You can search back through this thread for past suggestions. I think the most credible one I saw was an actress named Charlene Choi.
Cast the Characters of Trek Literature
- Thread starter Haval_Runa
- Start date
I think other people have suggested this before, but I imagine her as being played by Chloe Bennet from Agents of SHIELD.
I will note that from his first appearance, I've always heard Admiral Akaar speaking in the late Skip Homeier's voice. Sure, he played two bad guys in ST, and (if I remember right) at least one in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, but he also played one of the good guys in at least one of his two appearances on Quincy.
I think I decided on Alan Tudyk for that.
I had to google him. But now I have a potential face for Curzon's character.
^You had to Google Alan Tudyk? That's surprising. These days it's getting harder to find anything that he, or at least his voice, hasn't been in.
I'm thinking Victor Garber as Admiral Akaar.
Because Garber kind of looks like the actor who played his father (the High Teer) in TOS.
As for Alan Tudyk? Good luck getting him to appear in anything Trek-related. He's had some less than kind remarks about Trek in the past (I believe his exact words were "Star Trek is for pussies"). So if he turns up, I would be VERY surprised.
Although now that I think about it, he would make a pretty good Curzon...
Incidentally, I've just had occasion to reread a DS9 novel from the "Relaunch" era, and I found myself mentally casting Shar (a character I never had a good mental casting for before) as Jesse Rath of Defiance and Supergirl. It's true that he played white-haired aliens in both of those shows and a blue-skinned one in the latter, so that would seem to make him a good fit for an Andorian character, but my reason for connecting him with Shar was actually more to do with his voice, which is close to the way I'd previously imagined Shar's voice sounding.
Provide a source for that quote?
Alan Tudyk has played hillbillies in horror movies, racist baseball managers, beloved cargo ship pilots. We Browncoats (members of Firefly fandom) adore this guy, and I can't believe he'd say something so negative for print.
Are you a collective?
I thought Alan Tudyk did have some generally positive things to say about Star Trek in the DVD commentaries for Firefly?
Cool. I haven't got that far into "Supergirl" yet.
Jesse Rath as Brainiac 5 by Ian McLean, on Flickr
I remember in 1980, I read a review of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" that suggested the next movie should feature an alien adversary from TOS, and suggested "perhaps a renegade Andorian". I had just seen "Barbarella" for the first time, and John Philip Law (Pygar, the blind angel) would have made a great Andorian.
For me, Shar always looks like this. But I do feel like the novels did a great job with him, so sometimes it's easy to forget he wasn't an actual DS9 TV character.
DS9 Relaunch Shar by Ian McLean, on Flickr
I've always been slightly uncomfortable with the idea of casting an Asian actor for Shar, even despite that the actor cast for those DS9 relaunch photoshoots is clearly of some kind of Asian descent. But I'm also aware this may all be my own cultural hang-ups.
It's just that, outside of his bondmates at least (who are all dead now), Shar's principle romantic interest has been Prynn, who is also of at least partly Asian descent. That makes me worry about pairing the two 'Asian' characters, and that it might look like they are being paired only because they are the two Asian actors on the show. (Discounting the fact that we don't know who might be cast as Cenn, Aleco, Evik etc, plus we've at least also got Chao as a background character.)
It reminds me of Sisko's three romantic interests (Jennifer, Fenna, Kasidy) all being brown-skinned women, and how some people complained that that meant Sisko was racist for not dating outside his race, while others argued that he has the right to date whoever the hell is attracted to (with all attendant disclaimers about race not even being an issue in the in-universe 24th century even while it clearly still is in the real-world 21st, and race being an artificial construct anyway).
So if Prynn and Shar (both played by Asian actors) end up dating, does that suggest to the viewer that Asians can only be attracted to other Asians? Is that the kind of thing casting directors should even worry about in an enlightened 21st century? Am I tying myself into knots over obscure points that nobody even cares about? Probably yes to the last.
And what about the fact that, as one of a four-sex species, Shar is a chan - the sex that might be defined in horrifically insensitive terms as the 'girly man' gender? (Where thaan is the manly man, shen is the manly girl, and zhen is the girly girl.) If Shar is cast with an Asian actor, does that then play into stereotypes about Asian men being androgynous, effeminate and unmanly?
But is any of that actually any good reason not to cast an Asian actor as Shar, if he is in fact the best actor for the role?
.
