Continuing our interview with Voyager's B'Elanna Torres, now a guest on Seven Days

“All we really know", continues Dawson, "is that they haven’t seen each other in quite a long time, so that leaves a lot open to the imagination. I think when you’re faced with playing someone like this you have to invent a whole backstory for them and an entire relationship that they had with this other person. You then use this as the subtext to guide you in the scenes between both characters.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better actor to play opposite than Jonathan LaPaglia,” she adds. “He’s very passionate about his work and is willing to take risks in his acting. Jonathan’s totally committed to making Seven Days as good as it possibly can be and is open to other peoples’ ideas and suggestions. This certainly helped foster a productive and creative working environment.”

Believe it or not, being cast as Keagle came as a complete surprise to Dawson. “The Seven Days production people actually contacted the production team on Voyager without me knowing it,” says the actress. “They cleared my days and enabled me to do the project before ever approaching me about it. They sent me the script and I really liked the role. Once they worked everything out they offered me the job. That doesn’t happen very often in this business, so I was quite flattered.”

After finishing work on Seven Days, the actress was back at her post in engineering as B’Elanna Torres on Voyager. She and her fellow castmembers had returned to Paramount Studios in June to begin filming the show’s sixth season. One of the first episodes they shot, Barge of the Dead, features Dawson’s feisty Klingon alter ego. In it B’Elanna convinces Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) to allow her to enter a coma-like state so that she can help her mother Miral (Karen Austin), whose soul is trapped in Klingon purgatory.

“That is probably the most exhausting Voyager episode I’ve ever done just because B’Elanna is so present in it. Everything is through her perspective, and there is no B-storyline to switch to, so that made it very tiring. "Also, working from morning until night under all the make-up made for long days and very short turnarounds, which meant I barely made it home and back to work in time. Some nights it was easier for me to sleep in my trailer on the Paramount lot...”

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