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Science & Tech Quote by Marina Sirtis

"I've been getting a lot of science fiction scripts which contained variations on my Star Trek character and I've been turning them down. I strongly feel that the next role I do, I should not be wearing spandex"

About this Quote

Typecasting is its own kind of costume, and Marina Sirtis is naming it with a comedian's bluntness: spandex as shorthand for an industry that keeps trying to re-dress her in the same silhouette. The line lands because it treats a very real career trap like a wardrobe issue, exposing how Hollywood reduces performers to surfaces - not just roles, but bodies, textures, and genres. When she says she keeps getting "variations on my Star Trek character", she's not merely complaining about sci-fi scripts. She's describing a market logic that confuses recognition with repetition: if the audience liked you once, the safest bet is to sell them the same you, over and over, with different alien forehead ridges.

The humor ("I should not be wearing spandex") carries a sharper subtext. Spandex is restrictive, literal and metaphorical. It signals youth, sex appeal, and a particular era of televised futurism where women were often asked to look aerodynamic first and complex second. Sirtis isn't disowning Star Trek; she's pushing back on being frozen inside it, as if Deanna Troi were a template stamped onto every script that lands in her mailbox. There's also a quiet labor story here: the scripts are plentiful, the offers predictable, and the real risk is that saying yes becomes the path of least resistance until it hardens into your brand.

In a culture that loves nostalgia and IP, her insistence on a different next step reads like self-preservation - an actor demanding the right to surprise us, and to be seen as more than a franchise's flattering reflection.

Quote Details

TopicReinvention
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Marina Sirtis on typecasting and refusing spandex
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About the Author

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Marina Sirtis (born March 29, 1959) is a Actress from United Kingdom.

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