Killer Queen
As the VHS edition of Star Trek: First Contact finally goes on sale,
Borg Queen Alice Krige takes John Archer behind the scenes
 It's 9.50am, I'm
strolling purposefully across Hyde Park, and I need the toilet. Badly. This
may seem, to 'borrow' the words of Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, to be
a little bit more information than you needed to know right now. But believe
me, it is relevant. You see, at 10.00am I'm supposed to walk into an office,
get out my pen and pad, and chat as if we're old mates with the Borg Queen.
I'm sure anyone who's seen Star Trek: First Contact will now appreciate
my 'nervousness'. One of the most memorable big-screen baddies of recent memory,
Ms Queen has a nasty habit of travelling the universe conquering races and 'assimilating'
them into her own unstoppable army. Few people who meet her live to tell the
tale, and even those who do generally come away with mechanical body parts,
an ugly lump of metal on their heads and an aversion to referring to themselves
in the first person singular. Ridiculous as it may sound, the only thought running
through my mind was: will the Borg Queen let me use her throne room?
I finally get to the surprisingly unfuturistic
door (if I didn't know better I'd say it almost looked like ordinary wood),
take a deep breath, and walk right in. To find...
Alice Krige, actress. No pitch black eyes, cybernetic
bodysuits or pipes anywhere. No pale, glistening skin or heart-freezing stares.
Just a beautiful, petite woman with a warm smile and gentle expression wearing
what can only be described as – gasp – smart but definitely non-rubber
clothes. 'Hi,' she says. 'So you're from Home Cinema Choice? I've been
reading your magazine this morning and found it absolutely fascinating.'
Er, hang on a minute. Reality check. Shouldn't
I be hearing things like 'you're weapons are useless against us', and 'prepare
to be assimilated'? What's all this nice stuff?
'I'd love to know as much about how all these things
work as you do,' she continues, without a hint of sarcasm. Resisting the urge
to say that I'd love to know as much about splicing artificial implants into
human organisms and taking over the universe as she does, I settle down in a
chair, accept the cup of tea (!) she offers in my direction, and act like I
knew all along that she wouldn't be anything like her scary First Contact
persona. After all, that would've been silly, wouldn't it?...
IN THE BEGINNING
 So
(cough, splutter), how did you get to be the Borg Queen, then? 'I'll never know
all the ins and outs of it of course – you're the lowest form of life as
an actor – but basically it all started when I was called and asked to
come in and read for the part. At first they sent me only the scenes I was going
to be in, so I told my agent I'd only audition if I had the whole script.'
Hold it: you mean to say you messed with the Star
Trek people?
'Um, yes. Luckily my agent said, "No, no, you don't
understand. This is Star Trek. Nobody sees the whole script because it
would be on the Internet before they even start filming. Just go there and humour
them, alright?" So I did.'
It then turned out that 17 years as a thesp had
come up trumps in the shape of a couple of familiar faces. 'When I arrived to
audition I realised Jonathan Frakes (The Next Generation's Will Riker
and director of First Contact) and I had worked together on TV 12 years
earlier – and what's more, the woman casting the movie, Junie Lowry-Johnson,
was the same woman who'd cast that TV show as well!'
Still, old mates or no old mates, she was left
dangling for three weeks after the audition. 'After a couple of weeks of hearing
nothing, I just thought, "Oh well, another one bites the dust."' Happily for
us all, she couldn't have been more wrong.
ALICE IN TREKLAND
The more observant of you may be wondering how
Alice could have turned up to audition for a Trek movie without knowing
Jonathan Frakes would be there. Amazing though it may sound, Alice's knowledge
of the decade-crossing, global phenomenon that is Star Trek was, shall
we say, a little limited. 'All I knew was that Dr Spock had something to do
with it and someone said "beam me up Scotty" a lot.'
Ahem. And your excuse for such ignorance?
'Well, I grew up in South Africa, and they didn't
get TV there until the year I left, so I literally grew up without ever watching
one. It's this huge black hole in my education, and I've never quite caught
up.' Oh. Actually that's not bad as excuses go.
Obviously, though, she didn't want to turn up for
the audition not knowing at all what was expected. The old showbiz community
thing came to the rescue once more. 'I had a friend who'd written some episodes
of Deep Space Nine, so the moment I knew I was auditioning I phoned him
and found out he had all the Borg episodes on tape, so I rushed over to his
house and watched them, to get a sense of the universe.
