Star Trek Interviews (9) - Profile of/Interview with Larry Luckinbill/Sybok Taken from the Public Domain 1. Profile of Larry Luckinbill/Sybok With each Star Trek film, a new character is added to the mythos. First, there was Captain Will Decker, then Lt. Saavik and David Marcus, Gillian Taylor and finally, Sybok, Spock's half-brother. Actors of rare talent have filled those roles and in this case, Sybok is brought to life by Laurence Luckinbill. Luckinbill was aware of Star Trek and its international popularity but had seen little more than two TV episodes before receiving a call about playing this rather unusual Vulcan. He read the script and then met with producer Harve Bennett and director William Shatner who offered him the role on the spot. Then, Luckinbill immersed himself in the world of Star Trek, watching the previous four feature films in one weekend. He liked what he saw and he liked the character he would portray. "Sybok is a very complex character," Luckinbill says. "He's not a villain. Quite the contrary. He's a dyed-in-the-wool good guy who basically goes a step too far in trying to make everybody in every galaxy experience God his way. "To get a real handle on him, I found myself asking many very basic questions like what is religious experience and what is ambition? Sybok is a character who has a holy vision and is consumed with his wants and desires. That enormous drive and ambition is what I focused on." Luckinbill himself has always been ambitious, ever since he saw a Bomba the Jungle Boy film and decided immediately to become an actor in order to escape life in Fort Smith, Arkansas. However, he allowed reality to intrude and began his college career, preparing for a life in medicine. Failing grades encouraged him to switch majors and he found himself back in acting, making it his life's work. While studying at Catholic University's drama school, Luckinbill acted alongside fellow stars-to-be Jon Voight and Phillip Bosco. During the 1960s, he went from stage role to stage role, eventually debuting on Broadway in A Man for All Seasons. In 1967, Luckinbill was cast in Mart Crowley's play, The Boys in the Band, and after essaying his role in New York and London, he gained international acclaim for his work. He eventually played the role once more in William Friedkin's film adaptation. His theater credits are countless. He earned a New York Critics Circle Award for The Memory Bank and a Tony nomination for The Shadow Box. He has also notched nearly 20 films and numerous TV productions. He starred in one TV series, The Delphi Bureau, which lasted nine episodes but which still generates good memories. "We fought for that sucker!" he recalls. "We really wanted that thing to live! My power was based in reality. After all, there are people with photographic memories. The thing I liked about my character was that he was very real." An accomplished actor, Luckinbill has also written pieces for magazines ranging from American Theater to Esquire. He is married to actress Lucie Arnaz. The two have frequently performed on stage together, while raising five children. And now Luckinbill plays an entirely different type of Vulcan, totally expressive and completely unlike Spock. For Luckinbill, this created some interesting tension. "It was like your classic confrontation between brothers who had been apart for other than pleasant reasons," he explains. "To be brothers and yet be at opposite ends of the pole can be a terrible thing. "I believe my character had a definite edge on Leonard's because Sybok, despite being from Spock's family and being a full-blooded Vulcan, was able to be both human and non-human and to basically go off-the-wall. In fact, it was Sybok's basic unpredictability that was the basis of the struggle between our characters. My character in this movie may have had the greater freedom, but I think what we discovered in this movie was that Spock's character may have encompassed the greater truth." Certainly, playing Sybok has been a refreshing break for Luckinbill, who has spent the better part of the last two years portraying President Lyndon Johnson in his acclaimed one man show, LBJ. "Sybok was certainly a cathartic role that emotionally sent me through the roof," Laurence Luckinbill admits. "Sybok worked his way into me. I immediately latched onto the potential of playing a character who was seriously pursuing something that meant so much to him. Here was someone who was basically putting everything on the line, making a decision that was more important than anything and then using that philosophy to reach a higher level. Just about everything about Sybok was appealing to me." ------------------------------------------------------------------ 2. Interview with Larry Luckinbill/Sybok Q: How did you get this job? A: I have no idea. Harve and Bill looked at the tape of LBJ and decided that the energy that I have was something they could use. There was a theatricality about the character of Sybok that they saw in what I did with LBJ. So this is Sybok as the 36th President from Texas in Space. Q: Were you aware of "Star Trek"? A: No. I had seen maybe one or two of the old series... it all came as a rather pleasant surprise to me. I went out and rented all the movies. But I really