Did the decision had a very big impact on you personally?

The hours I was most unprepared for. The 12 to 16 hour days and the alarming speed with which episode followed episode and the amount of learning that I had to do, so we worked from Monday till Friday and often most weeks into the early hours of Saturday morning and then certainly in the first couple of years I spent my weekends, Saturdays and Sundays, preparing for the next week, because otherwise you would never catch up.

Also the fact that I was encouraged and I was also interested in contributing to the scripts as much as possible, engaged me much more than I�d expected. But I was seven thousand miles away from home and I was often lonely and missed friends and family and aspects of my work too. I do remember once coming home quite late at night from the studio, driving along Beverly Boulevard and having to pull over because my eyes were so filled with tears because a piece of Elgar was playing on the radio.

It was a long time before any of us realised that we were very slowly becoming well known as actors. That was a very, very slow process, largely brought about by the fact that we were too busy working to lift up our heads and pay attention to what was happening. We knew that the series was doing well, but it really wasn�t until the first season ended that I went to my first Star Trek convention.

It was in Denver and [I] had expected that I would be standing in front of a few hundred people and found that there were two and a half thousand people and that they already knew more about me than I could ever possibly have believed.