What Happened To Seven Of Nine Actress Jeri Ryan After Star Trek: Voyager?

Jeri Ryan, the actor behind the resident reformed Borg from "Star Trek: Voyager," helped create one of the most iconic and fascinating characters in the "Star Trek" universe. Through her nuanced portrayal of Seven of Nine's sense of humor, vulnerability, and personal evolution as a former drone, the actor elevated what could have easily been a one-dimensional character. Ryan portrayed a slow and complicated journey to refind her own humanity — a journey that Seven is still on by the end of "Star Trek: Picard."

For her work as Seven of Nine, Ryan would be honored with two Saturn Awards more than two decades apart, winning one in 2001 for "Star Trek: Voyager" and a second for her reprisal of the role on "Star Trek: Picard" in 2024. But Ryan's show business career goes far beyond the world of Starfleet. She got her first taste of the spotlight as Miss Illinois 1989 and began competing in pageants to help raise funds for college tuition before kicking off her successful TV career. 

After her time on "Voyager," Ryan worked steadily with regular TV roles. Mastering smart, witty characters with a penchant for sarcasm and just enough bombshell beauty to open all the doors, she has perfectly embodied plenty of morally complex women balancing a professional, academic persona with a little dash of bad girl edge. From playing attorneys in high-stakes courtroom dramas to grifters with a gift for sleight-of-hand, here's what Ryan has been up to since "Star Trek: Voyager."

When "Star Trek: Voyager" came to an end, Jeri Ryan jumped right into the soapy primetime Fox drama "Boston Public." She wasn't planning on doing another TV series right away because of the relentless work schedule on "Voyager," but when she found out that creator David E. Kelley (the man behind the acclaimed legal dramedy "Ally McBeal") wanted her on board, she couldn't say no.

Ryan didn't even know who she would be playing in "Boston Public" when she agreed to the gig and Kelley told her nothing about her character, Ronnie Cooke, until four days before shooting commenced. "It was terrifying! I think the way I found out I was going to play a lawyer was from the wardrobe people," Ryan told Entertainment Weekly in 2002. "But David's involvement was the only reason I signed on to a show completely sight unseen." 

Ryan plays a no-nonsense attorney who becomes a teacher (and eventually a vice principal and guidance counselor) on the series, which follows the lives of students, admins, and educators in a Boston school. She would later credit "Boston Public" for helping her avoid getting typecast based on her "Star Trek" performance, telling StarTrek.com, "I was incredibly lucky and incredibly grateful."

After "Boston Public" ended, Jeri Ryan popped up in a couple of episodes of "Two and a Half Men" as Sherri, a woman to first date Charlie Harper (Charlie Sheen) and later date his brother Alan (Jon Cryer), before landing a regular role on the third season of Fox's "The O.C." Ryan was one of a handful of "Star Trek" alumni to be involved with "The O.C." — Tom Paris actor Robert Duncan McNeill directed two episodes, and Keiko Ishikawa actor Rosalind Chao played Dr. Kim in six episodes of the hit teen drama series.

Ryan featured in a rage-inducing arc in which her character, Charlotte Morgan, gets to know Kirsten Cohen (Kelly Rowan) in rehab and the pair move into a halfway house together at Lake Arrowhead. Charlotte turns out to be a grifter who targets the wealthy, but before she can successfully complete the con, Kirsten's best friend Julie Cooper (Melinda Clarke) catches on and puts a stop to her plan. She tells Charlotte: "I think it's time you left, don't you? This town is really only big enough for one manipulative b***h."

Jeri Ryan's love of beautiful food has been well-documented through the years. She met her husband, Michelin star French chef Christophe Émé, at a food charity event in 2003, later telling People, "I've always had a thing for chefs and I've always had a thing for the French." The pair married in 2007, locking in a lifetime of access to personally curated gourmet meals for the former Borg foodie. As her husband's primary taste-tester, Ryan had all the credentials needed to be an expert "Iron Chef" judge, so it's little wonder she appeared twice on "Iron Chef America" — in 2006 and again in 2009.

