Star Trek is making diversity history.
The CBS All Access show announced on Wednesday (September 2) that the franchise’s first non-binary and transgender actors, Blu del Barrio and Ian Alexander, will join for Season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery.
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The actors will also be playing non-binary and transgender characters.
Blu was in their final year of acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art when they auditioned for the role of Adira, a non-binary resident of the 32nd Century who quickly finds the U.S.S. Discovery to be their new home, and is a character who is “highly intelligent with a confidence and self-assurance well beyond their years.” They become friends with Dr. Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) and Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp), who were also the first gay couple to be part of a Star Trek cast.
Ian will play Gray, the first major Trill character in the franchise since Deep Space Nine, a hybrid species, in which a humanoid “host” joins with an intestine-like symbiont and receives the memories and personality of the symbiont, plus the symbiont’s memories and experiences of its previous hosts.
“Symbionts are joined with hosts regardless of gender, so a female host in the present may have memories of having been male in the past. And vice versa. It was an early attempt at Trek blurring gender boundaries and inquiring into what exactly makes one’s identity,” Indiewire reports.
“Gray is empathetic, warm and eager to fulfill his lifelong dream of being a Trill host, but he will have to adapt when his life takes an unexpected turn,” says CBS.
Ian is also the first out transgender Asian-American actor on television, and is known as Buck Vu on Netflix’s The OA and Lev in the highly acclaimed video game The Last of Us Part II.
Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 debuts on CBS All Access on October 15. There’s also a brand new series in the franchise coming!
