Behr, recalling the experience of working with Yulin, explained in a 2017 tweet: “[Yulin] b**ched and moaned about [his role] demanding that it undergo a major rewrite. Not a word was changed. Funny old biz.”
This stunned me when I first read it. The script for “Duet” is so sublime, as is Yulin’s performance. Acting as Kira’s foil, he helps bring out the best in Nana Visitor too. The interplay between Kira and Marritza, a determined woman standing outside a cell talking to a man playing mind games as he sits inside it, evokes “Silence of the Lambs.” Visitor and Yulin are nearly as good as Jodie Foster as Clarice and Sir Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter were.
The part of Marritza is a dramatic feast that day player jobs on TV rarely offer. When “Darhe’el” brags about his war crimes to Kira, Yulin is totally convincing as a power-drunk tyrant. From the way he describes his pride in killing Bajorans, in having control over life and death and then always choosing the latter, you feel like you’re watching the Devil himself. Then, with hindsight, you realize Yulin isn’t playing a hammy villain, Marritza is. He’s trying to convince Kira that she’s right about him being a monster — just like Yulin, in turn, convinces us in his final scenes that he’s a man who’d rather die than keep on living as one of the guilty.
Notice how his Darhe’el facade finally collapses while denigrating himself and his cowardice, describing how (in third person) Maritza covered his ears and cried himself to sleep every night, terrified by the screams he could hear from his bunk. Watching him, one feels that he never stopped hearing those screams after leaving Gallitep, so he stopped covering his ears.
Hearing that Yulin seemed to “hate” the episode? It stung me with disappointment. Then I happened on Conway’s earlier 2012 interview with Star Trek.com. His account still fits with Behr’s memories of “b**ching and moaning,” but according to Conway, it wasn’t because Yulin hated “Duet” at all:
“[Yulin] didn’t like the ending of [‘Duet’]. He got so invested in his character that he didn’t want his character to die at the end. He was trying to justify it and have him somehow survive, which almost never happens on a television show. The guest star never starts trying to change a script. He did, but mostly because he was so invested in the character.”
Yulin’s complaining seems to have come from his passion for the “Duet” script, not lack of it. I think both Behr and Conway’s accounts are the truth, just remembered differently. Yulin wanting the ending changed so Marritza lived does fit the demanded “major rewrite” Behr recounts. Plus, since he was stepping out of line and above his rank to get the script changed, Behr might’ve remembered that as him being difficult to work with. (Behr did make the tweet 24 years after “Duet” first aired.)