Nicole DeBoer said that contrary to expectations, coming to Deep Space Nine in its last season was not difficult for her at all. "Everybody asks me that," she said. "I think what I really liken it to is sort of, they were like one big happy family and it was just like they adopted somebody, you know?"

Speaking to The United Federation of Planets of South Australia fan club, where DeBoer attended a convention in October, the Ezri Dax actress said that she felt welcomed into an "already well knit family" where the rest of the cast were already comfortable with one another. "They had been together for many years...and also I have lots of training from doing guest episodes before," she noted. "You have to get really good at coming into a varied situation and fitting in as best you can."

Until she came to The Dead Zone, the Michael Piller series on USA Network which begins its fifth season in 2006, DeBoer had never worked on a series for more than one season. "Either it was ending, in the case of Deep Space Nine, or else it just didn’t get picked up again." If she had had another season, she would like to have explored the confidence Ezri acquired as she adjusted to the Dax symbiont: "I would definitely like to see her more in control and really using these other lives she has because of the symbiont, really being able to manipulate it to her benefit and use the knowledge of all these people that she has before her."

There were pros and cons to taking over the character of Dax after Terry Farrell played Jadzia for six years. "Somebody's already established it for you, which is good - on one hand you already have a base to sort of work from," she explained. "It's detrimental because people have preconceived ideas and people are loyal to the Jadzia character, so that can be hard, but I think it had good and bad things to it."

Like Ezri, a counselor, DeBoer thought about studying psychology. "I think as an actor you have to be thinking consistently about why people do what they do," she said. "I think you just sort of do that partly intuitively as an actor - it's what you want to explore, right?"

The full interview is at The United Federation of Planets of South Australia site.

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