Interviews Conducted by Robert J. Beck

Where do you think your interest in acting comes from?

I think it may be some kind of inheritance. My mother was
a very keen actress in her youth and she was meant to go
to RADA drama school but she got offered jobs actually
so she skipped the drama school part of things. She
worked for a good length of time until she met my dad
who in my understanding sort of rescued her from the
devil’s jaw as he thought [laughter] and it wasn’t talked
about in our house at all.
I think it was around the age of nine actually that at the school I was at the English Mistress thought it was high time that the school put on a play. All my mates went to audition for it so I went too and she gave me the lead part! I never looked back from that really. I went to my big boarding school and they had an amazing tradition of extra-curriculum activity and I did a ton of stuff with the school theatre under the guidance of a man named Christopher Richardson. Then I went to London to go to university at UCL and they have Bloomsbury Theatre, which was called the Collegiate back then, in Bloomsbury Square. I suppose that’s where the seed was sown way back then. But I’ve got a feeling I got from my mum [laughter].

And you started off in England doing the usual shows, like the Bill?

I did, I did the Bill that was my first TV job. I still have the letter somewhere, “Dear Dominic Keating we are delighted that you will be playing Second Friend” [laughter] Yeah my first shooting was down at Portabella Road.

Have you done Casualty too?

 Oh yeah did Casualty! I just did a Holby City a couple of years ago too, I’ve come full circle.

How did you make the jump from acting in the UK to going over to the US?

After my contract with Desmond’s ended, a sit-com on Channel 4, I had a friend of mine who lived up in Northern California and then his brother was getting married and he had a bachelor furore in Vegas so I followed the circus down there. Then after that I knew an actress who had gone from London to LA herself so I looked her up and I went and stayed in LA for about three weeks in the autumn of ’93 and I just hung out and I very quickly met a ton of people and I guess I was 30 or so back then and I just looked around. I was single, I had a flat I could rent out, and I thought "you know what if I don't go now I’ll never know". So I came home and I packed up and I rented my flat out and five weeks later I was on a plane. Two days after that there was a huge earthquake and God bless LA was in flames when I got there. And I went on a wing and a prayer Rob, that’s the God’s honest truth.
I didn’t have an agent, I didn’t have any work papers, so I just sort of gave myself a year or two but I got a green card within six months. I got a good lawyer who by the time he’d finished my file it was like “I’m fucking famous!” [laughter] I just stuck it out and I got work fairly quickly initially. Then it went dry for quite a while and I remember there was a state of me coming in second to everything but at least I was coming in second. Then in the late ‘90s it really started picking up I really did start to work. I started booking recurring roles on certain shows and actually making a bit of cash.
Every year you get to pilot season and it was like “Oh God here we go another pilot season” and I really had no luck in even getting auditions for pilots which would go to series. But I’d done this guest-star audition for Voyager and I thought I’d got an absolute shoe-in afterwards but I never heard from them again so I was like “what have you got to do to get a job in this town?” Out of the blue the casting director for Enterprise rang up my Manager and said “I think I’ve got something for Dominic Keating” and it was the most painless audition process of my life. Three auditions later I was signing a bit fat contact for seven years which unfortunately only transpired as four but that’s better than a poke in the eye with a plasma coil [laughter]