Prosthetics and Borg bits

I have to tell you, Ethan Philips, who plays Nelix, who has nothing except his lips exposed on his face when he’s in make-up, and never complains. I think he’s a saint. I don’t know how he’s does it. The Borg make-up is very tough. It’s a whole rubber head and neck and the first part of your chest. Your ears are covered, there’s a laser over one eye, there’s rubber glued to your head in different places where tubes come in and out. It took five hours the first day we did the make-up. They got it down to two and a half or three, eventually.

But it’s tough. After working an eighteen hour day, you have to sit in the chair and for another hour and a half to get out of the make-up, when everyone else is going home. That’s when it really becomes tough.

The assimilation tubules that come out of the hat were all post production, that wasn’t an actual thing at all. That was done by computer.

It’s a huge relief to only have a little bit of the rubber on. I was always for as few prosthetics as I could get, once I was in the Borg make-up. It was an interesting experience [but] I don’t necessarily need to do it again for another job.