The following is an article posted on Trekweb.com on April 12, 2003.
Actress Marina Sirtis stopped by BBC Wiltshire recently to answer fan questions submitted via the Internet and the site has made available a RealAudio streaming recording of her responses. Although much of the interview concerns Sirtis's career in particular, one fan did ask whether she thinks STAR TREK has steam left in it after NEMESIS.
"I think it peaked with TNG, but then I'm biased," she answered honestly.
The actress told another fan that she wished Troi's personal life had been developed a bit more on the series.
"We never really knew what Troi did in her spare time, apart from work out," she says. "We saw her in a leotard on occasion doing, you know, like Kung Fooey-type things with Worf. But we never knew what her hobbies were or what she did on her down time. So I think that would've been quite interesting to find out what she did."
Even so, playing the subdued counselor for over ten years hasn't been easy for the vivacious Sirtis. One fan asked her what the most difficult thing about playing the character was.
"Keeping Marina out, because Marina's, as you can see, we're not very similar," she responded. "And it was sometimes really hard to squash Marina and make sure she didn't infringe on Troi."
Someone asked her if there is any episode she felt was really "bad" and shouldn't have aired. The answer was easy.
"The second episode we ever made, and it was called 'Code of Honor', and I thought basically, not to put too fine a point on it, that it was racist."
The age-old "what do you think of having a gay character on STAR TREK?" popped up as well.
"I'm going to give the answer that Gene always used to give, and that is, how do you know who was gay and who wasn't? They didn't walk around with a sign saying 'I am gay'. So any of those people that you met as guest stars or saw sitting in Ten Forward or whatever, how do you know they weren't gay? He just didn't want it to be a 'thing'. He felt that by the 24th century, it wouldn't be a 'thing' and one wouldn't have to make a point of it."
[Editor's commentary: It's about the regular characters. And they didn't need signs. You know they were all heterosexual because they all had heteroexual relationships, without exception. And in every single case where a guest character interacted romantically with the crew, he or she was heterosexual as well. In addition, if some of the nameless extras sitting in Ten Forward were gay, why did we never see any of them holding hands with a same-sex date? There was plenty of that with opposite-sex pairs. Besides, Sirtis is rewriting history here. Roddenberry had changed his mind on the subject, and promised visible gay characters. "We have gay characters, they're just invisible" is Berman's philosophy, not Roddenberry's. ]
You can see photos of Marina's appearance and hear the full audio interview here.