The Captain Janeway Crisis: How Kate Mulgrew Saved ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ From a Day One Disaster
Before Mulgrew stepped in, the first woman to lead 'Star Trek' nearly sank the entire production
Key Takeaways
- The biggest crisis for 'Star Trek: Voyager' came before filming—with its captain.
- Geneviève Bujold’s exit reshaped the future of 'Star Trek: Voyager.'
- Kate Mulgrew didn’t just replace Bujold as Janeway—she defined her.
As Star Trek moved into the mid-1990s, the franchise was preparing to break new ground once again. Following the success of The Next Generation and the ongoing run of Deep Space Nine, Paramount launched Star Trek: Voyager in 1995 as the flagship series for the newly formed UPN network. The premise was a strong one: a Starfleet vessel, the USS Voyager, is suddenly hurled across the galaxy to the distant Delta Quadrant, leaving its crew 70,000 light-years from home with no immediate hope of rescue. Forced to forge alliances—including an uneasy one with a band of Maquis rebels—the crew would have to rely on each other to survive a decades-long journey back to Earth.
At the center of that journey was Captain Kathryn Janeway, a character who would carry not only the narrative weight of the series, but also the historic distinction of being the first female captain to headline a Star Trek show. Around her would be a diverse ensemble, including Chakotay (Robert Beltran), the former Maquis leader turned first officer; Tuvok (Tim Russ), the logical Vulcan security chief; B’Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson), a brilliant but volatile engineer; Harry Kim (Garrett Wang), the eager young operations officer; Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill), a disgraced pilot seeking redemption; and the Emergency Medical Hologram (Robert Picardo), a program forced to function as the ship’s doctor. But before any of that could come together, the producers faced a daunting challenge: finding the right actress to embody Janeway—someone who could project authority, intelligence, warmth and resilience, while anchoring a series that would test its characters in ways no previous Star Trek had attempted.
The casting of Captain Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager was an arduous process, with a wide variety of possible names being bandied about, including Lindsay Wagner (The Bionic Woman), Linda Hamilton (Beauty and the Beast, The Terminator), Erin Gray (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), Susan Gibney (who had appeared on a pair of Next Generation episodes), Joanna Cassidy (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) and Kate Mulgrew.
KATE MULGREW (actor, Captain Kathryn Janeway): “I was in Ireland with my kids and my manager called me about the audition. I said I wouldn’t come home for it; that I didn’t know anything about it and I wouldn’t leave in the middle of a vacation. When I did get home, I asked if they were still auditioning people, and they were. So I went on camera in Times Square and shot an audition, which was appalling. It was pouring down rain, I had fallen in love with this guy in Ireland who I was about to meet with, and I said at the end of the audition, directly into the camera, ‘Forgive me, that was the most abysmal audition of my life, but I’ve fallen in love, my head’s not here, so sorry!’ And sure enough, it was bad.”
JERI TAYLOR (executive producer; co-creator): “The search for the captain was a long and difficult one. This is the person that gets the white-hot glare of publicity as the first female ever to head one of the Star Trek series and she has to be just right. We considered, auditioned, looked at tapes of what seemed like every actress between the ages of probably 30 and 55 in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Canada, and Europe. We had several people we were happy with. Some of the studio executives didn’t necessarily share our feelings. Finally, with days to go, we were made aware that Geneviève Bujold was interested, and we were ecstatic.”
Geneviève Bujold is a French-Canadian actress best known for her portrayal of Anne Boleyn in the 1969 film Anne of the Thousand Days, for which she won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress and was nominated for an Academy Award. Other notable credits include Brian De Palma’s Obsession (1976), Coma (1978), Tightrope (1984) and David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988).
KENNETH BILLER (executive producer; showrunner, Season 7): “Jeri, Rick, and Michael were really excited about it. I think they thought it was kind of cool that she was not American per se in the way that Jean-Luc Picard had not been American, and that that kind of spoke to the international quality of it all. She was considered a very serious, really interesting actress.”
RICK BERMAN (executive producer; co-creator): “She had been an Academy Award[-nominated] movie star. Michael and Jeri adored her. I felt there was something funny there; there was something that didn’t seem right.”
BRANNON BRAGA (executive producer): “I really pushed for Geneviève Bujold to play Janeway. I was, like, ‘I love Geneviève Bujold from her work in the seventies and early eighties.’ That turned out to be a bust. I don’t think she realized she had to be there every day. If you watch her dailies, you can see she’s not very good.”
WINRICH KOLBE (director, “Caretaker”): “On the day we met her, I told Rick, ‘This will either be a total disaster or a real triumph.’ At that point, I didn’t know which it was going to be. At that particular moment, I guess there was a little panic to get somebody so we could get going. Some of us were very high on Geneviève, so we hired her.”
