Phasers on Stun! by Ryan Britt

Author:Ryan Britt [Britt, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

THERE’S COFFEE IN THAT NEBULA!

Voyager tears down the Starfleet boys’ club

On a rainy afternoon in the summer of 1994, Kate Mulgrew took a taxi to Forty-fourth Street in Manhattan to audition for a role she barely understood. She was thirty-nine years old and in “no way” familiar with the “culture of Star Trek.” With various guest roles on Cheers, Murphy Brown, and a two-year stint on the soap opera Ryan’s Hope, Mulgrew’s resume didn’t have the fancy gravitas of Patrick Stewart’s, but it did prove she knew how to work. While she rode in that taxicab, trying to compose herself for a perplexing audition, she was thinking about her two young sons, while reeling from waves of trauma from her painful divorce, which was then in progress. On top of all that, she was involved in a tumultuous romance with another man. As Mulgrew revealed in her first memoir, she had nothing on her mind but the romantic vortex she was weathering, and so, her first reading for Star Trek: Voyager was like putting a starship on self-destruct.

“I delivered an audition so devoid of meaning, so completely inauthentic, stilted, and false, that on several occasions I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing.” This was a taped VHS audition, which would be sent to producers Rick Berman, Jeri Taylor, and Michael Piller in LA along with the tapes of several others from “Elizabeth Janeway” hopefuls. Horrified by what she knew was a lifeless, unprofessional performance, Mulgrew ended the audition by looking straight into the camera and saying, “I’d like to apologize . . . [this] is not good work by any stretch of the imagination, but you see I’ve fallen in love, and I can’t concentrate.” The producers of Star Trek: Voyager watched the audition tape and made their decision. They decided to cast someone else.

Elizabeth Janeway, the captain of the USS Voyager, was supposed to be played by the French Canadian actress Geneviève Bujold. Lauded for her roles in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, Michael Crichton’s Coma, and most famously as Anne Boleyn in the 1969 classic Anne of the Thousand Days, Bujold’s casting was a Patrick Stewart–esque coup: a classically trained non-American actor who would, once again, imbue a new Trek series with a kind of international flavor. But, bringing in Bujold was not a “unanimous” decision on the Voyager team. Unlike Mulgrew, Bujold did not audition because her representation insinuated it would be beneath her. A TV Guide cover story in October 1994 cited several unnamed Voyager staffers who referred to Bujold as a spoiled “royal princess.”

Like the casting of Jeffery Hunter as Captain Pike in “The Cage” in 1964, it’s impossible to really visualize a parallel universe here that turns out well for anyone. The footage of Bujold in her uncompleted pilot of Voyager isn’t one of those fascinating artifacts of what might have been, it’s more like a glitch in the matrix—a pop culture bullet we all collectively dodged. If you’ve ever seen

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