Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Neelix
9. Hedgehog Day
Neelix has had a lot of epithets thrown at him over the years, mostly by fans, often by Tuvok, and that one time by Q at the bar. "Watch your mouth, hedgehog" was one of the more notable insults, hurled by Quarren's simulation of Tom Paris in Living Witness. The Museum of Kyrian Heritage might have got most things wrong, but "hedgehog" was more historically accurate than you might think.
When Ethan Phillips first went up for the role of Neelix, he didn't know he was auditioning for an alien. "I thought he was a human being with a boil on his neck for some reason," he noted in Star Trek: Voyager — A Celebration. Just before Phillips was called into the audition room, the actor sitting next to him said, "Have you heard what the character of Neelix is? He looks like a hedgehog". Phillips admitted that he didn't know what to do with the information, and so "just read him like a human being".
As we discussed in '10 Things You Didn't Know About The Doctor,' Robert Picardo was vying for the role of Neelix, too. Prior to the in-person auditions in Los Angeles, Phillips had also put himself on tape for what was still 'Doc Zimmerman'. In the end, the choice for Neelix came down to Phillips and Picardo, both friends. As Phillips noted in Star Trek: Voyager — A Vision of the Future, "Bob and I have gone up against each other for parts for twenty years. Sometimes he gets them; sometimes I get 'em". In this case, they each got each other's.