Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Neelix
8. Hair & Make-up? Hakuna Matata!
'A Day in the Life of Ethan Phillips' reads the title of the Star Trek: Voyager DVD extra. That day began very early. At 3:30am, Phillips was in his trailer before heading to hair and make-up for well over two hours. After a full day's filming (in this case for the episode Phage), he then had to spend another hour and a half having Neelix removed. The actor took it all in his stride. "I feel fantastic," he noted to the camera, as he headed back to his trailer in the dead of night.
Phillips' no worries, no complaints, approach was not only a boon to his colleagues — Kate Mulgrew recalled the "hysterical" on set antics in her first memoir Born with Teeth — it was also anchored in the design of Neelix himself. When it came to devising the look for the Talaxian, legendary make-up artist Michael Westmore took direct inspiration from a film he had recently seen — The Lion King. He had 'Hakuna Matata' very much in mind.
"The two characters that people loved [in The Lion King] were the meerkat and the warthog," Westmore noted on the DVD extra Delta Quadrant Makeup Magic. "I'm going to design an alien that brings out the characteristics of those two characters," Westmore added. And so, a cross between Timon and Pumbaa it was, although Neelix's mane was actually made of goat hair.