Think 2020 is bad? Try the year 3188
‘Star Trek’ actors relish challenge of playing characters who have jumped way into future
What the crew of the starship Discovery experiences as the “Star Trek” TV spinoff takes off on its third season might seem a little familiar to people estranged from family and friends by the coronavirus pandemic.
Granted, our COVID-19 separations won’t last 930 years, which is how far the ship’s crew has travelled in time, leaving behind everyone and everything else they ever knew.
“It’s not an easy transition,” said Sonequa Martin-Green, who stars as science officer Michael Burnham in “Star Trek: Discovery.” The fictional Starfleet vessel started its journey in the mid-23rd century, 10 years before the events of the original “Star Trek” TV series.
“It’s not, ‘Oh, we’re here in this future together. Yay!’ ” Clearly not. To refresh your memory, when the second season of the made-in-Toronto show ended, Burnham and Discovery jumped through a wormhole into the future to keep a rogue artificial intelligence from wiping out the galaxy — and the ship and all its crew were erased from Starfleet history.
Martin-Green called it “the ultimate act of selflessness. And you see us reckoning with that because it was not an easy choice. And it is not an easy healing process either.”
But what’s traumatic for the characters is invigorating for the actors who play them.
“To be able to say we are boldly going where no one has gone before, to be able to mean that in such a new, tangible way, it’s very exciting,” said MartinGreen.
“It puts us in this really fertile ground to continue to explore,” echoed Mary Wiseman, who plays Ensign Sylvia Tilly.
When the actors sat down with the Star, separately, at a Toronto hotel in late January, there had been one confirmed coronavirus case in Toronto, in a traveller, but there was no sense of the upheaval that was to come.
The same was true when media toured the show’s set at Pinewood Toronto Studios the next day. We were much closer than two metres apart as we crowded onto the bridge of Discovery, sat in the captain’s chair, walked the ship’s corridors, and peeked into its sick bay, engineering room and mess hall.
Some fun facts: the ship’s automatic doors really work, controlled by special effects operators who can see actors approaching through cameras on either side, and they really do make that “whoosh” sound.
The quarters for various members of the crew are actually the same space, just dressed up with different props and removable walls. One wall was still covered in moss from the
“To be able to say we are boldly going where no one has gone before, to be able to mean that in such a new, tangible way, it’s very exciting.”
SONEQUA MARTIN-GREEN ‘STAR TREK: DISCOVERY’ STAR
cabin of Commander Saru (Doug Jones), a member of the plant-loving Kelpien species.
Also, there are everyday items sprinkled among the sci-fi props, including soda stream bottles and vegetable steamers in engineering. In sick bay, one of the medical devices is an Ikea salt shaker, a tribute to the salt shakers that served as Dr. McCoy’s medical instruments on the original “Star Trek.”
Wiseman said the set definitely helps actors get into character. For instance, the Discovery crew doesn’t see sunlight and neither do the actors in studio.
“We actually don’t do as much green screen work as people expect,” she added. “For the most part, we perform the scenes on the bridge. And it’s a space that’s incredibly familiar to us and that feels very, very real.”
Indeed, supervising art director Jody Clement said that when the actors look at monitors on the bridge, they’re looking at real graphics. In instances where green screen has to be used — for instance, on the giant view screen on the bridge — the actors are shown visuals ahead of time so they’ll be familiar with whatever planet or other CGI they’re looking at.
There is one bit of fakery that Wiseman, who was primarily a theatre actor before “Star Trek” came calling, doesn’t always feel comfortable with.
“I am not science or mathminded at all,” said Wiseman, whose character is a brilliant theoretical engineer. “I was much more like an English lit theatre nerd. And so (it’s) very challenging sometimes to learn the lines. It takes a while to figure out what I’m talking about, but it’s cool.”
Martin-Green, on the other hand, whose Burnham is well versed in xenoanthropology and quantum mechanics, said she often goes down a “science rabbit hole.”
“I encourage anybody to try to study up on quantum mechanics if you aren’t already familiar with it. It’s never-ending,” she said.
“I find myself going so far that I get dizzy … but I do always get to a point where I have a comfortable understanding of what I’m talking about just because, for me as an actor, I have to do that so that I can speak from my heart.”
Of course, with Discovery having jumped to the year 3188, there will be new science and technology to explore.
“Having to acclimate to this future is going to be a challenge for everyone,” said MartinGreen, best known previously for her work on “The Walking Dead.”
She and Wiseman were particularly keen on the emotional parts of that acclimation.
Wiseman noted that when you’re 930 years in the future “and everyone you’ve ever known is long, long passed away,” relationships among the crew become tighter “and it deepens everything that happens after that … all these characters have huge growth spurts because they left so much behind and so much is expected of them.”
“It’s very beautiful, but it’s very ugly at times as well,” said Martin-Green. “I love how it’s been handled. And I have so much respect for what the writers did and then also what the actors did to bring it to life as well.
“I cannot boast enough about this group of people,” she added. “It’s what you dream for as an actor. To be in a group of people with no ego, with only love and passion and respect and reverence for what it is that we do.”
Both actors also see “Star Trek: Discovery” as part of a continuum of shows providing more meaningful roles for women.
“I have these moments on our show where I look around and I think, ‘Oh, there are three women talking to each other in this scene, that’s cool.’ I don’t think that would have been as prevalent 15 years ago,” Wiseman said.
“We still have a long way to go,” Martin-Green said, adding she’d like to see “lots of different representation. But we’re on the way.”
This season, Black actor David Ajala joins the cast as Cleveland Booker, a new ally for Burnham. “Discovery” is also introducing the franchise’s first nonbinary and transgender characters: Adira and Gray, played by nonbinary actor Blu del Barrio and trans Asian American actor Ian Alexander.
“One of the basic premises of ‘Star Trek’ is there’s room enough for all and, in fact, we’re better when everybody is included,” Wiseman said.