Although I was living in LA, my heart was always here in England...
People would say, ‘Why have you got the picture of that girl from Star Trek in your wallet?’ And she would say, ‘it’s my daughter’ and she’d be proud of me. By that stage, my dad had passed.”
She went on to record 176 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Marina says: “A 16-hour-day was normal when we were doing Star Trek. You know, we were doing 26 shows a year. The crew were on their knees by Christmas.”
She is now promoting her new British gangster film,the Bezonians, which features a Greek gambling club whose owner’s life is threatened by actor Vinnie Jones’ thug when he loses money at poker.
“Of course, I knew about these clubs!” she tells me frankly. “I grew up in Haringey when Haringey was Greek Cypriot and not Kurdish. Back in the day even the shop signs were in Greek in Haringey. My dad didn’t belong to one of these clubs because, actually, we were ‘Greek Greek’.
“We weren’t Greek Cypriot. But the clubs are the Cypriot equivalent of an English guy going to the pub, right?
“They go to the cafe, they play cards or they play backgammon and you know, it’s kind of boys’ time. The only women there are serving drinks and food.”
Another factor in her decision to leave Hollywood was the divided state of America. “Trump happened to America. That’s what happened. And people in showbusiness have this ridiculous sense of entitlement, that we’re doing something so special and that the rules don’t apply to us.
“And we’re not! Acting is our job. We have a job to do like a baker or a tailor or a cobbler. We all have our job.we’re not artists – and we’re lucky to be doing what we’re doing and getting paid for it.”
Finally, did she ever meet an alien in all her 176 episodes who was scarier than Vinnie Jones? “No! Vinnie is such an icon.”
The Bezonians is available on Blu-ray, DVD & Digital Download from May 2.