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Click below for more stories about Terry Farrell:
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DEEP
COVER
One of the nice things about being an alien for a day is that you get
tons of attention. During lunch, strangers on the Paramount lot approach
me constantly to admire my creamy green complexion and tweak my
foam-rubber nose. Later in the day, while I'm sipping a soda outside
soundstage No. 4, a studio tour bus filled with preteens rolls by.
"Coooooool!" a few of them gush, pointing my way. I wave back. "Hey,
kids!" I want to say, "Don't let this happen to you!"
Resting in his trailer, still wearing his jumbo-eared Ferengi outfit,
actor Armin Shimerman seems to have gotten used to the stares. He plays
Quark, the wily saloonkeeper who isn't thrilled about the arrival of the
station's new Federation overlords (one of the first things the Feds do is
chuck Quark's teenage nephew in the brig for looting).
"I've done aliens before," Shimerman says. "On my first appearance on
Next Generation I played a prop, a talking box. It took nine hours of
makeup. I also played the very first Ferengi they ever did on Next
Generation. That took about 31 2 hours. Plus I've done episodes of Alien
Nation and some movie aliens. I'm the Lon Chaney of my generation."
"My makeup takes only about two hours," says Rene Auberjonois, who
plays Security Officer Odo, a "shape shifter" who can turn himself into
any form he wants, a la Terminator 2 (Odo apparently has some trouble
turning convincingly human; his face is always flat and featureless).
"I've done Charlie's Angels, and it took a lot longer to put those women's
faces together than it does ours. A lot longer."
Of course, not everyone on board Deep Space Nine requires an extensive
alien make-over. "My character is very human," says Avery Brooks, who
plays Benjamin Sisko, Trek's first starring black commander and a single
parent. Unlike William Shatner's swashbuckling Kirk or Patrick Stewart's
politically correct Picard, Deep Space's skipper is a decidedly tortured
soul.
"He's not at peace with himself," Brooks explains. "He's not happy
about being assigned to the space station-he doesn't think it's the ideal
environment to raise his son. And he still hasn't come to terms with the
death of his wife." (She was killed on the starship Saratoga during Next
Generation's famous Borg battles a few seasons ago, when the evil space
zombies brainwashed Captain Picard and forced him to blow up most of the
Federation fleet; Stewart will make a cameo appearance on the Deep Space
premiere for a flashback of the incident.)
Other Deep Spacers include Nana Visitor as First Officer Kira Nerys, a
hotheaded Bajoran who doesn't trust the Federation (Bajorans look just
like humans except for an adorable crinkle of wrinkles on the bridge of
the nose); Siddig El Fadil as Doctor Bashir (he's human but specializes in
multi-species medicine); Terry Farrell as Lieutenant Dax (she may look
like a fashion model, but she's really a Trill, with a 300-year-old
sluglike symbiotic life-form snuggled inside her body); Cirroc Lofton as
Sisko's son, Jake (a space brat who doesn't even remember life on earth);
and Colm Meaney as Miles O'Brien, who has been promoted from Next
Generation's transporter chief to Deep Space's chief operations officer.
This mix of characters is designed to open up new plot avenues for the
Trek franchise. "Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek's late creator) had a rule on
Next Generation that there couldn't be conflict among the show's permanent
characters," says Rick Berman. "He wanted a 24th century in which
everybody in the Federation got along. But that made writing the show
extremely difficult. So we made the Deep Space characters a little less
squeaky clean. We've given more of an edge to them. And we've put them in
a difficult environment-in a place that doesn't look so much like a TWA
waiting room."
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Copyright © 1999 Time Inc. & Entertainment Weekly
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