As a seasoned gamer and Star Trek enthusiast with countless hours spent in the vast expanse of the galaxy, I can confidently say that Alice Krige’s portrayal of the Borg Queen is one for the ages. However, stepping into those metallic shoes was no picnic, as she herself revealed in her grueling transformation process.
Alice Krige, who played one of the most formidable Star Trek villains as the Borg Queen, found her most challenging ordeal to be becoming the character herself. Making her debut in the second-best Star Trek film, “Star Trek: First Contact,” her outstanding performance required a meticulous and potentially uncomfortable transformation using peculiar substances. In an interview for “The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, and Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek: The Next 25 Years From The Next Generation To J.J. Abrams,” Krige confessed that during the character design process, they used a substance called Gafquat on her head. This material, resembling a concentrated hair spray, was applied with a spoon and hardened so much that it felt like she had a hot pan on her head.
The material maintained a distance between Krige’s hair and the adhesive used during the application of prosthetics, which was an intricate process taking roughly six hours daily for makeup application from the neck up, an hour to put on the suit, and another two hours to remove it. Luckily, the artists handling the transformation kept the environment lively with their humorous antics, sharing enough jokes to last a lifetime.
Alice Krige couldn’t stay hidden as the legendary Borg Queen
First Contact”, shared that they took special measures to keep Alice Krige in the scene without concealing her captivating mouth and eyes. He mentioned that it would have been disappointing to hide these features under a mask. This experience from his long-term work on Star Trek taught him a valuable lesson about alien characters – often, actors can get lost behind prosthetics, but they didn’t want that to happen with Alice.
The end result is a Borg leader that looks more human than her counterparts but still not human at all. She became a character worthy to be in the same conversation as Khan or Q, but the journey to find her was a long one. “We saw almost a hundred actresses for the Borg Queen, but nobody was able to nail it, because the language was very difficult, stilted, metaphoric, and not very conversational.” Thankfully, Krige had the perfect combination to face off against Picard (Patrick Stewart). “Alice brought all of that into the room. When she walked in, [producer] Rick Berman and I both breathed a collective sigh of relief that we had found an actress who could play the part.” You might say, resistance was futile.
Get the Looper exclusive on what it’s like to play the Borg here.
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2024-08-26 14:59