Her journey has now brought her to he paramount lot, where she joined the cast of STAR TREK: VOYAGER at the start of the fourth STAR TREK series' fourth season. Designated Seven of Nine: her character has very much been the focus of the plotlines of the season - as well as the attention of the world's Press. Jeri herself seems unaffected by this, although she has learned to cope with the crowds of fans that attend conventions. Probably this is because she is achieving exactly what she always wanted to do - although, as she tells me while her hair and face are transformed into Seven's distinctive look in the make-up trailer, it was always "become an actress or something else."

When I was very little, I wanted to be an actress or a vetinarian; when I was in high school, I wasn't sure if I wanted to major in theatre or in biomedical engineering. Less practical, but I chose theatre. I've always loved it. I've always loved performing. I've loved the escapism of being another person, slipping into another character for a little while. I started acting really in school plays, and in community theatre off of junior high school."

Jeri took her degree in theatre at Northwestern University and then moved to Los Angeles to break into screen acting. "I did a couple of dozen different guest or recurring roles on episodic TV shows, a couple of smallish features, and pilots that didn't sell - things like that," she recalls. "Then last year I had DARK SKIES."

"Jeri isn't exactly sure when she began filming on Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman's ambitious show which retold the history of the past 40 years. "I was trying to remember the other day. It seems like it was round about thanksgiving 1996 [the end of November], halfway into the season.

"I'd never seen the show and didn't know the storyline, so I was confused - it was a bit complicated! Juliet, my character, was a Russian agent for the Russian equivalent of Majestic, the covert agency fighting the aliens. Originally the character was conceived as sort of a villainess, Loengards nemesis, really. Then a couple of episodes in they changed it. It was great. The two series regular roles have both been really strong, smart tough cookies. That's nice, because there aren't a whole lot of strong female roles."

When Juliet came in originally, she didn't necessarily need to be female. "That's true," Jeri agrees. "But part of the reason for writing the character was that they wanted to add some sort of chemistry... electricity is the word I believe they used!" she laughs.

How far ahead of filming the final couple of episodes were the cast and crew aware that show would not be returning for the new season? "Well we knew pretty much when they added the character; NBC at that point had written of the show. They'd pretty much buried it by that time. The addition of Juliet was a last ditch attempt to try and get a bit of attention again. But at that time, I don't think there was anything that could be done to save it."

"The entire season, the show had never been aired for more than three weeks. You can't get an audience that way. They would never promo the show for the next week, and if it disappeared for two or three weeks in succession they would never say, 'DARK SKIES will be back in three weeks', so even people who started to watch it and tried to see it again would look the next Saturday and it was gone. There would be no further explanation of where it had gone, so they would assume it was cancelled already. We found out for sure after we had wrapped."

Does Jeri think DARK SKIES was cancelled because NBC didn't understand the show? "They didn't give the show a fair shake, I don't think. From what I hear they gave the premiere an enormous send-off, then that was pretty much it. They said they were pretty much on their own. And a) it was the time slot of death - Saturday at 8 - and b) they had no continuity with that show. They had no chance to build up an audience."

There have been loads of rumours about of a DARK SKIES follow-up TV movie. Did anything get more concrete? "Yes," Jeri says still clearly entranced by her first full-time character. "Apparently, just after I already started working on STAR TREK my option was officially up in June, so I had already been working on VOYAGER for a few weeks, and they were calling up at the eleventh hour and saying they were going to call their option because they were going to try to sell it to the USA Network. They were threatening to move the show to Toronto, which none of us was excited about, then they were going to pick up the option for a series of movies. That would have been great. I would have loved that. I think all of us would - although I think J T was quite delighted to have been killed at the end. But logistically, there's no way to do it. The money fell through in the end so it wasn't going to happen. Even if they got the money now, I don't think they could work it out. Eric and Megan's on a series, I'm on a series. Our hiatuses don't match, so I don't think schedulewise we'll ever be able to work it out. I would have loved to have continued with that character and seen where that part was going to."

"I had seen bits and pieces of each of the STAR TREK series over the years. I never watched it faithfully. I've never really been a sci-fi person. I came on this show pretty blind. I'd never seen the Borg, I had no idea what a Borg was. I didn't really know the background of the other characters. I didn't see VOYAGER in the beginning so I didn't know what the story was, so I was on the show and I had no idea they were lost in space! it was a little bit overwhelming, because I was coming in completely in the dark.

"They said that Seven was a former Borg who had been human and had been assimilated. She was regaining her humanity, and all of that. To be perfectly honest, I had no interest in this character when I first heard the description. I hadn't seen much STAR TREK, and I didn't know a lot about it, and I wasn't really sure what the quality of writing was. I wasn't overwhelmed when somebody finally described what a Borg is! I wasn't exactly overenthusiastic about being one!" We chuckle "Not the best look in the world! They downplayed the full Borg make-up to begin with, though.

"The main reason I wasn't really excited about it was STAR TREK's reputation is notorious for actors being sucked into sci-fi/alien mode, especially if you're in the prosthetic make up. That to me looked like career suicide. So I passed on it initially. Then because I knew the casting directors really well, they called back and said that they really thought that I should look at the part, and they thought I'd like it"

''You'll find that lots of actors are army brats," she explains. "That's because you need to learn to be the new kid in school and play a different role to fit in. When you're a child and going through the moving, it's tough, but as an adult, I realise it taught me to be adaptable." She graduated from Northwestern University as a National Merit Scholar with a BS in theatre, and moved to Los Angeles to pursue roles in television and films.

In early roles she played "Mostly the sweet young thing," making guest appearances on Melrose Place, Mat lock, Murder She Wrote, The Flash, Who's The Boss, Reasonable Doubts and Diagnosis Murder. Last year Ryan made the move into films, working on two small independent movies over the summer. The first was The Last Man ("a very funny script: it's about the last three people on Earth"); the other was Men Cry Bullets.

Home is in Chicago, which she shares with her investment banker husband. This means living in Los Angeles on weekdays, and returning to Chicago at weekends. Ryan likes this routine, claiming it allows her to distance herself from Tinseltown, and recognises the advantages of being married to someone who is not in the entertainment business. "My husband is someone who's in the real world. It's a big help that I don't have both feet in Hollywood."

Doesn't this weekly commuting ever prove wearing?

"It doesn't help a lot," she replies candidly. "It's tough. My husband and I have had a commuter marriage our entire marriage, with the exception of the one year I was pregnant and stayed home. But apart from that we've always been apart, except at weekends, and in the summers I'll go home for a month or two, or in December when things slow down here. But the bulk of our time is spent apart, and it is hard, but my agent understands that if she needs me for an audition I will fly back at a moment's notice, and that's not a big deal. My husband travels a lot with his job, so we have a lot of frequent flyer miles so we can hop on a plane with no notice. That's a nice luxury and he is very supportive, which is very important.

My son is a commuter as well - he's grown up his entire life on planes. He spends part of his time with me, and part of his time at home. My mom is the nanny and she flies back and forth with him, which is a huge help, but the hardest thing I've ever had to do is leave my son in Chicago and come out here:" Ryan claims that joining the Dark Skies ensemble mid-way through the first season reminded her of school days, when she was always the new kid on the block.