What Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Star Nana Visitor Looks Like Today
Strong, capable women are integral to "Star Trek." And in the world of Trek, few women go harder than former Bajoran resistance fighter Major Kira Nerys of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine." Despite Visitor's original misconception that Kira Nerys would be a one-off performance, the straight-talking Bajoran would become one of the franchise's most beloved characters, with sites like Slate and Wired ranking Nerys among their top 10 "Star Trek" crew members.
After "Deep Space Nine" ended, the actor who brought Nerys to life, Nana Visitor, went on to guest star as the sadistic Madame X, aka Elizabeth Renfro, on "Dark Angel," appearing in six episodes of the James Cameron co-created cyberpunk series. Between 2009 and 2014, Visitor voice-acted as a number of "Family Guy" characters. She would later land a role on the Seth MacFarlane Trek-inspired series "The Orville," but much to the disappointment of "Star Trek"-loving "Orville" fans, Visitor's agent didn't tell the actor she had the part until it was too late for her to join the series.
Through the years, Visitor has also guest-starred on a number of other shows, including "Battlestar Galactica," "Torchwood: Miracle Day," "Grimm," and "Castle." She has also appeared in a few films, including her roles as Pamela Voorhees in the 2009 "Friday the 13th" and as an adoption agent in another MacFarlane project, "Ted 2." Visitor would also stop in to reprise her role as Kira Nerys on a 2022 episode of "Star Trek: Lower Decks." Most recently, Visitor has been busy writing "Star Trek: Open a Channel: A Woman's Trek," which the actor called "a book about the women of Star Trek and their cultural effect" (via X) scheduled for release in October 2024.
For Visitor, Kira Nerys was a gamechanging female role
In a 1990s landscape where TV and film representations of women too often lacked dimension and complexity, Visitor found Nerys to be a game-changer. Up to that point, Visitor told Bleeding Cool, all of her roles had been written to in some way serve the production's male characters. "I served to make people understand something more about the male character who was the star of every show," Visitor explained. In fact, Nerys was written so differently that the actor originally mistook Kira for a male role, telling herself that someone had made a mistake. When she realized it wasn't, she pumped herself up to get into the Kira Nerys headspace with the help of some Doc Martens and very loud rap music. In a world of flat, static female characters, Visitor found Nerys to be a refreshingly complicated figure.
As the actor told TrekMovie.com, "[I]t was the first time I was playing someone who wasn't an adjective. She had goals, and agency, and dreams. And it was like being taken out of a straitjacket." Visitor's decision to write her book years later grew out of the awareness that many viewers connect with characters like Nerys and that connection has the power to quite literally change lives.
Visitor sees that need for representation realized in the new slate of "Star Trek" series that strives for more diverse representation despite the apparent cognitive dissonance of some gatekeeping old-school Trekkies. As Visitor keenly observed in her interview with Bleeding Cool, "People didn't understand there were many more diverse groups, how many women, how many black women were watching the original show and getting huge inspiration from it."