Linda Park Loves The Languages

Normally the engineers get all the hard lines, but Enterprise's Linda Park (Hoshi Sato) has to deliver long speeches in alien languages. Fortunately, the actress loves the job as much as her character does.

"It's really fun," Park said in a video interview at StarTrek.com. "Once we get the hang of it and we get past memorising the pronunciation along with what they actually mean, it becomes very fun to just be speaking in this other language. It kind of becomes real for us because we know what it means and we're saying it with the same intent."

The actress revealed that an upcoming episode would feature Hoshi and Phlox speaking in Denobulan. "I've just had this scene with Doctor Phlox, where we speak in his home language and we have this long scene," she said. "And once we started to get going it was just so much fun. So I really enjoy speaking different languages."

What does Park bring to the role of Hoshi Sato? "The biggest thing I think is a hunger for knowledge and experience," the actress said. "I think Hoshi has more of a latent explorer in her than the others have because she gets fearful sometimes. But I hope that she'll blossom and become the full-fledged explorer that I hope she will be."

All these weird and wonderful experiences sometimes come back to haunt Park in real life. "I do get teased a lot from my friends, who'll repeat lines I say back to me while we're out. Everyone's always like 'So Linda, you want to go see a movie later on? Currrrr glit.' All these weird alien noises on my [answering] machine, so I have funny friends."

That isn't quite as unnerving as being recognised in public. "I haven't done any conventions yet, I'm going to wait a little while," Park said. "[But] I had my first 'sighting'. I was going to see a movie, and you know the guy who sells the tickets has the little microphone, the speaker [where he says] 'next please.' I was walking by the movie theatre, there was a long line, I was looking at the times, and then I hear over the speakers 'Enterprise rocks!' [It was] really loud and everyone's looking around to see who he's talking to and I just kind of like scurried away. But that was really cool."

A series of video interviews with Park, in which she also talked about the craft of acting and her reaction to the pilot, can be found here at StarTrek.com.

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