”
And sure enough, Dick, who plays the neurotic Matthew on the NBC sitcom “Newsradio,” got his wish: a juicy guest-starring role in the “Voyager” episode “Message in a Bottle,” which airs Wednesday, Jan. 14. In the show, Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) discovers a far-off Starfleet vessel and, with the window of opportunity for communication closing quickly, she sends the Doctor (Robert Picardo) through an optronic datastream.
Upon arriving on the Prometheus, the Doctor discovers that its crew has been murdered andthat the Romulans are in command. Dick plays Dr. Bradley–a “virgin’ character, never before activated–an Emergency Medical Hologram, or EMH, whom the Doctor turns to for help.
“I’m an EMH, Mark II, and the Doctor is an EMH, Mark 1, with the bald head and the beady little eyes,” Dick says, laughing during a phone call from his “Newsradio” dressing room. “There’s a lot of humor in the show, a lot more than usual because the Doctor and I spar with each other a little bit.
“Really, what the Doctor wants to do is put a message in my ship’s computer that says everyone on the Voyager is still alive and trying to get home.”
Dick, a 32-year-old single father of three who lives in Los Angeles, reports that he didn’t have the easiest time of it. He couldn’t wear his omnipresent eyeglasses, and was constantly “tripping down the steps” as a result.
Then there was the technobabble.
“It’s this completely nonsensical `Star Trek’ jargon,” says Dick, whose credits include “The Ben Stiller Show” and such films as “Reality Bites” (1994) and “The Cable Guy” (1996).
“I couldn’t remember this one line for the life of me, so I wrote it on a little piece of paper and put it on the panel I was supposed to be looking at.
“But I couldn’t read it, of course, because I wasn’t wearing my glasses!”
Dick laughs now, but “Voyager’s” iron-clad, say-it-as-it’s-written dictum proved unnerving.
“I expected it to be like `Newsradio,’ where I could just wing it,” says the actor, who will soon be seen in the big-screen comedy “Best Men” with Drew Barrymore and Dean Cain, and heard in “Simba’s Pride,” the upcoming direct-to-video sequel to “The Lion King” (1994).
“Matthew on `Newsradio’ is very easygoing, and I can change words and make them flow out of my mouth any way I want, and make it my own.
“But it’s not that way on `Star Trek.’ It’s a lot more militaristic. It was, `You’ve got to get the words verbatim.’ They needed that for the `Trek’ jargon reasons, but also for editing reasons. It had to be the same every time because it’s a one-camera show.
“I teared up the first day. I felt like I wasn’t cut out for it, but Robert Picardo said, `Don’t worry about it. You’re gonna do great.’
“He kept giving me positive reinforcement. I swear to God, if he wasn’t there I would have gone running from the set screaming and cursing. Robert Picardo was awesome.”
And in the end, was it worth it?
“It was great, so exciting” Dick says. “It was such a challenge, and it kicked my butt.
“We worked hard, we worked long. Some days were 16 hours.
“I came back to `Newsradio’ really on top of my game. It was like going through the actor’s version of basic training.”
