INTERVIEW: NANA VISITOR
Kira (Nana Visitor) with Worf (Michael Dorn)
TRIBAL GATHERING Not only was Deep Space Nine the darkest entry into the Trek canon, it was also something of an orphan, not as feted by the critics as its predecessor, The Next Generation. In fact, it was different in almost every way. Even the DS9 set had a different vibe from The Next Generation and, later, Voyager. The cast was a group of pros who shared tremendous chemistry, but there was never the love-in that The Next Generation cast famously enjoyed. All of that, Visitor acknowledges, “fueled” her performance.
“It was easy for me to drop into the place I felt I needed to be in,” she says, “The set was part of it. It was so huge. You walked in and, if you spent 12 to 16 hours there, it wasn’t hard to believe that you were on a space station, in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes it felt like that. I remember walking around Paramount with my make-up, before anyone on the lot knew what we were doing. This was early on. And people would look at me, and then look at me again. I had my nose on, and they were curious. But it wasn’t really hard for me to go, ‘Yeah? What’s the matter with my nose?’ So I got the feeling of being a Bajoran in a Cardassian world. I looked different. ‘What’s wrong with the way I look?’ “So, just walking around the lot helped prepare me,” Visitor continues, “The fact was that we were such different people as a community, as a cast, and yet they were my tribe, for seven years. We were so different, from such different lives. Alexander Siddig was English, and the most unbelievable gentleman, and he was so shocked by the aggressive New Yorker in me – which made me even more pissed off. So when we were in scenes together, it worked perfectly. He was like, ‘Whoa! Whoa! That’s a lot of energy.’ Just in his eyes, I could see that. And that would fuel me even more to be pissed off. So it all kind of fed in.”
MIRROR IMAGE D eep Space Nine, dark as it was in any given episode, ventured into even darker territory with its Mirror Universe episodes. Those five hours – among them “Crossover,” “The Emperor’s New Cloak,” and “Resurrection” – presented audiences with Intendant Kira, a hedonistic, spoiled and narcissistic version of an already dynamic and compelling character. “I come from theater and I love to do big characters, but I was always worried that I was going to take the diva bit of Intendant Kira too far, and make her funny,” Visitor confesses, “And I found her so frightening. I wanted her to walk that line where you’re almost going, ‘Ah, she’s kind of cool,’ and then make you think, ‘Oh my God, I’m liking someone who’s a sociopath.’ I wanted that edge. Sometimes I felt like I fell off that edge, into funny/diva, as opposed to dangerous woman.”