Armin Shimerman regrets playing a Ferengi on TNG

Ask a Star Trek fan to name a Ferengi, and they’ll most likely say Quark

That’s because Quark is the most well-known and beloved Ferengi the Star Trek franchise ever created. He was devious, loveable, and downright mean at times, but fans still loved him, and Armin Shimerman played him well. Certainly better, he thinks, than the first time he put on the massive ears.

In the fifth episode of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Shimerman played a much different Ferengi, and he believes he’s partly responsible for the reason why the Ferengis couldn’t be thought of as the menacing villains they were supposed to be. In fact, he says he failed miserably.

"What we were told about the Ferengi and what we ended up with were like night and day. The Ferengi were going to be the new Klingons. They were never meant to be a comical race; they were meant to be ferocious and menacing. And unfortunately, they hired me to play one of the lead Ferengi, and I failed miserably."

So when he took the role as Quark on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, he spent the first four years trying to redeem himself and turn Quark into a strong, three-dimensional character.

"I didn’t put it behind me for years; it was like sword of Damocles hanging over my head. All of my work on Deep Space Nine, for the first four seasons, was me trying to eradicate that original performance from everyone’s mind. It was my personal agenda to rectify the mistake I made–to take a one-dimensional character and make him a three-dimensional character."

In all fairness, though, the design of the Ferengi made it difficult to see them as threatening. A reviewer for Tor.com said that they were “far too comical to be taken in any way seriously as the threat the script desperately wanted them to be.” And though Shimerman might lay the poor reviews of the episode at his own feet, overall, none of the Ferengis came across as menacing, which is one of the reasons why Gamespot named it as one of the 11 most bizarre moments of Star Trek. The Next Generation.

Shimerman definitely redeemed himself with Quark, although, many TNG fans didn’t know the Ferengis on The Last Outpost weren’t supposed to be funny characters. So no one was holding it against him for how the Ferengis turned out. We just thought that was the way they were meant to be, and as Deep Space Nine proved, it definitely worked out for the best.