'Once they offered me the part I watched hours
and hours of tapes of the whole Next Generation series to learn about
all the characters.' Hmm, now that's a poor excuse; if you're going to
turn into a Trek junkie, you should at least be honest about it. The Federation
would expect nothing less...
SUITS YOU, YOUR MAJESTY
 Initially Alice had high hopes that dressing
up as the Borg Queen was going to be fun. 'The first description of her in the
script – which I finally got given in full – said: "She wears no prosthetics,
but she is bald." I thought "Great, great, I can handle that – as long
as I don't have to wear any prosthetics, I'll be fine." The last thing I wanted
when surrounded by women like Gates McFadden – looking like Marina, all
svelte and skinny and long-legged – was to be stuck in some hideous prosthetic
body suit.'
Oh dear. First Contact fans will be aware
that far from having no prosthetics, the Borg Queen as she appears in the final
movie has a ruddy great lump of them sticking out the back of her head, and
is adorned in what looks suspiciously like a full-on body suit.
'A few days after I was offered the part I got
a call telling me I had to pop in to have a mask done. I thought this was a
bit odd considering they were only going to put a bald cap on me, but I went
along. While they were doing the casting I asked why they had to do it, and
they said it was for the prosthetics...'
Originally the Borg Queen's outfit was envisaged
as a shimmering dress 'with splits all over the place so it could reveal a little
bit of Borg every time I moved', but the full rubber, figure-tight number they
finally went for proved to be every bit as horrific to wear as Alice had feared.
'As soon as I knew I had to wear the suit I went
on a fitness regime to get in better shape. Thank goodness I did, otherwise
I would never have been able to cope with what was to come...
'The first day was the worst. On top of six hours
in make-up it took me another full hour to get into the suit. People had to
hold it down while I wiggled into it. By the time they took it off again at
the end of the day my hands were purple, and I was actually in an enormous amount
of pain. Also, I'd had to wear a catsuit under the rubber one, and this had
rolled up at the bottom of the legs and given me a little bracelet of blisters
round each ankle.'
Another hard lesson was learnt on that first day:
even Borg Queens have to use the little girl's room.
'All morning while getting made up and costumed
I'd blithely drunk loads of coffee, tea and orange juice, so not surprisingly
come late afternoon I was absolutely desperate to pee. Eventually I said "Look,
I've just got to go to the loo", so they resignedly said OK and off I went.
The problem was, it took me 45 minutes, with the whole crew just sitting there
waiting for me.
'One of the make-up artists had once made a skin-tight
suit for an actress and put holes in the soles of its feet so that she could
stand on a drain and let the pee go out that way. He offered to do the same
for me, but I said I'd just rather not drink anything in future, thank you very
much!'
Fortunately, Alice didn't have to endure a second
day of such unpleasantness. 'Bless them, after we'd wrapped at two in the morning
– this was after starting at four the previous morning – Todd Masters
[Borg Design Supervisor] and his team went back to their workshop and made me
a softer suit. After the hard suit this new one felt like marshmallow –
it was just heavenly.'
Even this more wearer-friendly suit required the
constant attentions of a suitably queenly entourage, though. 'I had someone
to look after my Borg feet, someone looking after my hands, someone who was
in charge of the contact lenses, someone in charge of the suit's battery packs,
someone with a glue pot and a paintbrush to stick the suit back together when
it ripped (which was often) and two people wielding the biggest tubes of KY
Jelly I've ever seen in my life!'
Excuse me?
'I had to be constantly "KY-ed" to give me that
all-over, wet, shiny look.' Ah, of course.
At least Alice believes all the effort was worth
it. 'Right from when I first saw a sculpture of her head, I thought the Queen
was extremely beautiful. The designers told me they'd wanted a sort of Nefertiti
look with a high forehead, and it worked brilliantly.
'The only thing I didn't like was that they'd given
me eyebrows. I didn't want them. They thought this would make me look strange
– obviously no one minded the fact that I had pipes sticking out the back
of my head! – but I said they'd limit me to one expression. Both Jonathan
Frakes and I had decided earlier that the more we played against the usual idea
of a villain, the more sympathetic and intriguing we could make her – something
that would have been very hard to achieve with a pair of wicked pointy eyebrows.'
