Actress Kate Mulgrew takes us around her lovely home from home on USS Voyager

For a moment, it seems that we’ve walked in on a Hello! magazine interview. Kate Mulgrew, star of Star Trek: Voyager, is giving us a tour of the titular ship of the show for all the hoards of vulture-like journalists flocking around her. She takes great pains to show off the detail of the control consoles, and is obviously enjoying showing off what the creative people who built Voyager produced.

As she points from station to station, identifying where crewmembers sit, someone asks the obvious question: where’s the bathroom, then?“This is the 24th Century,” she jokes. “We don’t go to the bathroom.”

Kate Mulgrew has been playing Captain Kathryn Janeway for six years, commanding UPN’s flagship vessel through weekly adventures and dramas. A theatre actress by training, Mulgrew stepped into the role of the first female leading Trek Captain at the very last minute, but has made great pains to make the role her own over the previous couple of years. How did she endure that initial process of settling in? “By the seat of my pants! For the first season and a half. Then I slowly started taking breaths. I think initially that I felt so scrutinized.

“Genevieve Bujold initially took this job. She quit and it was nervous because a lot of jobs hung in the balance. Was I going to pull this off? So my great concern for at least a season and a half was ‘would I be able to inhabit this command to their satisfaction?’ having been preceded – very successfully – by two men. And after a year it became obvious that that was going to be all right. Then I got to the business of Janeway.”

Married to the Part

It’s obvious from the affection in her voice that she feels genuine fondness for the somewhat maverick captain. Initially stranded 70,000 light years away from their home, Janeway has led her mis-matched crew through the domain of some of the most dangerous creatures – including the much feared Borg – and come out unscathed. Now only 30,000 light years from Earth (not bad in just over half a decade), it seems that Janeway’s luck may have run out.

In the exciting season finale, Janeway finally faces the one enemy that never gives up when she goes head to head against the Borg Collective once more. The episode is entitled Unimatrix Zero, and involves a fight against the Collective from within, and giving a startling twist on Janeway’s individuality. With this new development, one has to ask Mulgew whether she’s happy with Janeway’s evolution as a whole.

“I’m very happy,” she states. “You know, it’s like a love affair: you don’t know who’s serious, who’s not, who’s going to take the risk, who’s going to make the first move. Then you’ve established that it’s mutual, then someone says ‘will you marry me?’ and you’re married. And we’re married now.”

She moves around to her chair, and motions to where the viewscreen should be. At present, it’s blank. Totally blank. Where there should be a glittering starscape is a piece of wood – actually the back of the mess hall set just across the way. Mulgrew takes it all in her stride.

“I’m often talking to an alien here, and I’m seeing exactly what you’re seeing. So the great challenge as an actress was, ‘What am I going to do looking at this?’ Lumberwall. That was the real dilemma for the first season. But now I have that under my belt,” she admits with a smile...

Dan Ranger

Get TV Zone #128 for the full interviews with Kate Mulgrew and Tim Russ (Tuvok), and our latest Voyager episode reviews