Warp Factor Trek

For Darryl Hinds, appearing as the Rodaxian ambassador Co’Rah in the comedic Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode “Human Best Friend” represented “a childhood dream come true.” In this exclusive interview, he explains the journey he took to portray the alien.

Becoming a Star Trek Fan

As a boy, Darryl Hinds developed a fondness for Star Trek. “My earliest memory of Trek is watching The Original Series,” he says. “In Canada, it came on during lunchtime, so when I was really, really young, I would come home from school and watch The Original Series at lunchtime. When TNG came out, I started sitting down with my family and watching that religiously. I was a little bit older then, but I watched every single episode.”

Despite his enthusiasm for the show, Hinds was somewhat in denial of his fandom. “It’s funny because, a few years ago, I would never call myself a Trekkie,” he reflects. “I would never consider myself one because  I was always like, I’m a Star Wars guy. But I was talking to a director friend of mine, who is a huge Trekkie, and we were talking through it. The only Star Treks that I haven’t watched are Enterprise and the latter seasons of Deep Space Nine. So, he finally said, ‘You know, Darryl, I think… you’re a Trekkie.’ I was like, ‘You know what? You’re right – I think I am a Trekkie!’”

Becoming an Actor

Darryl Hinds also developed an interest in performing. “Like the classic actor story, I was always the class clown, making people laugh in class,” he remembers. “Once when I was in junior high, I was out at the lunch recess, quoting some sketches from a show that was very popular called SCTV, which I had watched the night before. I was with my friends and by the end of recess, people had gathered to watch me do impressions of this show. As the recess bell rang and everyone walked away, my friend turned to me and said, ‘You should get paid to do this.’ It was the first time I actually thought, Oh, you could get people to come and watch you! I was like, Well, I perform in high school, in school plays and assemblies. After high school, I’m gonna find a theater school to go to.”

Darryl Hinds went on to study theatre at the University of Toronto Mississauga. “There, you can have an intensive study of practical acting as well as a degree in theater and drama, so I did that,” he explains, “and then I went from theater school to auditioning for theater and got theater roles, got film and television roles, and this has been my only occupation since I became an adult. So, I’ve been able to make a living at it, which is rare and very lucky.”

In 2011, Hinds did a couple of episodes in the short-lived medical drama Combat Hospital, wearing burn and blood makeup because his character survived a helicopter crash. Regarding the makeup, he says, “I got more claustrophobic with that, because I couldn’t touch anything, than I did with the Star Trek makeup. But it’s all great – I’m never complaining about it because it’s all fun make-believe.”

Becoming a Star Trek Actor

Some of Darryl Hinds’ auditions were for Star Trek: Discovery. “When I heard Star Trek was coming to Toronto, I had to audition for it!” he remembers. “I was very excited to put myself on tape for anything Trek, so I sent a note to my agent. I was like, ‘Anything in the Star Trek universe, please send me out for.’ I auditioned for the first few seasons of Discovery, got close on some of those roles. I think there was a bridge crew member that I auditioned for, and guest star roles every season came along. When they send the casting call, it’s not the same names, so I don’t know who the character would have been.”

Despite the anonymity of the roles he was applying for, Hinds remained determined to appear in Star Trek. “I started watching Strange New Worlds and fell in love with that,” he reminisces. “I was like, ‘Please, anything in Strange New Worlds,’ and then auditioned again and again.”

For Co’Rah, Hinds was sent a character breakdown and a single scene rather than the full script. “I think that’s out of necessity, especially for something like Star Trek. They don’t want any leaks, so they described this alien without naming him. It said they value formality and pretense above all things. My agent was like, ‘Are you a Klingon?’” Hinds laughs, “and I was like, ‘I don’t think so.’”

Hinds also began to speculate about the aliens. “When they described them on paper, my immediate thought was Vulcans and Vulcan adherence to logic and how logic provides Vulcans peace and comfort and structure. So, I took a lot from what Vulcans do. They were like a jump-off point for me, and Klingons as well, taking their gruffness.”

Being Cast

At last, Darryl Hinds managed to secure a Star Trek role, cast as Co’Rah in the SNW episode “Human Best Friend”. He recalls, “I got hired from a self-tape. It was very exciting! When I actually booked the role – when they said, ‘You got it’ – then they sent the script, with the character’s actual name.”

Reading the script delighted Hinds. “As a Trekkie myself, it was great to see that it was one of those fun bottle episodes that had a lot of classic joy,” he comments. “This was the Dude, Where’s My Shuttle? episode. It’s kind of a combination of The Hangover and Dude, Where’s My Car? It was a lot of fun.”

The script also confirmed more details about the character. “Since it was a new species, which was exciting, the script described what the species was – Rodaxian – and again said they value formality and formal posturing above everything else, but they didn’t give me a guideline on how to play it. So, a huge challenge was… how do you embody this thing in a way that’s different from a Klingon, who are very warrior, or a Vulcan, who are very logical? Finding a different way is a great thing to explore.”

Being Fitted

Focusing on particular gestures was key to Darryl Hinds hammering down the portrayal of Co’Rah. The formality of the character informed particular performance decisions. “Everything needs to be proper,” Hinds reasons. “I’m going to try to present myself with a certain grace and hold my body in a certain way and speak in a certain way. All of that was contributing to how I put the character together, when I prepped my character for myself. That’s all the homework I did, given the information we know about this race.”

Hinds was at first unaware how extensive the makeup would be. “I’ve done prosthetic work before, but not that much,” he admits. “You have the fittings and the makeup tests beforehand, so that gets you used to it gradually. To do the mold for the headpiece and all the makeup, they do a full upper body mold where they put clay around your entire face, and you have to sit in that for about two hours. I’d never had to be completely encased before. Luckily enough, wearing the mold was strangely relaxing.”

