Star Trek: Prodigy’s Kate Mulgrew Reveals Janeway May Come Back for a New Generation
Paramount+ came up with the first episode of Star Trek: Prodigy this week which will the first-ever series aimed at younger audiences. Star Trek: Prodigy will introduce old and new Stark Trek fans to a new ensemble cast of characters who will take charge of the as abandoned Starfleet vessel, USS Protostar. However, they will be joined a Captain Kathryn Janeway. The character will be voiced by Kate Mulgrew, who starred in Star Trek: Voyager. As the first female Captain to lead a Star Trek series, Janeway has left a great mark on women in leadership positions. Talking to comicbook.com, Mulgrew on how returning to the role affects the legacy of Janeway.
Star Trek: Prodigy Is Here!
“Well, it’s a further enhancement of that legacy, isn’t it?” She says. “Because who better than this young demographic to carry the mantle and what better mantle to give them than that of Star Trek?
However, this is not the same Janeway fans from the 7 long seasons of Star Trek: Voyager. In Prodigy’s Janeway is just a training hologram built-in Protostar’s computer.
“She’s familiar, but she’s different,” Mulgrew tells us of the nuanced differences between the two versions of the character. “She’s a hologram, so she is endowed with certain traits that would make her arguably a little bit bigger than life, whereas of course, live-action Janeway was live-action and what you saw with what you got. But I love drawing her, I love illustrating her and shaping her in accordance to the needs of the other characters. It’s really a wonderful challenge creatively.”
Mulgrew also talked about voicing the character and playing it in live-action.
“Well it’s solitary,” Mulgrew says of recording her vocal performances. “Comparatively speaking, it’s easier, certainly easier than the live-action. And I find being alone in the booth very freeing. I find something about that whole sense of being sort of cloaked in velvet wonderfully liberating and I don’t know why, but I always have. I started by reading books on tape when I was a very young actress and I just loved the whole sense of it, sense of mystery and you can take wing imaginatively in that booth in a way that sometimes in live-action, you can’t.”
“I would say beware of the emotional flooding that might overcome them,” she says. “It happened to me today watching it backstage. It’s very strange. It’s a deep, deep thing. If you love Star Trek, and if you love a particular character like Janeway, it’s going to be very, very resonant, particularly if you’re sharing it with your young ones, very meaningful, I should think, to have that shared experience. It’s going to be weighted with a future that perhaps the other demographics did not have.”
Star Trek: Prodigy’s premiere episode is streaming now on Paramount+.
