Profile : Command Performance : WHETHER IN CHARACTER ON ‘VOYAGER’ OR NOT, KATE MULGREW LEAVES NO DOUBT WHO’S CAPTAIN OF THE SHIP

You don’t interview Kate Mulgrew.

You get adopted by her.

She wants to know about your job. (“You’re a feature writer? It’s hard, isn’t it?”)

She wants to know about your life. (“Are you in love? It’s good, your marriage?”)

Those earnest blue eyes lock onto yours and start searching your soul with the same intensity that her “Star Trek: Voyager” Capt. Kathryn Janeway turns on those murky galactic nebulas.

Mulgrew leans close across the table at the busy lunchtime Russian Tea Room in Manhattan. She wants to make a real connection. Doing the inevitable publicity that surrounds anything Trek is one thing--”and it has to be done well,” she adds, “because these Trekkers are a very serious bunch. They are responsible for my happiness, in a way. So whatever I say to you I want to be conveyed with great ...” She can’t find the word, she’s so intent about the feeling.

But more important: This is an hour out of her life. Why waste it? Get personal. Don’t pussyfoot. When she did Tom Snyder’s late-night CBS chat fest, they analyzed morality, Bible parables and their mutual Midwestern Roman Catholic upbringing. With NBC’s comedic Conan O’Brien she joked, then acceded to his appeals that she do an Irish jig.

“Talk-show hosts have a very high level of anxiety. Which I do not like,” she says, sipping Chardonnay. “And I resent being there if I feel that anxiety. You become a character instead of a person. One way to defuse it is to say: ‘Are you in love?’ Right? And everybody stops for a minute. Then you can gauge each other.”

Right? That’s no space filler. She wants to make sure you’re paying attention. Are you just checking questions off a list? Or are you here--human, open, curious? When you’re facing Katherine Mulgrew, better be all of the above. She doesn’t suffer pretenses gladly. Never has. The oldest girl in a self-described “salt of the Earth” small-city Iowa family, she learned to be direct early on, when she was handed full responsibility for shepherding her younger siblings.

“My mother raised eight children. And there was no question that I would help her. And shut up about it,” she says, characteristically punching out her phrases like jabs. “Nobody ever said anything. It just was. And further, there was no question that if I wanted things, I went to work. And I was working at 12 as a short-order cook. That’s young. It didn’t seem young.”

Did Kate Mulgrew ever seem young? Even lunchtime chatter proves she’s a take-charge person. Agree to join her with a glass of wine, and you receive her “Atta girl!” approval like a kid who’s won Mom’s pride by showing some spunk. Even if she is thrilled to have you along for the ride, this interview is clearly her vehicle. She’s so driven, so “total.”

“My mother said that to me last week,” she notes. “It was my 40th birthday. And I was talking to her about the job, and she said, ‘Oh, Kitten. Don’t you know you were total when you were 4?’ ” Meaning? “Passionate. All the way through.”

Which she certainly is about Kathryn Janeway, “total” earth mother of the Enterprise. Oops--Voyager, of course. But Janeway’s cocky cowboy stance does hark to the very foundations of “Star Trek” and the original ‘60s series’ Enterprise captain. Like William Shatner’s rash master of derring-do, Trek’s first female captain is a lone ranger to some extent, certainly because her ship functions solo in uncharted space 75 light years from known territory (victim of a premiere-episode space warp), but also because Janeway’s a seat-of-the-pants kind of gal. Unlike Trek’s last two imperious, bridge-based commanding officers (Picard on “The Next Generation,” Sisko on “Deep Space Nine”), she’s a front-lines authority figure who doesn’t just issue the orders but hops on down and leads the charge.

“Life is pretty good,” Mulgrew says. “I have a marvelous job. It’s been a great year in my life. I’ve been in this business a long time. And this is a blessing. And I know it. I needed this job. I needed this character. Just a couple of weeks before I got it, I was putting my house on the market. It was a tough year for me,” she says.

“All of this came, quite remarkably, without any of the stress and strain that usually accompanies [these things]--it’s as if somebody ordained that this should be.” She messed up her initial audition, by her own reckoning, but finagled another--and then Genevieve Bujold walked.

“It’s as in love, right? True or false? Don’t we always say to each other--maybe you meet one, and if you meet two people you really adore in a lifetime, it’s remarkable. The same goes for acting. It took me 40 years to find her. I’ve never been happier in my life.”

“Star Trek: Voyager” airs at 8 p.m. on KCOP.