As part of CNET’s coverage of Star Trek’s 50th anniversary, I chatted with a dozen cast members from across the franchise about everything from Star Trek’s inclusive message to whether the ships are actually real.

By Ian Sherr

If Nana Visitor could have done one thing on Star Trek, she would have been captain.

Call it galactic jealousy that Kate Mulgrew ended up as Capt. Kathryn Janeway of “Star Trek: Voyager,” running a ship with a lot of strong female characters.

Nana Visitor as Kira Nerys in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” / CBS

Visitor was powerful on her own. As Kira Nerys, Visitor played a freedom fighter who fought back the invasion of a militaristic species. Her race seemed to embody allegories to World War II, specifically the French Resistance and the Holocaust. Nerys was a fighter. Visitor loved that about her.

Even then, she wanted more.

“I really wanted to do Captain Janeway,” she said. “I wanted everything, but I didn’t want to leave Kira…I wanted to do it all.”

Visitor (whose first name is pronounced na-NAW) clearly had an emotional connection to her Star Trekexperience that made it more than a job. Maybe that’s because Star Trek was the only TV show she watched as a teenager, usually while eating dinner before work.

Or maybe it’s because executive producer Rick Berman wooed her to join the cast by telling her about the gritty and emotional stories “Deep Space Nine” would explore during its 1993-1999 run. That was enough to get her to ignore her manager, who told her being on Star Trek was career suicide.

For the next seven years, she lived and breathed Star Trek nearly 16 hours a day. “It’s taken up a big part of my life and an important one,” she said.

Visitor also identified as Nerys so much she sometimes still slips into talking about her in the first person. “When we’d go on the Defiant,” she said at one point, referring to a ship on the show. Then she caught herself and said, “OK, when we’d go on the set of the Defiant…”

The realness of what the Star Trek series was able to create with sets, props and makeup had a profound effect. “I don’t have a really good handle on reality, not when my senses are being filled like they were on the show,” she said. “It was happening, and it was important. It was real to me.”Click for full coverage.

Visitor is currently working on a production of a play she wrote called “Bardo,” which explores suicide.

As part of CNET’s coverage of Star Trek’s 50th anniversary, I chatted with a dozen cast members from across the franchise about everything from Star Trek’s inclusive message to how to play a fake doctor in the future.

By Ian Sherr

Gates McFadden didn’t watch much TV before she landed a role on the Star Trek revival “The Next Generation.” And when she admitted to friends she had almost no Trekkie knowledge, they were horrified.

“I didn’t understand what warp speed is or what a Klingon is,” she said.

That’s probably why she turned down the role. Twice. It took several conversations with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry to turn her around. His goal for her character, Dr. Beverly Crusher, was to give a woman a command position on the Enterprise and much more substance than Communications Officer Nyota Uhura had in the original series.

Gates McFadden as Dr. Beverly Crusher. / CBS

“It’s a character that has authority and it’s something people didn’t have in the show,” she remembered Roddenberry telling her. Crusher would be able to challenge Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart. She’d also be his love interest, in addition to being a widow and single mother.

“I had grown up when Gloria Steinem had happened and the question was, Can women have it all?” she said. “This was a different role. There was something modern about it.”

Even so, she felt the show didn’t dig as deep on some aspects of her character, like single parenting.

She also faced the challenge of being on “The Next Generation” and raising her son, who was born about halfway through the show’s 1987-94 run. Though many of us would be jealous of parts of his childhood (“My son learned to walk on the bridge, literally”), she struggled with separating Gates McFadden from Beverly Crusher.

One way she handled that was by letting her son watch rehearsals, but not the finished show. “I didn’t want him to project onto my character,” she said. “I didn’t want him to confuse realities.”

There were times the situation worried her. Once, she was inspecting an action figure of her character for approval, and her son blurted out, “Oh, a mommy doll!”

It all turned out fine, she said, and she’s happy with the 25-year-old man he’s become.

As to her on-set son, Wesley Crusher, she felt  he got a bad rap from fans who complained he was both annoying and boring.

As part of CNET’s coverage of Star Trek’s 50th anniversary, I talked with a dozen cast members from across the franchise about everything from Star Trek’s inclusive message to how they really felt about their characters.

By Ian Sherr

Robert Beltran is known for two things in the Star Trek universe: playing Commander Chakotay in “Star Trek: Voyager” from 1995-2001, and complaining about it to the press.

Get Beltran going, and he’ll grumble about just about anything related to Star Trek. He didn’t like the monotony of shooting. (“I often say it’s like working in a factory.”) And he’s not a fan of its predictable format. (“I kept telling the writers, ‘If you can just take three minutes off a bridge scene and write another scene with human beings talking, the show is going to be much better.'”)

He even rails against the show’s “Prime Directive,” a guiding principle that prohibits Starfleet characters from interfering with the development of alien civilizations.

Robert Beltran as Chakotay in “Star Trek: Voyager.” / CBS

“The idea of leaving any species to die in its own filth when you have the ability to help them, just because you wanna let them get through their normal evolutionary processes is bunk — it’s a bunch of fascist crap,” he said. “I much prefer the Cub Scout motto.” (The Cub Scout motto, by the way, is about doing your best and helping others.)

So, it’s safe to say Beltran’s not much of a Trekkie. He barely watches TV anyway. He prefers the arts, music and stage work. He writes poetry and composes music.