didn't know anything about "Star Trek" at all. I thought the movies, with the exception of the first one, were very good, increasingly good, which I like. Q: Can you describe Sybok to me? A: Sybok is tall, he's handsome... when we talked about the character, we talked about people who have gone off. We talked about Gene Scott, who's an evangelist. We talked about the charisma of a leader, any of the current third world leaders. And we came to the conclusion that really where the script heads with this - and it's a very deep thought and I accuse Harve of Mortimer Adlerism, [Alder], who wrote a book called The Ten Philosophical Mistakes of the Twentieth Century - it's a very deep survey of what we've tried to do as human beings and where we've ended up. What Sybok tries to do is to lead the unfortunate of the world to a better world, and this mistake or his misfortune is that he attempts to do it by stealing, lying, grabbing, forcing, and all that. And the same goes for Lenin, or Jimmy Swaggert, or whomever. They ultimately are culpable people because they will stop at nothing to achieve their ends. Q: What was your first impression of this story? A: I loved it. I thought it was [a kind of] spiritual resolution of the series of movies... it showed a more human Spock, an older, somewhat wiser and certainly funnier Kirk, it gave us a wonderful explanation of Dr. McCoy... and it all comes about in the pursuit of this Sybok rebel, who's trying to infect them and... take charge of the Star Trek bunch, which I like very much. I think that's the action of the script. He's trying to take them over, and they resist. In the earlier incarnation of the script, I liked it better when they didn't all resist quite so patently. Q: You don't get to take over the character of James Kirk, but you did have to deal with him as an actor and a director. A: I love Bill. I like his directing very much. I told him the other day [that] he's never said anything unhelpful to me. And when you consider the history of me and directors and the fact that I am very much an anti-authoritarian kind of person, I think that's remarkable, because I've never found directors particularly helpful. I find Bill helpful and it's not only because he's an actor and he understands, although to a large degree that's it, I think. He understands what the actor is trying to accomplish and he does trust actors. He trusts that you're there to do the job and he trusts that you're not there to f**k him up or counter his work. And to a remarkable degree he and I probably see eye to eye about acting itself. I'm not exactly his style of actor nor he mine, but I think that we both have a traditional background. We've played Shakespeare, we've done this, and there's a theatricality about it that's necessary, a kind of energy which is always there in his work and mine, too. I found it very disconcerting to be in a scene with him because here I am in a scene with the director and oddly enough, when the director stands in the scene, he's not your audience anymore. He's now some kind of character that you're supposed to be talking to. So maybe I relate less to him as Kirk than as the director. He's not Captain Kirk, he's standing there and I think, "I know he's not Kirk, he's really thinking about the camera angles and he's wondering if we're on our marks and he's thinking about 'is this shot the one that I really want?'" I know this is true because we talk about it all the time. That has been schizophrenic for me, and I know it is for him, because it's very difficult for him to do what he's trying to do. But I really think he's going to pull it off, although he may shortcut himself as a character in the film. I know I would feel that. But I really hope that this movie goes through the roof for him because I would like to see him work as a director, because the one thing about Bill is that he brings such joy to it. I'll never forget the day when everything went wrong. All day I think we got one shot in the shuttlecraft. We got down to do the shot, and he still took the time, wisely, to turn around and remind everybody of their job... and then went off into such a bizarre explanation to himself and to us about how everything had gone wrong, everything had screwed up, that we all started to laugh. He made it fun. As he said up in Ridgecrest once, "We're all children here, and we're really here only to play act." That indicates real deep preparation. Q: Have you had any personal insights playing Sybok? A: Yes. Actually I kind of had one from the first day of dailies and today, just looking at the big speech [I give] to the crew, exhorting them to search for God... looking at my face and thinking "No Larry, you never be an aesthete." There's always something, to me that will be essentially comic about my face... I could never really be Lenin without telling a Joke. Q: Do you prefer playing comedy? A: I prefer playing dramatic, handsome, beautiful leading men, but unfortunately something else happens. I came to the movies wanting to be Montgomery Clift, because he fit my mood when I was in high school. I thought, "Boy there's nothing better than to be sort of tragic and doomed and thin," But as it turned out, I'm sort of ribald and tending to put on weight here and