I dunno. Maybe she was just having a bad day on the set. But that… whew. Mulgrew, for all her faults, was 'way better than her, IMHO. I think the producers made the right call. What say you?
Damn. I had never seen any footage of Bujold in the role before. She was wretched.
I’m afraid to look
She reminds me of Linda Hunt doing a bad impression of Madeline Kahn doing a bad impression of Marlene Dietrich…
So if she got the job why did Mulgrew end up with the role?
Marc
I dunno. I kinda like her accent. But Picard was already vaguely French or British or something or other.
Still a Kate Mulgrew fan.
It sounded like she’d be okay for a movie on the big screen, but not so hot in a weekly TV show. She did seem a bit serious and grave, which Kate Mulgrew could do, but had a feisty enthusiasm towards her position I enjoyed.
She seems to be trying too hard to act like a man.
Mulgrew, had a much better balance.
Ok, I watched the whole thing, maybe she was having a bad day. Or maybe she just realized what a stinker this was going to be and decided to give up.
Marc
Yowza. Maybe English-language acting just isn’t her thing.
Two interesting back-to-back bits of trivia in her IMDb listing:
-She gave up the demanding job of Captain of the USS Voyager (“Star Trek: Voyager” (1995)) after only one day of filming. Kate Mulgrew followed her into the Captain’s Chair.
-Was cast as Baroness Kessler in Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999), but became ill at the last moment and had to give up the part.
Became ill. Riiiiight.
Gawd after only one bit of dialogue, I’m convinced that the only French captain fit for the chair was the one who spoke like a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company 
Wow. That was just as weird as I’d always heard it was. She did seem to be having unusual difficulty with the English language, which is very weird, since she’s acted in English plenty of times before. I suspect she just hadn’t learned her lines very well.
Her timing was absolutely horrible! “I’ll get you back . . . to them.” OTOH, she played that same scene (the one with Tuvok) with some real emotion underneath her restrained exterior. Of course, the emotions were of someone tired and frustrated with a situation they’d rather not be in, and given the look on her face as soon as the scene cut, maybe she wasn’t acting.
Her acting (or non-acting) style really clashed with the other actors in the scene where she starts off discussing the Cardassians with Tom Paris and the XO. She seemed to be whispering her lines compared to the others. I wonder if she’s done any stage work. Star Trek is always a bit stagy, and it could have helped her balance the assertive but unsubtle acting of Robert Duncan McNeil (Tom Paris) and the others. She seemed to be expecting lots of very tight, emotional shots and close miking, instead of broad action shots with everyone barking their lines. Bizarre.
So, I looked, and the clip crashed about a minute in, right where Janeway, Paris and Kim come onto the bridge. Bujold had nice hair… but that’s all I got. Sounds like I should be grateful.
She seemed to be playing the role as a more tortured, responsible soul that Mulgrew. She didn’t seem bad to me.
See, I always heard it was because she was asked to pad her bra and she wouldn’t. They asked ol’ Kate and she said “No prob.”
We Dubuquers hate her.
Who? Why?
She sounds so…bored. Her and Tuvok talking about the planet without ‘nucleogenics’ in the atmosphere especially had that feeling.
Kate Mulgrew was born in Dubuque. I can’t tell whether he’s saying that Dubuquers hate Kate for some reason, or if they hate Mlle. Bujold because she quit and their Kate had to step up and suffer multiple seasons on Voyager…
C’mon, when was the last time you first saw a new Trek captain without thinking “Oh God, no way is this gonna fly!”? I’m sure she would’ve made a great Janeway in time. Still, she doesn’t radiate the confidence that Kate Mulgrew does.
She suffered all the way to the bank…and through a walk on part in a Trek movie.
^ :dubious: ^
So please clarify the post that gave rise to that discussion in the first place…who do Dubuquers hate and why?