| Alice Krige Borg Queen Queen of the Hive |
| When Alice Krige learned she had gained the role of the Borg Queen, she was both delighted and apprehensive. "It was kind of a mix of exhilaration and trepidation," says the actress. "I always have my heart in my mouth when I start something new, so that's always par for the course. You never know whether or not you're going to make it work." In particular, Krige was challenged by Star Trek's somewhat formal and stylized speech. "There's a very extraordinary and unusual use of language in Star Trek," she feels. "It has a quality and rhythm all its own. It's not written like colloquial speech. It's out there on its own. I found that particularly interesting, but I didn't necessarily think that it was going to be easy to pull that off." In fact, not only did Krige "pull it off," but she excelled, creating in the Borg Queen a character that director Jonathan Frakes describes as "delicious." But the presence of a Borg Queen to begin with, no matter who gives her life, is a bit of a departure from earlier encounters with that race. As a single, decentralized, collective mind, the Borg are not supposed to be individuals with personalites, Queen or otherwise. In order to give her life, Krige had to justify in her own mind just what the existence of a Borg Queen entailed. "Let me tell," says Krige, "not one person I spoke to had the same take on who she was. As far as I'm concerned," she says, "I am the collective. She's it. The Borg population simply exists as an aspect or a function of her. They're not even her drones, but her instruments. She is the collective. She's the imagination. She's the mind. Perhaps she's the combination of them. This is kind of weird territory. And it's also kind of weird because everyone concerned had a slightly different take on it. There was no one sort of gospel on who she was or is. So I guess I just came up with who I think she is. I think she is Borg; she's never revealed herself before, and the Borg we've met so far have just been her tentacles - a physical manifestation of herself." So how does one play a collective with a mind both inside one's head and group mind everywhere? Is it hard to squeeze all that into a shape, to be inside and outside a form at the same time? "Well, I think we're all inside and outside our form at the same time. I'll tell you what it is. It's as difficult to tell you what she is as it is to tell you what a Human being is. One knows experimentally that a Human being has a physical form, and we know that the physical form produces thought and feeling and sensation. All of that I know the Borg Queen has. Some of us have an intimation that a Human being also has an aspect of spirit, and the Borg Queen has that, but what that is, I couldn't tell you, either apropos of Human beings or apropos of the Borg Queen. I wouldn't know that it's there, that it exists. At a certain point, I just had to get up and do it, and I had to go from a gut place and not think about it too much, just take everything I had gleaned. Everything that coalesces and works inside of you is what you've got to go on." Throughout her experience on Star Trek: First Contact, Krige had an entourage beyond that of her Borg warriors - the Star Trek make-up department. "In total, the whole thing took seven hours, suit and make-up, to put on, and it took two hours to get off." While that sounds horrendously gruelling, Krige actually enjoyed the experience: "In fact I had a wonderful time because the make-up artist, Scott Wheeler, who created it, and Mark Bussan, who helped put it on were just delightful. One, because they have completely wacky senses of humor, and two, because they both really are fine artists in their own right. They're very, very creative people, and I just had the best time with them as we applied the make-up. I haven't laughed so much in years. The people who created the suit and put it on were equally funny and kind of wacky and talented. It was a very, very delightful group of people to be surrounded by. Usually, I go into hair and make-up for 45 minutes, and I'm out of there. But on Star Trek it was a totally unique experience. You know those sharks that are surrounded by about six people. Constantly. From the moment I got out of the make-up chair and was suited up, I then had a little shoal of attendents. The make-up was always needing to be touched up and repaired and the suit was needing to be glued and the battery packs were needing to be checked, so I was constantly surrounded and they were all delightful, which is what made it okay, but it was certainly a completely new experience for me." So, did having an actual entourage help Krige feel the part? "That hadn't occurred to me," she laughs, "but maybe it helped on a subliminal level." The bulk of Krige's scenes were with Brent Spiner, for whom the actress is full of praise. "Brent was wonderful because his level of concern for Data was just astonishing. He continued to work at the script and the storyline and wrestled with it until the scene was shot and we'd walked away from it. He continued to work at it throughout the process, seeking to make it more complex, more real. I was enormously grateful to have him there, because obviously he's steeped in this and cared enormously about getting it to be as good as it possibly could be." Although Krige was only marginally familiar with Star Trek before being cast in First Contact, she's now a die hard member of the Data fan club. "I totally fell in love with Data," she confesses. "I'm afraid it was head over heels. The character has a kind of naivety and innocence that I found completely beguiling, a sort of sweetness." Krige wasn't the only one beguiled by Data. She feels that her character, the Borg Queen truly fell for Data too. "It is a romance," she contends. "It's just a kind of bittersweet thing really, because I think she actually fell in love with him, but when you have someone so consumed by a need for power and for control, the two don't really necessarily mix. I have a feeling that they both actually did fall in love with each other. I guess it had a sad ending." Krige found the famous "family" atmosphere of a Star Trek shoot to be wonderful. "What was really lovely was, on the days that Patrick and Jonathan and Brent were on the set together, there was this wonderful sense of hilarity and carnival. They obviously enjoy each other so much, and they tease each other, and it was just very funny and delightful to see the three of them, who've obviously spent so much time together, enjoy each other so much. It was really a very happy experience." Krige says that she had so many wonderful moments on Star Trek: First Contact that she couldn't single one out. "It really is enjoyable to play that kind of bad guy, and I really, really love the people that I worked with. All of the creative people involved have got very unusual imaginations and really were a great deal of fun to be around. I was eventually running on pure adrenaline, because mostly we were working an 18 hour day, but in spite of that I really had a wonderful time." |
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| Lou Anders Taken from Star Trek Monthly (January 1997, Vol. 1, No. 23) |
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