Though initially he hoped the Chakotay character could present opportunities to explore culture and identity, Beltran, a child of Mexican immigrants, ultimately realized that wouldn’t happen much. But he’s made peace with it, and come to appreciate aspects of his life as a pseudo nerd-celebrity. Like many  Star Trek cast members, he appreciates the fan enthusiasm that’s helped keep the franchise alive.

“I also knew I was going to work with a bunch of great actors and a great crew,” he said, adding that the seven years he spent on the series were well worth it. “I wouldn’t trade them for anything.”

Beltran, 62, is currently turning toward more theater work and focusing on his music

As part of CNET’s coverage of Star Trek’s 50th anniversary, I chatted with a dozen cast members from across the franchise about everything from Star Trek’s inclusive message to how to convincingly play an alien.

By Ian Sherr

If John Billingsley had his way, you’d have heard him squawk like a bird in the middle of his lines.

He was auditioning for the part of Phlox, the ship’s doctor on “Star Trek: Enterprise,” which ran from 2001 to 2005. The character was part of a race of aliens called the Denobulans that hadn’t been depicted on the Star Trek shows before.

John Billingsley as Phlox on “Star Trek: Enterprise.” / CBS

When the actor read for the part, the producers requested a slight alien accent. Billingsley had no idea what that meant or what a Denobulan would sound like. So after unsuccessfully bouncing a few ideas off his wife, he decided to give his character “kind of an Indian lilt.” And a squawk.

Since no one told him not to squawk, he continued to do it “in moments of rapture,” even after he landed the part.

But the bird sounds were not to be. When he tried squawking during production for the pilot, they told him to stop screwing around.

“I figured, go for the job you would like to have,” Billingsley remembers with a laugh. “At the time I was auditioning, I thought I’d like to be a bird — and I was going to give him something to flap his wings about.”

Though Billingsley played an alien, he appreciated the fact that he didn’t have to learn the long and intricate history of the Vulcans or how to speak Klingon. “What were the Denobulans like? They were like me.”

Billingsley spent two and a half hours in makeup each day becoming his character. That’s about the same amount of time it took  Michael Dorn, who played Worf on two other Star Trek shows, to morph into an Klingon. Billingsley routinely turned on classical music and squinted at The New York Times without his glasses while being transformed.

Like many Star Trek cast members, Billingsley, now 56, began his career as a stage actor. He moved to Los Angeles to try his hand at TV at the age of 35 and ended up as a “character actor.” In Hollywood parlance, that means he played a specific type. He wasn’t the crusading attorney or the gruff cop. Instead, producers cast him as a child predator. A lot.

He was up for the part of the tech whiz on the action show “Alias” once, but didn’t get it.

So when the opportunity to join “Star Trek: Enterprise” came along, Billingsley was open to it. He’d watched the original “Star Trek” as a child, but he didn’t, in his words, “grok” it. He preferred magazines and books, including the works of notable sci-fi authors Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. “I have been a big reader all my life,” he said.

That’s probably why he felt a connection to Phlox, whose Buddhist-like attitude he appreciated. He also liked that his character used holistic medicine and didn’t rely on technology, at least not too much. “It was nice to play a good guy and someone whose value system and temperament is much closer to my own,” he said.

Billingsley, you see, is a self-described  Luddite, and found the technobabble Star Trek is so well known for the most challenging part of the job. Thankfully, most of it was medical babble, which was easier to manage.

As part of CNET’s coverage of Star Trek’s 50th anniversary, we talked with a dozen cast members from across the franchise about everything from Star Trek’s inclusive message to how actors show emotion when their character has none.

By Ian Sherr

Tim Russ may be among the most-cast actors in Star Trek shows and movies, but don’t call him a Trekkie.

In fact, the 60-year-old actor, who appeared on “Star Trek: Voyager” from 1995 to 2001, for many years saw Star Trek as just another job. Sure, he’d seen reruns of the original series, mostly since there weren’t many TV channels when he was growing up. But before he began his Star Trek career, he knew about as much about the franchise as he did about “Gilligan’s Island.”

“It was my job,” he said. “It could have just as well been ‘Baywatch.'”

Tim Russ as Voyager’s head of security, Tuvok. / CBS

Russ is a sci-fi nut, though, and when he was cast, he took the part because he remembered how interesting and edgy the original Star Trek show’s stories were.

“They had social commentary,” he said. And to a black kid growing up in the turmoil of the ’60s, the issues the show tackled hit close to home. Gene Roddenberry, the creator, “dealt with the conditions of what was happening,” Russ said. “I was very much aware obviously of what was going on with the turmoil of civil rights and Vietnam, and that was all brought out in his stories.”

Russ was first cast on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” as a terrorist named Devor, not the character he’d ultimately play. Russ held two other roles — one as an unnamed “Lieutenant,” the other as a Klingon mercenary called T’Kar on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” — before being cast as Tuvok, the Vulcan head of security for “Star Trek: Voyager.” He called it a seven-year audition process.

Russ likes to think about big-picture issues, which is probably why he appreciates sci-fi so much. “It allows you to challenge the human condition,” he said. He particularly enjoys self-contained stories, like H.G. Wells’ novel “The War of the Worlds” and the TV show “The X-Files.”

The actor is still involved in Star Trek, though not in an official sense. He’s directed and acted in fan projects like “Star Trek: Renegades.” Some of his most recent work outside the Star Trekuniverse includes “Junkie,” a gritty film he directed about a small town riddled with a heroin epidemic.