Visitor: Life After Deep Space Nine
3 min readIn the second part of her interview with Star Trek.com, Nana Visitor talks about her current work, thoughts about Kira Nerys and life after Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
Even though she would love to play Kira again, Visitor knows that she will not be doing so. “I never think of playing Major Kira again, but I could and I would in a moment,” she said. “She’s somebody I had difficulty actually dropping. I had to watch myself so that I wasn’t frightening to people or so that I wasn’t a little aggressive in my own life after playing her for seven years. I had to wean myself off of being Major Kira.”
Visitor also had an intriguing question for fans of Deep Space Nine and Kira Nerys. “How would Kira have changed post 9/11,” she asked. “If the show was still on in 2001, would they have changed her? And if the show had come on after 9/11, would they even have had the character? That’s a question I have. Kira was called a freedom fighter, but she was a terrorist. So that’s a question I have, and I know it’s a question that makes a lot of people nervous. It’s the biggest question I have, and I wonder what people think.”
When Deep Space Nine ended, Visitor was a bit lost. “I was devastated,” she said. “I was completely devastated. I’m very much a tribal person, and I felt that group was my tribe. I felt that Paramount, by the end of the show, was my home. And I deeply loved my character. I was not ready to give up playing her. My children practically grew up at Paramount. It was very difficult for me to leave. I was in my 40’s, being put out in the world. And if you think about it, I was a Star Trek actor, in my 40’s, female, and it was hard not to think, ‘This is not going to be good.'”
But happily for Visitor, she was not sidelined, but moved on to other roles, including a recurring role on Dark Angel. “But, actually, I got to do some of my most satisfying work since then, so there you go,” she said. “All the clichés and presuppositions you think will rule your life … they don’t always rule your life.”
Nowadays, in addition to the occasional acting role, Visitor has partnered up
with Kim Montalvo to run a dessert business, Un Petit Morceau, as reported earlier here. “We’re doing really well,” said Visitor. “My partner Kim is a former businesswoman. She’s a neighbor. She started coming over for dinner and we became fast friends. She said, ‘My God, your food is incredible. We should do something with this while we’re both sitting here in Corrales, in a village with horses and goats and alpacas.’ And that’s what we did. We’re now in our second year.”
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