D’Abo As A Vulnerable Female Q
3 min readPlaying Amanda Rogers, a reluctant female Q, was an interesting challenge for actress Olivia D’Abo.
D’Abo found Rogers to be compelling due to the challenges and potential of the character. “She was actually a lot of fun to play and I think I was more interested and challenged by how she dealt with the obstacles she had to overcome in the storyline,” said d’Abo. “I had fun discovering and revealing her inner conflicts and where the possibilities lived inside her.”
Amanda Rogers may have been a Q, but d’Abo found parallels between Rogers’ potential and the potential that is inside any human being. “I definitely made a choice to play her as human as possible,” she said. “And I made that choice because we all have a great power inside us. Sometimes, others see it in us before we see it in ourselves, so there’s a process we must go through to recognize it. I saw Amanda that way. She had great depth, power and potential. That can be scary at times for all of us because our potential for greatness is so vast and expansive that we shy away from it. But hopefully it’s what we aspire to claim for ourselves… when we’re ready.”
Roger’s vulnerability also appealed to d’Abo. “Amanda had a vulnerability I related to because she was an orphan and in the episode was clearly at a stage in her life where she had some pretty important choices to make about her future,” said d’Abo. “She had a strength and a wisdom about her. She was searching for the truth and searching for her own sense of truth. Though she was impressionable at times, it was inevitable to me through playing her that through her own self discovery she’d know which choices to make and what path to take.”
D’Abo worked alongside John de Lancie, whose personality reminded her of a Shakespeare character. “John de Lancie was great to work with,” said d’Abo. “He had tremendous energy and reminded me of Puck from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He was wonderfully mischievous, always so excited on set and eager to educate me on the importance of what a true Q represented.”
De Lancie also clued d’Abo in regarding the world of Star Trek and what it meant. “He also continually reminded me how Star Trek lives on forever, that it’s immortal and so important to so many people all around the world,” said d’Abo. “I wasn’t necessarily sure what he meant at the time, but he was right. In some way strange way, for that episode’s moment in time, we were contributing something to science fiction history.”
D’Abo will be seen next in a new TV movie, We Have Your Husband, in which she plays the best friend of an American-born woman, whose Mexican husband has been kidnapped from their ranch in Mexico, and is being held for ransom. We Have Your Husband airs on Lifetime tomorrow night at 8 PM EST.
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The tag should be “D’Abo” not “D’Aba”