Susanna Thompson Talks "Unimatrix Zero" Cast Interview 

Source: Webtrek          

Return as Borg Queen Challenges The Actress by Ian Spelling     

The Borg Queen, the sinewy and sweaty villianess last seen making life hard for Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) and company in the Voyager telemovie "Dark Frontier," returns to menace anew in "Unimatrix Zero," which will air on May 24.  And once again stepping into the Queen's lair for the sixth season's cliffhanger is actress Susanna Thompson.  "I wasn't really surprised that they called," Thompson says. "I was more surprised that I said yes." 

This time, the Borg Queen discovers a disease is running rampant among her drones--a disease called individuality. During the regeneration process, some Borg temporarily regain access to memories of their lives before they were assimilated.  "When the Queen learns what is happening, she brings in a drone and asks for his help," Thompson says. "the Queen's testing method is too slow, and she wants to get to the crux of it immediately."  "He doesn't respond, so she tears apart his cortical array," the actress says. "In effect she becomes a mad scientist, and she's desperately in search of this wiring problem that's allowing this to happen.  "In the meantime, the Voyager has discovered this as well."  Not to give away too much, but the Borg Queen makes Janeway a most tempting offer.  Janeway, of course rejects the proposal, setting in motion a chain of events that won't be resolved until Voyager's 7th season opener which airs next fall.  Thompson spent much of previous Voyager shot blinded by the Borg Queen's contact lenses, being led around the set by a production assistant. Though she still wore lenses for "Unimatrix Zero," the actress reports that the production staff was "extra-sensitive" about how long the lenses stayed in, adding that writer-producer Brannon Braga space her work days to give her eyes time to recover. 

However, "Unimatrix Zero" was still a tough, tough shoot.  "They work so fast over at Star Trek, and it's not really the way I like to work, particularly when they throw last-minute script revisions at you," says Thompson, now a regular on ABC's freshman drama "Once and Again. And a lot of the revisions are huge techno-babble paragraphs. I've been in situations like that before, where they worked very fast," Thompson says, "But I was dealing with normal language, and I wasn't in costume or elaborate makeup."  "But to be the Borg Queen and do that was not so easy," she concludes. "It doesn't come second nature for me."  Practice makes perfect, however, and Thompson will be back as the Borg Queen later this summer when she films "Unimatrix Zero" part 2. The actress hopes not only that there will be a finished script, but also that the episode will feature a scene as deliciously decadent as her favorite moment in "Unimatrix Zero."  There's one scene where you see me with a bunch of drone heads that I'm dissecting and have already dissected. There was a moment when they handed me a head before we started a scene, and the head was dripping and there were wires and other electrical pieces hanging out of it."  "It was very sci-fi Hamlet. It was very 'Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio.'"