Even though Carol Marcus is a part of Star Trek history, actress Alice Eve has made the character her own.
Playing a younger version of the character means that Eve was free to make some changes to Marcus.
“In the original, when she was in The Wrath of Khan, she was older and she had a child,” said Eve. “I guess she was tough. This Carol Marcus that I was playing, I didn’t feel she was tough. I wanted to bring a vulnerability to her, because she was at the beginning of her journey as a woman, rather than the middle, where she had a child and she’s raising it. I wanted to bring that sense of hope and softness to her, along with the list of capabilities that are on the page. And she became mine at some point, I understood that there was a tradition, but I didn’t hold too tightly to any of it because she was mine now.”
One thing Eve did have to do was wear a certain type of uniform, but her hairstyle was the result of a debate on futuristic hair, and what was chosen was due to emphasize Marcus’s youth. “Well, the costumes were already established, so it was understood I was a science officer in the Medbay, so I would wear blue in the sort of the shape of the dress that Zoe [Saldana] wore before,” said Eve. “In terms of the hair, obviously this is the future, and there was this interesting debate that raged about what hair was like in the future.
“We used the famous Vidal Sassoon bob from the ’60s to build a hairstyle. We think it showed a sense of youth, and it was in keeping with the original imagery of the ’60s show, but we modernized it and it added a clean efficiency to the line.”
As for Kirk and Marcus? Don’t expect Marcus’s appearances to be all about Kirk. “I am [part of Kirk’s Enterprise],” said Eve, “but it’s not always about Kirk. There are very heavy emotional journeys that we went on, but I think the most challenging thing for me was running around the Enterprise. I had funny shoes, and I felt like I was running always, and everything was very high-intensity.”
Source: StarTrek.com
