While Major Kira Nerys wasn’t a fan-favorite in the first season of ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘ she grew into being one of the better characters on the show who was always true to her beliefs though Nana Visitor almost didn’t take the job! Specifically, Visitor was told that the Deep Space Nine “will kill your career if you do this job. Turn it down” by her agent and had to be talked into it by co-creator Rick Berman. However, his words and more importantly the script are what ended up convincing her to join the series.
According to Visitor after Berman got her on the phone:
“By the end of the call, he had convinced me that I did want to be a part of it whether it impacted the rest of my career or not.
When I read the script, I thought, ‘That’s a man’s role. That’s not for me.’ Yet it was all I wanted to do. I hated every part that I had to play where I was chastising a husband or getting upset about the carpet. And I did a lot of those. Any time I could get my teeth into something, that was my flow state. That’s why I was an actor. Major Kira was like Disneyland for an actor.”
It took a while to win fans over but most of us had come around by the close of the first season if not right off the bat. Honestly, I think I enjoyed her character immediately as it slightly reminded me of what I felt where they had wanted to go with Natasha Yar from ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’.
Not everyone made the comparison as Visitor noted:
“Some people in the ‘Star Trek’ world were like, ‘That’s not what a woman in “Star Trek” should be. That’s the wrong thing to be teaching. But what I saw her as was a woman of appetite and gray area — lots of gray area. Very fallible, but growing and trying. And that’s all over television now.”
Wait, Star Trek ahead of its time? You don’t say! Thankfully, that is a theme we’ve commonly seen from the series in the past.
Are you happy that Nana Visitor ended up joining ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’ as Major Kira Nerys? How far into the series were you before you enjoyed her character? Share your thoughts below!
Source: Variety
