By Steve Krutzler / 03:00, 18 November 2003 / TrekWeb Features

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He radiates a coolness suggestive of his most famous character. The eerie personality of DEEP SPACE NINE's 'Weyoun' is easily spotted inside actor Jeffrey Combs. The peculiar uneasiness of the Dominion's dark prince oozes freely under the man's glasses, dark jeans and shirt, and stylistically disheveled black hair. The combination of humanism and ruthlessness that makes Weyoun so unnerving is readily imagined.

It percolates to the surface while we ascend in an elevator, awaiting his appearance on stage at the Vulkon convention in Orlando, on the way to a suite for this interview. A woman and her young daughter enter the lift and Combs leans forward to ask the child how old she is. His eyes are bold and his attention focused as if it's the most important question that has ever been posed. "Five? Six? Seven?" urges the voice of Weyoun boisterously, as fascinated by the girl's youthful smile as with a painting he hasn't the genes to appreciate.

"I remember that, and it's one of my favorite moments," he says of the memorable exchange from "Favor the Bold" in which Weyoun asks Kira to explain beauty to him. "What Weyoun was seeing there were his limitations. 'Wait a minute, I know that this is something aesthetically pleasing but I'm not getting it', and the reason he's not getting it is that, like cattle, it's been bred out of the Vorta. They have been molded and steered by the Dominion to be the ever-loyal subject without any sort of artistic or creative ability and yet they know there's something missing in their make up."

We switch chairs so the sunny window off the hotel's eighth floor backs him. He casually puts his legs on the coffee table and reclines to thoughtfully address each question.

"At the end of 'To the Death'," the fourth season episode that introduced him, "Weyoun gets killed. That's sort of a window into the fact that the writers didn't really envision this character going any farther than that. Having spoken with Ira [Steven Behr, executive produer] about that after the fact, what happened was that they really had wanted to explore the Jem'Hadar, that's the window they wanted to open. And what they saw in the dailies was they were much more intrigued by the handler, this Vorta. They liked what they saw and they probably didn't even get to the point of liking the totality until the whole episode was done and then, 'damn, he's dead!' Which is where the whole cloning solution came from, and became a kind of running joke."

Combs eventually returned as several different Weyouns throughout DS9's fifth, sixth, and seventh seasons before the Federation purportedly destroyed the Dominion cloning facility holding his genetic Petri dish. 'Garak' took care of the rest in "What You Leave Behind."

"I never bought into it because you always have a backup plan," Combs schemes. "In some cave somewhere there's Weyoun 8. [But it was] kind of fun to kill a character four or five times."

One of those clones provided the basis for the actor's meatiest episode.

"The most in-depth exploration of Weyoun was [the seventh season episode] 'Treachery, Faith, and the Great River'. To me that was my favorite. One of the clones was defective and saw the error of his ways and," noting the irony with an acrobatic facial gesture, "defected!" Combs explains the scenario in a methodical and calculated tone. "Odo and this 'defective' Weyoun are trying in the shuttlecraft to get back to the space station. And the new replaced Weyoun is trying to track him down, so I actually had the bizarre situation of having a subspace conversation with myself."

The charisma of Weyoun clearly emanates from inside this mercurial man. He moves from deep calmness to energetic theatrics and back again with the ease of a bird gliding through valleys and over mountains. His face contorts from expressionless to vivacious as he punctuates a remark here and there, or breaks into a brief impression. Combs says Weyoun's inner light, in fact, comes from without. He describes the first time he saw the finished make-up.

"Once it was done it was like, 'look at this elegant, sort of pleasing interesting character.' Something kabuki about them and something royal in a way, so that's where I got this idea of being... pleasant," he coos in the character's voice. "When pleasant doesn't work, then get nasty. But pleasant is your first option. You soothe them, with your voice. I work well with outward stimulus. It's always really important to me like, 'what are my shoes?'" He glances at my feet. "If you were wearing cowboy boots right now you'd feel different than in your sneakers there. The contact lenses [also] really helped because they were chillingly cold. They're lavender in person but they film sort of an icy blue. All that together exudes this person who hides in [the costume] and can speak for itself."

Blue is an important color for his latest TREK character as well. But despite his cool outside, the kind of outward control Weyoun possesses is alien to 'Shran'.