It's just that, outside of his bondmates at least (who are all dead now), Shar's principle romantic interest has been Prynn, who is also of at least partly Asian descent. That makes me worry about pairing the two 'Asian' characters, and that it might look like they are being paired only because they are the two Asian actors on the show. (Discounting the fact that we don't know who might be cast as Cenn, Aleco, Evik etc, plus we've at least also got Chao as a background character.)
It reminds me of Sisko's three romantic interests (Jennifer, Fenna, Kasidy) all being brown-skinned women, and how some people complained that that meant Sisko was racist for not dating outside his race, while others argued that he has the right to date whoever the hell is attracted to (with all attendant disclaimers about race not even being an issue in the in-universe 24th century even while it clearly still is in the real-world 21st, and race being an artificial construct anyway).
So if Prynn and Shar (both played by Asian actors) end up dating, does that suggest to the viewer that Asians can only be attracted to other Asians? Is that the kind of thing casting directors should even worry about in an enlightened 21st century? Am I tying myself into knots over obscure points that nobody even cares about? Probably yes to the last.
And what about the fact that, as one of a four-sex species, Shar is a chan - the sex that might be defined in horrifically insensitive terms as the 'girly man' gender? (Where thaan is the manly man, shen is the manly girl, and zhen is the girly girl.) If Shar is cast with an Asian actor, does that then play into stereotypes about Asian men being androgynous, effeminate and unmanly?
But is any of that actually any good reason not to cast an Asian actor as Shar, if he is in fact the best actor for the role?
.
But they're not actors, and Shar isn't on a show. Shar exists purely as a book character, and that character is Andorian, not Asian. The cover model is just a cover model, nothing more. He's someone the cover artist hired to represent/approximate the character in the book. You can't take that too literally. The same character may be represented by different models on different book covers, depending on the artist or on the models' availability. I think there have been two or three different cover models for Mackenzie Calhoun of New Frontier.
In my Hub series, the stock-photo service we used for the cover of the first story collection went out of business, so I had to pick different models for the cover of the second collection. And that's fine, because those models aren't my characters, they're just faces on a cover that approximately represent my characters. It's no different from the way the original magazine stories had illustrations by several different artists who all depicted the main characters differently (some more accurately than others). Cover art and illustrations do not define the characters. The prose inside the book defines them. Cover art is just an attempt to approximate it, and readers are under no obligation to take it literally. (Especially since lots of cover art gets characters wrong, e.g. depicting characters of color as white, as with the later cover for David Gerrold's ST novel The Galactic Whirlpool.)
Shar appears in the DS9 Relaunch/TNG crossover comic, Divided We Fall, and I don't really think he looked Asian there. I'd say that's probably a better representation of how the character is intended to look than the cover art.
I've always like Vincent Kartheiser from Angel and Mad Men for Shar.
It recently occurred to me that the casting of Mr Ethan Peck as Mr Spock in DISCOVERY makes it very hard to resist 'casting' Mr Gregory Peck as Spock's Grandfather Skon in the Theatre of my Mind's Eye; having said that, I am also tempted to cast those actors who have played Mr Spock (or Sarek) in various productions as members of the Ambassador's extended family (for example casting Mr Ben Cross as Solkar).
One also tends to imagine Lieutenant Valeria Williams (from RISE OF THE FEDERATION) as being played by Ms. Ginnifer Goodwin; this is - I have to admit - partly based on her attested resemblance to Ms. Jennifer Morrison (my little imp of mischief finds the insinuation that Kirk Men have similar tastes in woman deeply amusing), but I genuinely think Ms. Goodwin makes a useful visual model for the character and a plausible casting call nonetheless.
Finally, and while Mr Bennett has every reason to remind us all that President al-Rashid is ACTUALLY played by Mr Idris Elba (he even spelled it out on his 'behind the scenes' blog!), I cannot help but imagine Mr Djimon Hounsou in the role.
One also tends to imagine Lieutenant Valeria Williams (from RISE OF THE FEDERATION) as being played by Ms. Ginnifer Goodwin; this is - I have to admit - partly based on her attested resemblance to Ms. Jennifer Morrison (my little imp of mischief finds the insinuation that Kirk Men have similar tastes in woman deeply amusing), but I genuinely think Ms. Goodwin makes a useful visual model for the character and a plausible casting call nonetheless.
Finally, and while Mr Bennett has every reason to remind us all that President al-Rashid is ACTUALLY played by Mr Idris Elba (he even spelled it out on his 'behind the scenes' blog!), I cannot help but imagine Mr Djimon Hounsou in the role.
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