Issue #3 of Star Trek Explorer, the official magazine for the Star Trek Universe, beams down to subscribers next week — and we’ve got an exclusive look at a new feature interview with Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Prodigy star Kate Mulgrew from the new release!
Between her return in Prodigy, adding her voice to the long-running Star Trek Online game, and her legendary leadership of the starship Voyager, franchise favorite Kate Mulgrew gets her own spotlight feature in the latest issue of Star Trek Explorer.
Here’s an exclusive excerpt from the lengthy interview with Explorer writer Ian Spelling:
Janeway is back… in more ways than one! Not only is Kate Mulgrew reprising her iconic Star Trek: Voyager role in animated sensation Star Trek: Prodigy, but in massively multiplayer online RPG Star Trek Online as well. So how does it feel for the actress to be portraying a holographic Captain Janeway, an animated Admiral Janeway, and a menacing Mirror Janeway all at once…?
“Let me tell you something,” Mulgrew marvels. “From the moment I stepped onto that bridge 25 years ago, I knew that anything was possible. It has been! That’s truly the legacy of Star Trek. Once you undertake a role like this, the captain of a starship, you’re asking for a wild, wonderful, and phenomenal experiences to befall you. And so, they have. It was not a terrific surprise that I was called to voice the character that I created. It was simply a great pleasure. I thought it would have been so disappointing had they given it to somebody else to imitate me, but they didn’t. That’s the wisdom of [Executive Producer] Alex Kurtzman. Smart guy.”
That said, it wasn’t a no-brainer.
“No, it wasn’t actually,” she notes. “I gave it some real consideration over quite a long period of time. But I was so enamored of Alex Kurtzman’s approach and of his intelligence that I didn’t consider too long. The reality is, nobody else could voice it but me, in order to make it an honest success. I think people will respond to the face that it is Mulgrew’s voice in the embodiment of Janeway, but I’m thrilled that he asked me, and I’m thrilled to be doing it. It’s really been quite a happy and satisfying experience.”
Mulgrew begins to describe how Janeway came back to her “almost immediately,” but then course corrects to stress that the character “never left me.” As a result, when she sat in front of a microphone to record her dialogue for Prodigy, Janeway spilled out of her as if it were the 1990s and she was looping dialogue for an episode of Voyager.
“It’s so deeply imprinted,” Mulgrew says of Janeway. “She resides within. She never leaves, and she’s never far. When the scripts were given to me, the booth was closed. Particularly being within the circumstances of the pandemic, I felt a real need, almost a calling, to just get her back, and to let her go. That’s what happened. It was wonderful. Lovely.”
Star Trek Explorer #3 features a wide range of Trek content, including an interview with Q actor John de Lancie focusing on his return in Star Trek: Picard, a trip behind the scenes of Star Trek: Prodigy with the show’s creative leaders, and two new short stories: a Captain Proton adventure from Voyager writer Lisa Klink, and new Khan Singh short story from the master of Khan fiction, author Greg Cox.
You can read the full interview with Star Trek: Prodigy’s Kate Mulgrew, along with all of that other good stuff from the Star Trek Universe when Star Trek Explorer #3 goes on sale June 28 — head over to Titan Magazines’ site to subscribe, or to pick up back issues of the previous Star Trek Explorer releases if you missed them!