JERI TAYLOR: “The character’s original name was Elizabeth Janeway, but that was changed for legal reasons. There is a prominent Elizabeth Janeway and we were not allowed to use names of prominent people, because it can be sticky, although we heard sort of second hand that Elizabeth Janeway was flattered about it. It then changed to Nicole at Geneviève Bujold’s request, because that is in fact her given name and she wanted that. For two days, it was Nicole Janeway.”
TOM MAZZA (Paramount executive): “Things began with, obviously, a long casting process to find the captain. One of the aspects we were looking for in the captain, the attributes of the actor, is that they had to have strength. Every single captain had an internal strength that came through. When Geneviève Bujold’s name came up, it was a very interesting choice, but her strength tends to come from within a deeper place. That works sometimes. It doesn’t necessarily work for all characters, but historically, that role has always had a very strong personality outside, not just inside. But from the outside, her appearance was just a little softer and I think that was generally everybody’s question at the time.”
RICK BERMAN: “This was a woman who in no way was going to be able to deal with the rigors of episodic television. And I made the point very clear. They all said, ‘That’s nonsense, it’s going to be fine.’ So I said, ‘Well, at least let’s read her the riot act; let’s tell her how awful it can be to be a regular on a television series. That she’s going to be working with directors she doesn’t know; she’s going to be working 15 hours a day,’ etc., etc.”
WINRICH KOLBE: “Her concept of the show was completely her own. I do not understand why she took the show in the first place. It seemed to me she was not prepared for what happened.”
RICK BERMAN: “So we had her in. Of course the studio was in love with the idea of an Academy Award[-nominated] movie star. Jeri Taylor and Michael Piller went apes**t. They thought, holy mackerel, we have ourselves an Academy Award–winning [sic] movie star to play Janeway. I spent a lot of time with this woman and I could just see that there was a fragility to her and the way that she talked about making movies, the way that she talked about the kind of relationship that she had with her directors and with her writers. It was a whole sensibility that told me there was no way this woman was going to be able to do an episodic television show. I remember she said, ‘I will go talk to my children and I will let you know on Monday.’ And she called me the next day and said, ‘I’ve spoken with my children and the answer is oui, oui, I will do it.’ I just thought, ‘Oy, I know I’m right about this. I know this isn’t going to work.’”
“All I said to Jeri and Michael was, ‘ This is the biggest mistake that we’re making. There is no fu**ing way this woman is going to be able to pull this off. She’s lovely, she’s beautiful, but it’s not going to happen.’ And everybody disagreed with me, and I was not going to pull rank, and I said, ‘Great.’ It wasn’t even the first day when she said, ‘They want to dye my hair.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you’ve got gray hair, we want to dye your hair.’ ‘But, I like my hair.’ And then the next day it was, ‘I have costumers who are coming and touching me and adjusting my costume. Who’s directing this thing?’ It was Rick Kolbe. And she said, ‘I do not know this man. I need to spend some time with him discussing my character, discussing my story, discussing what this episode is about.’ And then she started saying things like, ‘Where’s rehearsal time?’ One thing after another and I just said, ‘Here we go…’”
WINRICH KOLBE: “We started shooting her on Monday, working hard to get going, and on Thursday afternoon, we were just about ready to break for lunch when she said, in front of everyone, ‘It’s just not working out too well. I don’t think I’m right for the part.’ To which I said, ‘Don’t ever say that!’ Not because I wanted to lecture her or because she was wrong, but because she shouldn’t have said this in front of the crew. It creates a psychological problem. The captain of the ship is supposed to be the captain of the crew, of us. He or she defines how a unit works. Patrick Stewart did it his way, Avery Brooks did it his way. When the star of the show says, “I don’t think I’m right for the part,” you can feel the reaction from the entire crew. At that moment, I got together with her, we had a chat about the situation. I called the producers and about half an hour later, it was decided to cancel her relationship with the show. It wasn’t Paramount or anyone that fired her; she just decided to pull out.”
MICHAEL PILLER (executive producer; co-creator): “What happened very simply was that Geneviève Bujold was used to working on features and used to working in a very specific manner, with great preparation and great rehearsal, and when she realized that she was going to be working 12-hour days and that there were none of the luxuries that come with acting for features—I don’t mean luxuries in terms of perks, I’m talking about the luxury of time and preparation—she just said, ‘I’m not going to be able to do this.’ That was obviously a problem.”
TOM MAZZA: “One thing you can’t have as a starship captain is someone who appears uncomfortable and not confident in that role. That was permeating her performance. It was raising huge questions, and you can imagine the cost involved that’s mounting on an hourly basis. And the fact that she was guaranteed the entire season.”