"They just asked me if I would help bring the Andorians back and they said they see them as more aggressive. I took that and ran with it. I really thought about Cagney, James Cagney." Combs's theatrical toy chest bursts open with an impression. "A 'little tough guy', really in-your-face, just pugnacious," the box closes again, "Pissed. And wouldn't you be, if you were being called terrorists when in reality you see the Vulcans using logic to justify whatever it is that they want to do."

Costuming contributes to his development of the character in a different way this time. He wears a remote-controlled pair of Andorian antennae attached to his head.

"It gets a little annoying; as the day progresses it sort of begins to crush in on you!" he jests. "The guy who created it is called a 'puppeteer' and he basically works in tandem with me," he explains with the kind of delight that only movie magic can generate. "We will talk about what the scene is about and about what we can do and what I'm saying. So we have created, slowly, this little bit of a language. When I'm curious they do this, and when I'm enraged they do that, and when I'm confused they do that, and when I'm lying they do maybe this, and when I'm apologetic they do that. So we have all these subtleties."

He'll return to Paramount to shoot some additional footage for the otherwise-completed January 21st episode "Proving Ground" in a week or two. The episode, Combs's fourth appearance in the role, finds Shran a little more diplomatic and in command of his own ship.

"I thought it was one of the better scripts of ENTERPRISE that I've worked on, although I really liked the first one, 'The Andorian Incident'. This one explores much more the relationship between me and the captain and us working together on something, or not working together depending on how you look at it."

With the series heading into the Expanse, Combs says he thought that was the end of his role for a while. Although the writers haven't mapped out whether the Andorians will make a second appearance in the Expanse, Combs says this one continues to play on the Human/Vulcan/Andorian dynamics.

"It certainly has a lot of nice twists and turns and we do show up in the Expanse. It's because we can, our technology is better. Andorian is the word for advanced! And where are the Vulcans?" he says, taking on the voice of his newest character. "I think that's what's happening is, it's very hard for the Andorians to trust anybody. They've been screwed so many times by the Vulcans that it's very hard for them to compromise or to find common ground. But with these pink skins, and this particular pink skin, it almost bothers me somewhat that I could maybe trust this guy. It's not something we're comfortable with, trust. But it's begrudging respect. My character in this one is kind of put in a really interesting test of loyalty."

The evolution of Shran could well continue as ENTERPRISE charts the eventual birth of the Federation. If--that is--the show escapes the fate so many have already predicted for it.

"The creation of the Federation and all of the different species that had to come together to make that happen is, to me, the most interesting part of ENTERPRISE," he says, now returning to the more collected, Vorta-like manner. "A prime example of the argument to let ENTERPRISE have its full term is [that] I don't think DS9 found its rhythm and its identity until the fourth season. It is the beacon call for what can happen when someone with vision is given freedom to explore that."

"Series are not easy to do," he continues, picking up steam again. "It's kind of like a football game. 'You lost in the third quarter! What happened?' You just keep plowing along. There are so many steps along the way, and frankly, I never see any advertising for ENTERPRISE. Why is that? You never see any ads in the newspaper or hear anything on the radio or in TV Guide. Every time you turn the page on a Wednesday night you don't see an ad that says 'ENTERPRISE'; never, ever. So you can't coast and then turn around and say 'well, it's the show's fault.'"

This is a day when the fans demonstrate their support, at least. From the men donning STAR TREK t-shirts to the intricate models on display in a side room, the crowds aren't as large as they once were, but they still come.

"It always startles me that with the passage of time it's as if they were just watching it, the enthusiasm that's still there even after all this is quite humbling." Jeff slides into the strange pleasantness that goes so well with a Weyoun smile. This one, however, he doesn't have to act. "I used to do a lot of theater and you immediately got a barometer of how well or not well the evening is going, there really is an osmosis there between the performer and the audience. But when you're doing film and television you don't have that. There is no interplay; it is a synthetic form of entertainment, a really challenging one. You have to remember that there is an audience out there while you're doing it and really the only time that you get to see and interact with your audience is when you come to these cons."

The sight of an elderly lady moving gingerly through the parking lot in full Starfleet regalia reveals the staying power of this beleaguered phenomenon.

"They're the sweetest people. It means something to them," Combs says of conventions. And it doesn't take a genetically-engineered sense of aesthetics to appreciate that.

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