there and sort of juicy and silly. As you get older you begin to realize that what girls like more than anything is a sense of humour in a man... If I had my druthers now, I'll wind up a cross somewhere between Gene Hackman and Jim Garner... Q: Why do you act? A: Just the money. [He laughs] I don't know, because I have thought of acting as a thirty-year detour. First I thought of it as a one-year detour, then a two-year detour, and so on. And after thirty years, you realize there ain't no detour. This is the way. You're on the road. But you think of it as a detour because it's not a fit occupation for a grown man and neither is anything to do with this business in a way, what you're doing or what Bill's doing or anything else... unless you accept the fact that playing, and playing for people to enjoy, is a worthy thing to do. And of course it is, but not when you look at it from the strictly business point of view of your parents, who want you to have something like a profession. You know, "Your brother's a doctor." Q: What do you hope the audience will see in this movie? A: I hope that what they see is a kind of light [thing]... something not too heavy, but that tends to show. If anyone takes a message from my character I think they should take away that "here's a guy with the best heart in the world but he just went about it in the wrong way and, as a result, he lost himself." He wanted very desperately to regain the trust and love of his brother in his later life... I think that could stand as a lot of grown men's epitaphs, that they wanted to make things right with their family. If they take away a sadness because that didn't happen, they'll take away the joy that at least they got together again, which I think is important. Q: Was reaching that point your biggest challenge? A: Absolutely. Reaching for that and trying to make it comprehensive to people. Make them feel it. The urgency of wanting to make up with Spock. It comes through as an older brother wanting to dominate him again, which is the way it would be. Q: What was the most refreshing thing in this movie? A: I have to say the assembling of this terrific crew and meeting George and DeForest and Nichelle and Jimmy and finding out what really silly people they are. And the crew. The first day we came in to a really hard thing, [the] first shot [of] Sybok. Nobody knew what we were doing and we just sat in the make-up trailer and had fun. We played make-up and had a good time and I realized I was in the hands of people who had played make-up a lot and were willing to play and risk and dare to be silly. That was the first day of principal photography when I played bad Sybok and I didn't know who good Sybok was yet. I was on a blank set, talking to myself, and myself happened to be Bill reading me off camera. Q: What do you think the fight with the evil Sybok represents? A: The character coming to grips with... his real drives... the egotism that led him to think he was chosen to do this. Above all, led him to think that the end justifies the means. The end does not ever justify the means if the means are bad. The proof of the pudding is that he says, "Save yourselves. I will fight with me and destroy me!" That's still egocentric insanity if you really analyze it right down to the wire. But he doesn't have any choice. He will be consumed. It's Hitler in the bunker. The only wonderful difference is that Sybok isn't a burned out case, even at the end. He's still alive and kicking. And in Star Trek VI we'll see Sybok: the Return. Q: How does this project fit into your career? A: As I said to them when I was first interviewed, I've never really broken through on the big screen. I've always been kind of afraid. I've done lots of leads in little pictures, the off-Broadway kind of pictures - Paul Bartel, Jim Ivory, things like that. I've been awarded lots of things and been know as an actor's actor for a long time. I'd like to be know on the big screen, the public's actor. I'd like to really connect now with a bigger audience, and this is certainly a hell of a good opportunity to try that. The Star Trek system has lifted a lot of people and made them household words. My next movie I really want to play some kind of romantic character who gets the girl. I couldn't get God. I'm really in a good script right now. I'm over fifty and in a way that's really good plateau with a slight upward incline to view the rest of your life and say what your next goals are. I've been through midlife crises six or seven times and come out the other end. Now I'm looking forward to actually coming to grips with the business as it really is and what I can accomplish in it. I really want to do that. I'm really grateful to Star Trek V and to Bill and Harve. People don't realize that after all these years of working and auditioning, to walk into a room and have your previous work speak for you, and to have a part offered to you with no audition, with no caveats - I'll never forget what Bill said, "What do we say to the marvellous actor?" And Harve said, "We'll be in touch with your agent." And man, I went home and cried. Not just because I was grateful, but how can anybody pick somebody out, just like that? And at the same time it was like, yeah goddamn right they did! - o -