The 2006 episode saw Ryan appear alongside her husband, who challenged (and ultimately lost to) Iron Chef Morimoto in a lobster competition. In the 2009 episode, Ryan served as a judge alongside Jeffrey Steingarten and Kim Sunee as Iron Chef Cat Cora faced off with her challenger, San Francisco chef Charles Phan, in an almonds competition. Praising Ryan's culinary expertise, one IMDb reviewer called her insights about food "intelligent, perspicacious, and spot on" while observing that she appeared "cognizant of the concepts of texture, balance, and prominence of the star ingredient."

In 2006, Jeri Ryan was cast in a new CBS legal drama called "Shark" alongside cinema legend James Woods. Woods stars as Sebastian Stark, a Los Angeles public prosecutor who went off the rails after one of his courtroom successes led to a woman's death. Ryan plays his supervisor, district attorney Jessica Devlin. While Ryan enjoyed working with Woods, likening his energy levels to that of a "windup toy" in a 2006 TV Guide interview, she found her own lack of screen time in the series frustrating. "They keep telling me to be patient," Ryan said in the same interview, adding, "I am happy to be there, but I'm hoping we're going to see more of the character. I want to see how she develops beyond her scolding Stark."

Unfortunately, any serious long-term character growth was never to happen. Positioned in the same slot as the popular medical drama "E.R.," "Shark" faced an almost impossible challenge to begin with, with Ryan confessing that, while it was "a huge vote of confidence for the network to give you that time slot," locking horns with "E.R." on a weekly basis created an "enormous amount of pressure." To make things even harder, the legal drama's short run coincided with the 2007-08 Writers Guild of America Strike, likely contributing to its early cancellation after just two seasons.

If there's one type of character that Jeri Ryan knows like the back of her hand, it's a strong and focused attorney. In its long run, "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" has hosted a long and ever-growing list of guest stars, from A-listers to popular character actors. So, of course, Jeri Ryan had to spend a little time on the series. The "Star Trek: Voyager" cast member arrived on "SVU" in 2009 and appeared in three episodes as defense attorney Patrice LaRue. Ryan's tough-as-nails character spends her time on the series defending some deeply problematic people.

In her first appearance, "Baggage," which also guest-stars Delroy Lindo, Ryan finds her character arguing defense for a suspect in a serial killer case, and things get more grim from there. In "Hardwired," featuring Rosie Perez, LaRue defends pedophile rights advocacy group member Kevin O'Donnell (Garret Dillahunt), and for her final "SVU" entry, "Disabled," LaRue defends a woman who tormented her severely disabled sister. She would return to the "Law & Order" universe in 2011 for an episode of "Criminal Intent," playing cyber security firm boss Naomi Halloran.

Between 2009 and 2011, Jeri Ryan got a chance to return to the old scheming ways of her character in "The O.C." with the recurring part of con artist Tara Cole on "Leverage," a role she filled during Gina Bellman's hiatus from the series while out on maternity leave. An old friend of Sophie Devereaux (Bellman), Tara is a fellow grifter who prefers to use her feminine wiles to anchor her schemes.

Like the rest of the Leverage team, Tara is a woman of many talents. She speaks several languages, including Russian and German, and she's capable of running complicated long cons. She's also a skilled burglar and a gifted cryptographer — and that's to say nothing of her skills in hand-to-hand combat. Although we can never really know where she learned her craft, Tara likes to drop hints that she's spent time in a U.S. intelligence agency and has familiarity with Russian bureaucracy.

Speaking to Raked, Ryan reported being drawn to the character as a break from her usual roles. "I loved everything about her. She sounded like so much fun," Ryan said, adding, "She's a great skin to inhabit. I really enjoyed playing Tara." Ryan particularly enjoyed Tara's sense of humor, which she found a welcome change from the buttoned-up lawyers she typically plays. She reprised the role in an episode of the revival series "Leverage: Redemption" in 2025, sliding back into the role with ease.

In 2020, Jeri Ryan took on the role of iconic video game character Sonya Blade in Kevin Tancharoen's "Moral Kombat: Rebirth," which was basically a short, low-budget, fan-made film created with the intent of getting Warner Bros. interested in expanding it into a feature-length movie. The studio had acquired the rights for the property the previous year and Tancharoen wanted to make a gritty film based on the lore of the games, something darker than the two '90s movies. On top of securing Ryan's services as Sonya Blade, Tancharoen was able to cast Michael Jai White as Jackson "Jax" Briggs, a captain in the Deacon City Police Department.