Viewing the Rodaxian makeup design informed Hinds’ performance. “Everything about the way he looked – the grayish white sheen and the curve of the skull – was all very elegant,” he reflects. “Seeing him was enough to go, Oh, there is a natural elegance in it, so I should probably portray that elegance in some way.”

Rodaxian teeth in particular affected how Hinds played the character. “I had to overenunciate everything to get my lips around the teeth. When you do that, you automatically speak with a little bit more formality, because I’m putting my lips over the teeth a lot.” The heaviness of the headpiece also meant he had to hold his body upright, so his head wouldn’t be lolling in random directions. This rigidity of posture also contributed to his performance. “It’s all a happy accident,” he says. “Sometimes, it’s just necessity. It all contributes to this eventual product. And being a theater kid myself, playing him like a grown-up theater kid who is trying to present this air of pretense really helped.”

Despite thinking the Rodaxian makeup is “very cool,” Hinds found the prosthetics restrictive to wear. “That headpiece is deceiving because you think it’s like this hollow thing, but it’s a big, thick, solid chunk of silicone or rubber or whatever,” he relates. “It’s like a weighted football helmet. The ears on it aren’t real ears, so my ears are actually covered. The makeup people do their best to put a little hole in, so you can hear, but it’s still very muffled. With the contacts that I’m wearing, everything is a little hazy and blurred, and then I have giant teeth in,” he says, with a chuckle. “The entire thing was like I was performing underwater. I think the biggest challenge was getting used to having to perform with that much prosthetic on me. You get used to it as the day progresses.”

Being at the Table Read

Seated around a table, the cast did an initial read-through of the script. “When we were in the table read, I was holding myself back from nerding out too much,” Darryl Hinds recollects, “because that was the first time I actually sat down with the cast and I was just like, Ethan Peck – it’s, it’s Spock! The writer was in the table read, and Dave Foley was there too. He couldn’t be present, but he was zoomed in, and Dave Foley’s just great, so funny. Everyone was having a great time with this in the table read.”

Bringing the cast together allowed Hinds to notify his co-stars of his performance choices. “I presented what I was going to do to another actor, who was part of the other delegation, and she was great, a fantastic actor,” he enthuses. “But I didn’t present it like, ‘This is what you need to do.’ I would say, ‘This is what I’m going to do.’ She delivered her own performance, and so when I saw that she was doing different actions from me, in my head canon I was like, That could be the source of tension between the two factions, which feeds the character and feeds the scene, in that maybe my side of the Rodaxian civil war has held onto these formal traits and the other Rodaxians have abandoned them. That’s why we’re at war!”

Being On the Set

Although writer Kathryn Lyn had been at the table read and was on the set during production, Darryl Hinds didn’t feel it was his place to consult her about the episode. “I did two days filming. Especially as a day player coming in to do a couple days, I don’t want to overstep my bounds and ask for anything to be changed on my account,” he says, with a self-conscious laugh. “Maybe if I was a series regular and I had a concern about something, I might bring it up, in the most gracious way I could, but I feel no need to do that as a day player. My job is to do my best with the script given to me, and that’s what I tried to do. Luckily, I wasn’t really confused about anything. If you go too large, the director will say bring it down, but luckily the director never did that, so everything seemed to go fine.”

Co’Rah and the other Rodaxians change when they see a bombed shuttle explode through a window and think the explosion is fireworks detonated in their honour. Hinds credits the script for this transformation. “It was all written in the page. An exclamation point goes a long way!” he says, laughing. “They’re excited. I go from being very concerned to seeing this fireworks display which I think takes a lot of effort to put on and being very pleased with that. It’s pretty easy and natural when it’s laid out in a script like that.”

Another helpful feature was having something visual to perform his reaction to. “What was great is that the volume screen was out the window. So for that explosion, they had not a completed version but a line-of-sight mock shuttle go up on the volume and then a flash of light. It was really easy to play that sort of excitement because it was all there in front of you.”

Becoming Reminiscent

At first, Darryl Hinds felt unsure how well his performance in the episode would turn out. “I got home, after I filmed. I was with my wife, and I was like, ‘It’s one of those things where I have no idea what the performance is, because it was like I was underwater the entire time.’ I’m not complaining. It was so much fun, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.”

Hinds had concerns about how his characterisation might be altered in post-production. “I was initially worried because I was like, I think my character needs to be a little bit intimidating, to Pike, because he’s concerned. I have a high-pitched naslier-sounding voice, so I was like, I wonder if they’re gonna put a voice-changer on me, like they sometimes do with Klingons, to make my voice deeper or gruffer or whatever. That would all be post-production, so I wouldn’t know if they did that. But they just went with my voice, I think because, again, I’d tried to put gravitas into what I was doing.”

Seeing the finished episode delighted Hinds. “As far as editing goes, I don’t think anything was cut from the script. Everything that was there was what we shot. A lot of times for day players, it ends up being one line. But what ended up being there was what I had done, so I was happily surprised that everything stayed the same.”

To this day, Hinds is a fervent Star Trek fan, passionate about the “classic” feel of Strange New Worlds and the way its episodic storytelling allows it to dabble in various genres. Booking a role on the show has pleased Hinds most about the Star Trek franchise. He is also enthusiastic about having originated a new species in Star Trek. He concludes, “Getting to be a part of the fantastical world of Star Trek is forever something that I can now say has given me the opportunity to live a childhood dream.”