GARRETT WANG (actor, “Harry Kim”): “Before we even shot the first scene, we had a walkthrough on the set with Rick Kolbe, where he took us around and showed us how to operate certain things. We were all there, including Geneviève. Her aura was ‘approach with caution.’ She didn’t talk to anybody; she just sort of walked around and watched and listened to what was being said. Every now and then, one of the cast members would walk up and say, ‘Congratulations,’ and she would smile or nod or say thank you and that was it. She just did not further the conversation.”
WINRICH KOLBE: “She wasn’t really a captain. She wanted to be Geneviève Bujold, not Captain Janeway. She didn’t want to run the ship. We shot for a day and a half, we did a lot of things and she was pretty much involved in everything. I tried to get her to give us the authority that I wanted from the character, and that never came through.”
MICHAEL PILLER: “There’s no question Geneviève had a problem understanding what the twenty-fourth-century human being was like, and what Roddenberry’s vision of humanity was, because an actor would often bring approaches to their character that would not feel comfortable with the context of Star Trek. It took us time, saying, ‘No, that’s just not the way Roddenberry sees the future.’ I think she bristled under that as well.”
GARRETT WANG: “I asked her how she felt and she said, ‘I feel like I can’t trust anybody.’ And she left it at that. The interpretation for me was that she was getting in on this show and was being dragged right and left with people saying, ‘Okay, your hair has to be like this. Okay, your suit has to be like this; you have to wear this kind of shoe. You can’t do this, you can’t do that.’ It’s kind of like they said, ‘Geneviève, you’re the captain and you can do what you want,’ and she says, ‘Great. I want to do this and this,’ and they say, ‘Oh, but you can’t do that.’ That’s where I think her comment about trust came in.”
WINRICH KOLBE: “We had a chat about it and I said, ‘Why can’t you give me what I’m looking for in Janeway?’ She said to me, ‘I don’t want to be Janeway. I want to be me.’ Geneviève Bujold is a very fragile human being on the outside, and I felt she had to project a very strong inside for it to work.”
GARRETT WANG: “She would walk on the bridge and speak in a low, whispery voice, and she’s supposed to be the captain. For this role, you’ve got to raise your volume, not only for the mike, but for the other actors to get psyched. Like where Patrick Stewart is walking across the bridge, the camera zooms in and he says, ‘Warp one. Engage!’ and he’s intense. Geneviève came out there and the intensity wasn’t there. I’m not by any means saying she was a bad actress, but her take was different. She was commanding within, but there are some things you have to do to play the game. You just have to do it a certain way.”
“There’s a scene in the pilot when the Voyager is about to pull away from the Deep Space Nine station and things begin to happen when she says, ‘Engage.’ We’re filming and she walks around and says something to her first officer. He says, ‘Ready thrusters,’ I say, ‘Thrusters ready.’ She sits down in her chair and says, ‘Engage.’ The way she did it, though, was unusual. She sat down in the chair, closed her eyes for about a minute and softly said, ‘Engage.’ It just wasn’t working.”
RENÉ ECHEVARRIA (supervising producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine): “The only other actor that I remember having such an extraordinary commitment to the part like the original actors, and this is kind of funny, was Geneviève Bujold. In her first few days in her aborted Star Trek career, I remember watching dailies, which I think we had to sneak in and steal a videotape from Jeri Taylor’s office to watch them. They would say, ‘Action!’ and she would sit there with her eyes closed for, like, ten seconds. Then when she opened her eyes and started the scene, she was there; she was in space. She was the captain of a spaceship somewhere in another world. For whatever reason, it didn’t work out, but it was that same level of commitment that Shatner and those guys brought to it.”
ROBERT BELTRAN (actor, Chakotay): “I was the last to be cast, so they had actually begun filming before the Chakotay character was involved. I came on doing makeup tests while they were filming. I think it was mostly Geneviève and Tim Russ that had scenes together. I honestly don’t really know what happened with that. I do know that when I would see her, she seemed kind of lost and out of it. It didn’t seem like she was happy to be there. That’s the general sense that I had. I also think that maybe it wasn’t totally her fault in the sense that, as a captain, she would have been the direct opposite of Kate. One of the reasons I wanted to do the show was I wanted to work with Geneviève. I had always loved her work, and I thought it would be great to work with her day in and day out for seven years. So I was really disappointed when she left. She had a different sensibility.”
RICK BERMAN: “On the first day, I got calls from Rick Kolbe, who was directing the pilot, saying that she was having trouble with her lines. She felt that she couldn’t memorize seven pages a day. Earlier, she refused to dye her hair. Then she finally agreed to dye it. Then one of the hair people came to comb her hair and she said, ‘Get away, get away; nobody touches my hair.’ And the makeup person came to touch her up, and then she started saying, ‘I don’t know this Rick Kolbe. How am I supposed to work with a director I don’t know?'”
