Brent Spiner's Data has been one of the true icons of Next Generation Trek. In "Nemesis", he plays two androids and even gets to sing.
In the recent Star Trek movies, Data seems to have been pushed forward as a lead character. How much of that was down to you?
I think the character allowed for a lot of imagination from the writers. Given he's a machine, he's like a Greek chorus commenting on the human experience. With "Nemesis", I was involved in the whole story. In previous films, they would write it before we even saw it, and we'd come in and say what was going to work.
Do you agree with this suggestion of Star Trek being an optimistic view of the future?
I question this idea that it's a hopeful vision of the future. To me it's the same future that we live in now - it's people blowing people up. You try and negotiate; it doesn't work, so you blast them. That seems to be the way of the world. Maybe why Star Trek and science fiction is intriguing to people is simply it shows a future - period. Because in the world we live in, we can't be sure there's going to be a future.
Do you enjoy Trek on a consumer level?
No. I might if I wasn't in it. When I was young I watched some of the original series. I saw about 20 episodes of our show, but that was enough for me, and I haven't seen anything after that. Because I work on it so much, I've read all the episodes and I've acted on them - I just think it would be redundant for me to sit down and watch them.
When you released your album "Ol' Yellow Eyes Is Back", you followed a great tradition started by William Shatner...
I'm from a fine tradition of bad singing - that goes from Shatner to Nimoy to me. The baton has been handed on. But I've sung for a long time. I've done five musicals on Broadway. It was a vanity production. There was some concern at the time that the Sinatra estate would try to sue us [for copying the title - "Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back"]. But I read a biography of a comedian called Eddie Cantor who had an album called "Ol' Banjo Eyes Is Back" years before Sinatra did his, and so I said to Sinatra's people, the Cantor estate was going to come after them, and that was the last I heard about it.
