Quote/Unquote
Shazad Latif on his character Lieutenant Ash Tyler: “We meet him as a prisoner of war and he has gone through some really horrible things and we meet him with Jason Isaacs’ Captain Gabriel Lorca. It’s just about him going back to the ship trying to find who he is, trying to find some normality again because you see the effects about episode eight, everything starts to come to a head soon, see how it all affected him and what happened to him.” Jason Isaacs and Shazad Latif.
returns from its winter hiatus today on Netflix, and Trekkies are hoping that a popular fan theory will finally be laid to rest in the following weeks. At a roundtable interview held in London in November, tabloid! took the opportunity to quiz actor Shazad Latif (Spooks, Penny
around whom this theory revolves. The idea basically goes that Latif’s Lieutenant Ash Tyler, who eventually becomes chief of security on the USS Discovery after being rescued by Captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) from a Klingon war ship, is actually the albino Klingon Voq in human disguise. While the theory seems farfetched, especially since Tyler is also now lead character Michael Burnham’s (Sonequa Martin-Green) love interest, it’s not without merit. Especially since, in an episode (The Trouble with Tribbles) of the original Star Trek series, we’ve already seen a Klingon undergo drastic surgery to pass off as human and infiltrate a Starship. In Latif only appears on the show by episode four, the very episode where Voq disappears. On episode three, Voq’s associate L’Rell asks him to “sacrifice everything” if he wants to win the war against the Federation. This suggests that Voq might have had to give up his cherished Klingon identity to get on Discovery. Also, the actor who supposedly plays Voq, Javed Iqbal, is a previously unknown actor with a bizarrely empty IMDB page. Add to this the fact that Latif’s birthname is actually Shazad Iqbal, and things begin to get very interesting. Ask Latif if he’s actually ever met Iqbal, and the actor starts getting suspiciously shifty, “Javed Iqbal… I’ve met him, yeah. But we don’t see a lot of people… There are so many different sets that you hardly meet all of them.” The actor was so uncomfortable, co-star Isaacs had to intervene on his behalf, “Sonequa hosted these games nights where the crew get to know each other. The first time we did one, I hardly knew who [the Klingon actors] were because they normally have their silver heads [prosthetics] on or whatever… There are a lot of people you don’t meet.” Press further we did, but Latif recovers enough to politely shut the query down once and for all, “I am just glad that people are interested. fans do this all the time. They are really good detectives, but why don’t you just watch it? It’s a good mystery, it’s good.” Shazad Latif as Ash Tyler. Voq, allegedly played by Javed Iqbal. Isaacs and Jayne Brook. Isaacs and Sonequa Martin-Green.