TOM MAZZA: “Day two comes and we figured we’d see if day two is better. Day two wasn’t any better. Day three comes and we said, ‘We can’t do this. We’re going to have to bite the bullet.'”
RICK BERMAN: “And she finally went to her trailer in tears and I got a call from the director. I went down to her trailer with the director and I was very calm. I looked at her and said, ‘Look, just pack up your stuff and go home. Everything is going to be fine.’ And at that point I called the studio people, the chairman of the television division, and told him the story. He agreed and we said, ‘Let’s just shut down.’”
“As sad as I was, I had this gleeful sense of I told you so. The studio was so angry because we had to shut down and it cost a lot of money. They threatened to sue her, which was terrible—and, of course, they never did. All I know is that we then started the casting procedure again and Kate Mulgrew, who had been one of my top choices, we ended up hiring. She came in and read for us and for the studio, and as soon as we had hair situations worked out and uniform situations worked out, within a week we were shooting again.”
WINRICH KOLBE: “It’s probably good that the ‘situation’ happened when it did, even though it threw a monkey wrench into our operation. It would have been a disaster if we had shot the whole pilot and then found out it didn’t work.”
KATE MULGREW: “We know how great an actress she is. But she was not what they were looking for, and even if she had been, they were not what she was looking for. She had a 14-year-old son; she had a different idea of how she wanted to spend the next seven years of her life, and my hat has always been off to her because had she delayed, whether out of fear, greed, or whatever, it would have been a real problem for Paramount. Had she delayed even a few months and continued that long, it would have screwed everything up terribly. The fact that she did it so soon is, I think, a testament to her greatness, and I have always said that.”
TOM MAZZA: “When Kate walked in, you realized right away there was somebody who has that presence. Someone who said, ‘Okay, I get that they would have achieved the various milestones to get her to being captain.’”
KENNETH BILLER: “They decided they made a mistake and went back to Kate and got her in very quickly. Looking back, it’s very hard to imagine anybody but Kate playing that role. She just owned it completely.”
KATE MULGREW: “After that terrible audition, the man whom I fell in love with, and who became my second husband, took the script out of my bag and he said, ‘What is this?’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, because it’s something I’m not going to get.’ He said, ‘I think it is something you’re going to get.’ ‘Ridiculous!’ But then she quit and they called me back in… obviously they saw something.”
“I came in and they gave me two very big scenes. One was the monologue, ‘We’re lost in an uncharted part of the galaxy…,’ and the other was with Tuvok, establishing the depth and breadth of our friendship. I loved them both. And I made two very bold decisions in the room… not bold, but I played the scene with Tuvok with high humor, as Janeway did throughout her entire relationship with him, because he’s so Vulcan. I was always trying to ruffle his feathers. So that was full of laughs, and a certain underlying vulnerability, which I thought was very important to show; that her capacity for friendship was great indeed. And necessary to her, as a person. And with the monologue, I did it to them. I gave it to the producers. I turned to them as if they were my crew, looked right at them, and I said that I would get us through this. And I remember thinking, ‘Well, now it’s up to you.’”
“Understand, at the time, I knew nothing about Star Trek. If anything, I dismissed it. Which stood me in good stead, as it turns out, because ignorance in this case was bliss. And very liberating. I went into the audition, then I went to the network, which was harrowing for those who really knew what was at stake. I didn’t. I just knew that it was a very good part. I was told it was an important franchise, and that I probably had a guaranteed five to seven years, which is balm to an actress. I just went in and did it because I liked her. I went in with a sense of humor; I went in with a little bit of cheek. I’m always quite confident in those situations, because they’re either going to like me or they’re not going to like me. It’s very freeing. There must have been 50 people in that room, and I caught Berman’s eye right away. I stopped myself just short of winking at him as I left, but we had a nice little frisson.”
“Anyway, I went home and didn’t hear anything for three days. It was the high Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, which I was unaware of because I am, of course, Irish-Catholic, and I just assumed after the second day that I hadn’t gotten it. After my requisite two hours of despondency, I said to my kids, ‘I didn’t get it… I’m going to the market and we’ll grill some steaks tonight, have a couple of laughs.’ So I went to the market and when I came back, my nanny and my two children were standing on the front porch, telling me to listen to my messages, which I never did. So I went in and there it was: ‘Ms. Mulgrew, this is Rick Berman, executive producer of Star Trek: Voyager. I just wanted to say, ‘Welcome aboard, Captain.’”
Ed Gross is the co-author of the complete oral history of Star Trek, The Fifty-Year Mission, Volume I and Volume II, which features interviews with virtually everyone from every incarnation from The Original Series through the film Star Trek: Beyond.
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