Star Trek’s Jeri Ryan Reveals If She Prefers Playing Seven of Nine on Voyager or Picard

Star Trek: Voyager star Jeri Ryan reprised her role as former Borg drone Seven of Nine in the first season of Star Trek: Picard. She’ll be back again for the show’s second season, whenever it is finally able to start filming, and she’s having a better time playing Seven on Picard than she did when she originated the character on Voyager. A fan on Twitter asked Ryan which show she preferred working on, and Ryan unambiguously replied, “Picard!” Ryan’s reply won’t surprise fans familiar with the behind-the-scenes tension on Voyager‘s set or those who read ComicBook.com‘s interview with Ryan when she voiced Seven for the Star Trek Online: Legacy expansion. When asked about the potential for a Star Trek: Voyager reunion, Ryan said she’d be happy to have Seven reunite with some of those characters but wasn’t keen on the idea of a full-blown Voyager revival.

“Would I love to reunite with some of those characters? Sure, I think that’d be great,” she said. “I don’t necessarily need to do a Voyager show again. I think that I’ve done that. But I’m not a writer. I can’t really tell you anything.

“I’m having a great time on Picard. It’s a very happy set. It’s a very relaxed set, which has been great. I didn’t have a phenomenal overall experience shooting Voyager. I don’t look back on that as a super fun four years for me, unfortunately, so to be revisiting this character in a more pleasant work experience is great.”

Having been detached from the Borg collective for decades and reacclimated to human society, Seven is much more expressive in Picard than in Voyager. That’s closer to Ryan’s personality, but she still struggled to adjust when she first tried to get back into character.

“Jonny saved me,” Ryan said on Deadline‘s Star Trek: Picard podcast. She’s referring to Jonathan del Arco, who reprised his role as another former Borg drone, Hugh from Star Trek: The Next Generation, in Star Trek: Picard. “I was panicking… He saved my ass, totally, because I was panicking, totally, when I finally saw the first script. And I know, for this character specifically… I had four years of playing a character that was very specific. And she went from being full Borg to meaning mostly human, but there was a lot of transition, but she was still pretty stylized and specific at the end of that four years.

“This is 20 years later, and when I saw the first script, not knowing a lot of or really any of the backstory yet… I panicked because I couldn’t find her voice. I couldn’t hear her in any of this dialog because it was so different. Her voice was so specific for those four years. Partly because of the character the way it was written and developed but partly also because Brannon Braga wrote or rewrote most of Seven’s dialogue over that four-year period. Not every line, but a lot of it, so it was a very specific voice. And this was so different, so much more casual and human and slangy and not Seven to me, and I panicked.”

The first season of Star Trek: Picard is streaming now on CBS All Access.

(h/t Trek Movie)