Nana Visitor Sees Inspiration In Star Trek’s New Era And A Better Future For Women In Hollywood – TrekMovie.com

When Deep Space Nine‘s Nana Visitor was approached about writing Star Trek: Open A Channel: A Woman’s Trek about the women in Star Trek, the original idea pitched to her was that she’d do short interviews to work into a picture-filled coffee table book. When she started doing interviews, the concept changed to something deeper: a look at female Trek characters, yes, but also a deep dive into the actresses who played them and they times they lived in. We reviewed the book when it came out, then spoke to her in depth about her experience writing it and how it affected her.

Here is the final section of that extended and frank conversation, where she talks about the current batch of Star Trek shows and the progress that’s been made over the decades. (Read part 1, part 2, and part 3.)

In terms of the newer shows, let’s start with Picard. How much of Picard did you watch?

I watched a little bit of the third season. I watched quite a bit of the others. Now there are some women in there that I would have loved to have talked to as well—and that may be why Michelle got cut out, that I didn’t have a Picard section, but I couldn’t reach them either. Also, don’t forget, it was during Covid.

I thought that your thoughts on Raffi’s character were pretty spot-on. You didn’t get any pushback from anybody on that?

CBS read every word I wrote and didn’t make me change anything, which I was really impressed with.

And even Picard season 3, I loved it, but it still took some steps back. There are episodes where no two women have a conversation. I also felt like Beverly Crusher shows up with her son, and then everybody immediately forgets how important a mother is.

Yes. I hear you on that, but I was just so thrilled to see Gates kick some ass and do what she’s capable of, just like Denise in Next Gen, when she came back to guest. It was like, okay, you’ve been unleashed.

Right! Here’s the character that was always there but never got to be there.

It was fantastic.

And then Strange New Worlds is, I think, the only Star Trek show with more than three women in the main cast.

And they all look different, and they all have agency, and uniqueness. I think I said, I don’t know if it got in there, that they’re like a bunch of wildflowers. And in the ‘90s, we all had to be cultivated flowers: If you were lucky, you were a rose, but they’re like these gorgeous, unique flowers all unto themselves, which is so great.

It’s gotta be a different vibe on set too. I would imagine.

I so wanted to be on set. But, of course, again, Covid. They absolutely would not allow that. And I understood, they were just trying to get a show done.  I didn’t get to experience it, but I got to hear about the sets. I got to hear about the culture that Mike McMahan set up on Lower Decks. And Discovery. They gave Sonequa Martin-Green so much ability to set the tone, and she took it on. And I heard from everyone how great that set was, and it seems the same on Strange New Worlds. I only heard positive things about their working situation.

Oh, that’s great. Having met Sonequa, she has an energy that’s… there’s something sort of magical about that woman.

I expect big things from her in her career.

And she just has a very welcoming energy. When you speak to her, it’s like you come into her aura or something. It’s a very unique quality.

She does and she’s thoughtful and honest and vulnerable. In in my interview, it was just …  Everyone said, “Oh, Sonequa,” and I thought, come on, it can’t be. And it is. It really is.

I know you’ve been working on a documentary, and you have lots of footage, so what’s the status of that?

Well, we’ve been in a holding pattern, because it’s the same people doing the Voyager documentary [455 films] while they finish up other projects, and there are a couple of things that I want to be able to be assured of before—I really want to be able to get on sets. I really want to experience the women in their workplace to see it, to see the cruise with more women to talk [to], so I want to make sure that that that can happen before we start anything.

We’ve seen a lot of progress, so I have two questions about that. One, what are the changes that you’ve seen? And two, do you have a sense of what we’re still really sort of stuck in right now?

I asked every person the same question. Since Star Trek is so good at predicting what will work in the future, how things may be better…  What about childcare? I want to see how it’s done a thousand years from now. Do you have any good ideas about that? I would love to see that written about.

I was so happy to hear that the young women that I interviewed had no idea what I was talking about when I said, “Were you told you needed to be fuckable?” And they were like “What?” And that made me so happy. I see that as a huge change. Mike McMahan said something so important, that if you love a system, you must question it and keep at it. And he was talking about Hollywood, and I think that we’ve started to, obviously, to a great degree. I think we need to even more. And the idea that women, that the huge change that I’m seeing is that women are in all aspects of production now, and on the crew, that’s a whole different feeling.

And the addition of things like intimacy coordinators and things like that have changed, yeah? 

Yes, and that it’s talked about instead of, “Ooh, this is weird so let’s not talk about it, let’s just do it and get it over with.” And yet someone ends up feeling uncomfortable or taken advantage of. It makes so much sense to choreograph it, to talk about it. I did a movie where there was an intimacy coordinator, and she said something incredible to me. She said, “Okay, so whatever we agree to today, if in the moment it doesn’t feel right to you, stop.” And the director was like “yep,” and that is a huge change. I also feel like there needs to be someone on set, and I know it gets elaborate if you have all these people on set, but really for trauma, because I know for my character, I really didn’t understand. There’s no education for actors. I remember asking this well-known Shakespearean teacher in New York that I was studying with, I had just done Lady Macbeth and I said, “What do you do with this afterwards?” and he said, “Just be glad you got there.” And it’s a weird thing actors do. We drop thoughts in our heads, our bodies believe them, because our bodies believe every thought we drop in our head and we tell our brain to believe. So it can be some dangerous stuff that actors do with their mental health. And I took an interest in this, and I read a lot online, and there’s so many actors who said “I got messed up by this part. I had to go to talk to someone after this part.” And I just think that it needs to be taught.

Of course your body thinks you’ve gone through a trauma. Because I assume, as an actor, you have to convince yourself you’re going through it in some ways,

And it’s just natural, unless you’re doing a version of acting where you’re pretending, and you’re creating something that you’ve rehearsed, but I just don’t know how to act that way. But it can be very dangerous. It’s easier on stage, because there’s so much ritual set up that you know that you’re entering a space, and it’s a safe space. No one’s going to, you know, hopefully, talk or interrupt once this thing begins, and then you leave it on the stage. There are lots of little things that you do that seem.. just ritualistic. But they’re really important, because they tell your brain, “This is not me, and now this is me again.” And if you’re doing a scene on the side of the road in a car and you have to get there fast, you’re not going to set yourself up and go, Okay now, but actually you need to. But very often, no one’s thinking about that. They’re just like, get there, be there, deliver. But no one’s thinking about what that does to your body, which then gives your brain the message that you’re traumatized, which then sends it… it becomes this circle.

It’s not just about women. In that case, it’s just about remembering that we’re all part of humanity.

Exactly, yeah, and we are systems. We are systems that need to work appropriately and be cared for appropriately.

I have to thank you, because this book—I’ve been wanting to read something like this my whole life, partly because of Star Trek because that’s been such a huge part of my life, but also because of all my thoughts about being a woman. So I was very excited, taking pictures of pages as I was reading it and jotting down notes for things I want to write.

I love that. And that’s the conversation that I was hoping for. That’s the kind of connection. I feel like connecting you with your thoughts and just thinking about what it was like and what could be different for you now is… that’s opening a channel.

Buy Open A Channel: A Woman’s Trek by Nana Visitor

Nana Visitor’s full-color illustrated Star Trek: Open a Channel: A Woman’s Trek was released by Insight Editions on October 1. You can order it on Amazon in hardcover and  Kindle e-book.

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