Speaking to Nerd Reactor, Ryan revealed that she did the film for free as a favor to a friend without really knowing much about Tancharoen. "When he sent me the finished project I was blown away, I couldn't believe it," he said. "His vision is amazing. And then it went viral and turned into this thing with a life of its own, which was pretty incredible." While the short never led to a full film production, Tancharoen was able to expand on his vision with the web series "Moral Kombat: Legacy," with Ryan reprising her role. She and Jax are the primary focus of the first two episodes. She didn't return for the second season due to other commitments.

The reason that Jeri Ryan didn't come back as Sonya Blade in "Mortal Kombat: Legacy" Season 2 is that she was busy with TV roles. In 2011, she appeared in what would be the first of two episodes of the sci-fi series "Warehouse 13," and she also debuted as forensic anthropologist Kate Murphy in the ABC dramedy "Body of Proof," a role she would ultimately play across the show's three-season, 42-episode run.

Set in a Philadelphia medical examiner's office, the series follows a group of MEs as they work with police to solve crimes, following the clues on their bodies to find answers. For her role as Murphy, the office's Chief Medical Examiner, Ryan was required to learn a good deal of medical jargon, and she found that her past experience on "Star Trek: Voyager" came in handy. "I did technobabble for years, so if I can do technobabble I'm not that concerned about the medical stuff," she told TrekMovie.

The role ended up becoming one of the meatiest of Ryan's career. It presented her with plenty of chances to get really dramatic, including a scene in which her character has a close brush with death, something the actor enjoyed immensely. "I love that kind of stuff. I love the drama," Ryan told Assignment X. "That's been my kind of stuff to watch. I'm not a big sitcom watcher, so those kind of stories are fun to play — they're tough, they're painful, but I kind of love it."

After "Body of Proof" ended, Ryan picked up a few guest roles on the likes of "Major Crimes" (a spin-off of "The Closer" in which she once again plated a defense attorney), "Helix" (a Syfy series about a viral contagion outbreak with a genetic component), and "Arrow" (she played Jessica Danforth, a former mayoral candidate of Star City). Her next notable role began in 2016 when she debuted on the Titus Welliver-starring Amazon detective drama "Bosch" as a former escort and the widow of an Armenian criminal.

Smart, complicated, sexy, and cold-blooded, her "Bosch" character Veronica Allen is a textbook femme fatale as she winds men around her little finger while working to evade the police. In an interview with Fox411, Ryan remarked, "She's got quite a colorful past, and I think she gets Bosch a little bit unbalanced. He's not entirely sure what her real motives are. It takes him a while to figure out, I think, what's really going on with her." Ryan has always gravitated towards strong women and she saw the role as the latest in a long line of bimbo-defying characters. It also likely helped that her husband is a big fan of the novels that the series is based on.

After nearly two decades, Jeri Ryan got the chance to reprise her role as Seven of Nine in "Star Trek: Picard," which picks up with the titular character (Patrick Stewart) long after he retired in defiance of Starfleet's refusal to launch a rescue mission on Romulus. And who better to join Picard on his new adventures than our old friend Seven of Nine — an addition that's fortunately possible because a "Star Trek" producer decided against killing her off in the "Voyager" series finale.

In the years since Voyager returned to Earth, we find a Federation in distress and a planet struggling with the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack that laid waste to more than 92,000 lives. What does the woman who once struggled to understand her place in a world without assimilation do to cope with the state of things? She becomes a freedom fighter with the Fenris Rangers, a vigilante group fighting within the chaos that remains in what was once Romulan territory.

Having spent decades unassimilated from the Borg collective, the Seven we meet in "Picard" is even more independent and self-assured than the one we left behind at the end of "Voyager." The show gave Seven a chance to reach her full potential as a dynamic character, in turn growing Ryan's love for her character. "This continuation of her story and starting out with the Fenris Rangers, I love it," she told CinemaBlend. "I love everything about the way she's been developed. I truly do."