Melissa Ortegas is filming the third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds at present, but she was able to pop into Star Trek San Francisco Convention on Saturday to talk Lt. Erica Ortegas [via Trekmovie}. And while she couldn't share much about what's going on with her character in season three, she was excited to talk about Mirror Universe Erica Ortegas.
Navia thinks she would be a character you wouldn't want to mess with, and it's one she'd love to play, which doesn't come as a surprise. Villains aren't tied to morals or ethics and can be deliciously bad. Take Nana Visitor's Intendant Kira Nerys on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Visitor really played into that character and made her someone vastly different from the Kira we knew on Deep Space Nine. She was evil and unyielding without regret, and that's pretty much the way all of the Mirror Universe characters are. They embrace their villainy.
"“You wouldn’t want to mess with her. I would love that. Especially because I’ve never really played any villains and I would love to do that. I can’t even fully articulate how it would look… I think she would be a force to be reckoned with and I wouldn’t want to go up against her. For me, that would be fantastic as an actor to play that. There is something about a villain that is captivating, as well as that dark side. So I don’t know what it would look like but it would be pretty great and I hope the writers are thinking about something like that in the future.”"Melissa Navia
Lt. Ortegas isn't someone to be trifled with now so it's not hard to image her in another universe as a cosmic force that no one wants to confront. But we don't know if Strange New Worlds has any intentions of visiting the Mirror Universe. If not, perhaps there's a way we can still see an evil side of Orgtegas as we did in Star Trek: The Original Series when Captain Kirk was split into both parts of himself in "The Enemy Within." As much as Navia would love to play it, we'd love to see it.