GETTING INTO CHARACTER
 With
all the chaos engendered by the costume going on, it's no surprise that Alice
had trouble initially working out how best to play the Borg Queen, to suss out
what made the character tick.
'I asked people on the set where they thought the
Borg originated from, who they really were, and was disturbed to find that everyone
had different ideas. Usually I try to put together what I call a back story
to a character I'm playing, but when I tried to find one for the Borg Queen
I kept running up against a brick wall.
'Then one day I was reading Stephen Hawking's A
Brief History Of Time and it came to me: she's it. She is
the Borg. All the Borg we've encountered previously are just additives, just
her tools. Hawking says energy always has been and always will be, and that's
what she is. Pure mental energy that's always been there.'
Blimey. Anything else?
'Also, when I first saw myself in the mirror in
full make-up and costume and saw the stunned reactions from the rest of the
crew around me, I got this extraordinary feeling of power.' Aha. Now we're getting
somewhere. 'I realised that the Borg Queen's main – if not only –
drive is her insatiable lust for power.'
Or should that just be straight lust? Judging by
the lip-led attention she devotes in First Contact to android Lieutenant
'functional in every way and programmed in multiple techniques' Data, it looks
like our beloved queen has more than one definition of assimilation.
'The Queen's sexuality is part of her power. Before
we started filming, Brent Spiner [who plays Data] made me realise that the Queen
sees Data as the one person in the universe who's actually a match for her,
so seeing that his Achilles' Heel is that he wants to be human, she reels him
in using one of the most intense areas of human experience: sexuality. So from
the off I knew that the Queen should have a lot of sexuality – but it wasn't
until I got into the suit that I actually started to feel it.
'It was really weird. The suit made me feel as
if I didn't have any clothes on, but oddly I didn't feel embarrassed about feeling
naked. I've done nude scenes before and found them very difficult – you
just have to get rid of your inhibitions by focussing on what's happening between
the characters – but as the Queen I actually felt as if I enjoyed being
nude. I got a real buzz out of it!' Honestly. Stick a person in a bit of rubber
suit and just look what happens.
THE MOOD ON SET
 As
we Brits know only too well, of course, where there's a queen there's a class
system. And strangely this seemed true during filming. 'While I got given a
nice soft suit to wear, all my poor Borg minions had to put up with hard suits.
They all had necklaces of blisters and were in absolute agony. But the strangest
thing was the way people reacted to them. One of the crew confided to me one
day that she felt really guilty because she hadn't actually spoken to any of
the Borg because they were so scary and forbidding to look at. They'd become
sort of ostracised, standing in the corner by themselves. They’d be in
from two in the morning without anyone speaking to them. It was very sad.'
Sadness, however, was not on the agenda for the
legendarily close Next Generation crew. 'They really, really get on with
each other. There are series where actors hate each other, but it was absolutely
apparent that this lot get on like brothers and sisters.
'Patrick Stewart [Captain Picard], Jonathan [Frakes]
and Brent [Spiner] have been together so long that they really know each other's
foibles and are merciless about how they tease each other. They're very funny
people anyway, but together they create a sense of carnival on the set. It was
an enormous amount of fun.'
HOOK, LINE AND ASSIMILATOR
As my allotted time with Alice Krige draws towards
its unwanted end (fortunately a toilet visit during our interview didn't take
45 minutes...), I reflect on what has been – for me at least – a hugely
enjoyable hour. How long ago it seems now that I was standing outside the office
door quaking in my HCC boots dreading my audience with the Queen of intergalactic
evil. And yet in a way she has managed to pull off a truly Borg Queenian feat.
By just being one of the most unpretentiously nice people I've met, she's
won my unswerving devotion from this moment on. And not a brainwashing implant
in sight.
When she next appears on our screens – in
Close Relations, an upcoming five-part Beeb production about a dysfunctional
family – I guarantee I won't miss an episode. I'm even willing to forgive
her for being in the truly dreadful Stephen King adaptation Sleepwalkers,
for heaven's sake – and nobody could ask for more than that.
Which leaves me with just one more question. Why
is it that in her main two Hollywood movies, Sleepwalkers and Star
Trek: First Contact, she's been asked to play non-human monsters?
'Hmm. You know, I really have no idea. It's a bit
worrying, isn't it? [Long pause] Perhaps you ought to ask my husband...'
John Archer, Home Cinema Choice, May 1998
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