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However appropriate it is for Farrell to now look ahead, it’s also a time for looking back on her Star Treks. Back in late 1992, Farrell stepped for the very first time onto the DS9 set. She was a 28-year-old beauty whose credits included the horror film Hellraiser III and the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School, as well as the TV series Paper Dolls. She entered the world of Star Trek quite familiar with the original series and eager to breathe life into Jadzia Dax, the humanoid host of a Trill symbiont. Farrell remarks that the reality of acting on DS9 proved quite different from what she anticipated on other fronts. “I thought it would be much easier than it was. The technobabble was much more difficult that I ever thought it would be,” she says. “The hours were more difficult. I thought I would be able to have a better balance of working and living, and I pretty much ended up working, then resting. I didn’t get to spend as much time as I had hoped with my friends because I was just so tired. That made me feel so guilty. We would get done so late on Friday nights, and I was always canceling on people. I thought that because DS9 was an ensemble show, I wouldn’t work as many days or hours as I did. What you don’t realize is that sometimes you have to wait around before you go in. I remember one time I sat at home for 13 hours before they called me in. “Another thing that happened a lot on DS9 was that we would get a script the night before we would start working on it. That makes you really good at learning things fast, at the last minute. I was so terrified at the beginning, so scared of the words, so nervous about the technobabble. Now I’ve got much more confidence. I know I can learn my lines quickly and that I’ll be able to get them out when they say, ‘Action!’. Also, I now know how to listen to the other actors in a scene. When DS9 started, I was so worried about getting the technobabble right that I could hardly listen to the other actors. To play a scene well, you really have to be able to listen to the people you’re acting with, so that you can react to them and not just their words. Going into Becker, it’s great to have all the confidence I got from doing DS9.” Always fond of her earthy Trill character, Farrell for the most part thinks the writers developed her quite well over the years. Would she like to have seen Dax’s family even once? Sure. Would she like to have learned even more about what made Dax tick? Of course. Would she have preferred more scenes between Dax and Worf? You bet. Since DS9 is an ensemble show, however, its writers were obliged to devise stories not just for Dax, but for the eight other regular characters and the 30-plus recurring characters who people the DS9 landscape week after week. But the always candid Farrell doesn’t deny feeling that DS9 focused on too many guest stars at the regular’s expense. “When you already have nine people to write for on a weekly basis, I think you should exhaust all of the storylines in those directions first. I don’t know what the writers have to do or what their constraints are, because that’s certainly not my job,” she points out. “We’ve had some great recurring characters, but we don’t learn enough about the main characters as a result. Also, if the complaint is that there is not enough money [to entice Farrell to remain with DS9], why are they spending more money on guest stars? So, they would have me work one day and say one line, then pay three people to be guest leads that week. We had nine regulars! That’s a lot of actors. There should have been plenty to write about each one of them. “In a way, though, it was great for everyone. The guest actors all want to work, and they did. Many of the regulars became friends with some guest stars, so I guess it was OK. It was just too many people to write for. You couldn’t really get to know more than a couple of the regulars. You know the most about Kira, then maybe Sisko and Odo, then Quark and Bashir. Worf we already knew from his Next Generation days. In my opinion, they haven’t done a lot with Worf since he has been on DS9. We really don’t know too much about Dax other than that she’s a wisecracker who seems to roll with the punches. However, I loved that they made it a point to show that she was good in battle. That she was an equal who could get in there with anyone and hold her own. Since Dax’s science office blew up, though, we’ve learned even less about her. “That was one of the reasons I realized it was time to leave. They couldn’t do much more with Dax. They couldn’t promise me that they would do five Dax episodes next season, and I didn’t want them to make that promise. I realize that there are nine characters, and all of these great guest leads that have become integral parts of the show and of the stories. No one could argue that. If I got lucky, I might have gotten two Dax shows next year. Well, jeez, what if I got hit by that proverbial bus and I was in the middle of season seven? I would be so angry that I came back for what? Money, and not because I was working more or getting to do anything creatively different. That seemed like a really silly reason to come back. I didn’t need to say yes. I saved my money exactly because I wanted to be able to say no if I felt I needed to say no.” This site is a mirror of the original from entralling.com
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