Jeri Ryan

Photographs by Antoine Verglas

Where you’ve seen her:
As the cybernetically-enhanced Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager, and as the lawyer-turned-school teacher on Boston Public.

Big girl on campus:
“Well…freshman year I joined a sorority and threw myself, to a disgusting degree, into Greek life. I’d go out every night of the week—to a cotillion on Wednesday, then a social on Thursday, then a mixer on Friday—and then the parties on the weekends, of course. Not a lot of studying got done.”

It haunts us all:
“My first job, fresh out of college, was doing an episode of Who’s the Boss?, and it’s just cringe-inducing. A sitcom is filmed in front of a live audience, so it’s kind of like being in a play. And in the theater you project your voice to the back row. Well, nobody bothered to tell me that there was a microphone six inches above my damn head. So when the show aired, there I was, yelling every one of my lines. I sounded like the biggest moron in the history of the world. And it still reruns all the time. That show will haunt me forever.”

How to build character:
“I wasn’t overjoyed when I got the first two scripts and saw that I was naked for two episodes in a row. But the way David [E. Kelley, Boston Public’s creator] explained it to me was, he wanted to show that the character wasn’t all together—she seems like she’s got everything in order, but really her private life is not all perfect. Whatever.”

June 2002 (#54)