For Canadian actors, the Star Trek franchise is fast becoming a rite of passage | Canada Voices

To Canadian actors, the Star Trek franchise is fast becoming what the Law & Order franchise is to New York theatre actors: a lucrative guest-star gig, and a rite of passage in a homegrown career.

Ever since the series Star Trek: Discovery began shooting at Toronto’s Pinewood Studios in 2017 – followed by Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy – a galaxy of local talent has prospered, including, on Discovery alone, Michael Greyeyes, Mia Kirshner, Sheila McCarthy, Callum Keith Rennie and David Cronenberg. The movie database IMDB lists 456 Canadians who’ve been in some Star Trek or other. No wonder a 1,672-square-metre stage at Pinewood Toronto (about the size of an NHL rink) has been renamed the Star Trek Stage.

In the latest Toronto/Star Trek collab, the Paramount+ film Star Trek: Section 31, which arrives Jan. 24, Michelle Yeoh reprises her kick-ass Discovery character, Emperor Philippa Georgiou, who, as another character puts it, “cornered the market on atrocities.” Georgiou joins Section 31, a secret division of Starfleet, to atone for her past. Alongside her are two rising Canadian actors who can tick “Be in Star Trek” off their bucket lists: Humberly González as Melle, a bewitching, bald honey trap; and Kacey Rohl as Rachel Garrett, an ambitious Starfleet officer. (Veteran actor Sonja Smits makes a quick cameo.)

I met González and Rohl, glammed up and vivacious, last week in a Toronto hotel room crowded with lights and recording equipment. The paths that beamed them onto Star Trek were quite different: González, 32, grew up in Venezuela; fled political turmoil to Aruba at age 10, where she learned English; then emigrated again to Fort McMurray, “where there’s, like, one movie theatre in a mall, and oil,” she says laughing. But she found a theatre community that encouraged her to audition for the National Theatre School in Montreal. She got in – “Yeah, you did,” Rohl cheers her – graduated, moved to Toronto, landed an agent and started doing commercials. “I could sell you anything,” González says.

Rohl, 33, grew up in Vancouver. Her father is the television director Michael Rohl; her mother, the playwright/comedian Jan Derbyshire, set up a little desk beside hers where Rohl would draw while Derbyshire wrote. They called it “working hours.” (“Aww, I love that,” González chimes in.) At 14, Rohl took acting classes with the renowned coach Andrew McIlroy; in 2010 she began landing “sci-fi leaning and kidnapped daughter roles” in TV movies.

As Canadian working actors, however, the two have much in common. Both “chipped away” at their careers, audition after audition. González would travel an hour across Toronto for a two-minute cattle call, where she’d try to stand out among “hundreds of people who look exactly like you,” she says. Rohl distinguished herself as “the girl who went for it,” especially if a scene required her to scream: “All day I’d sit in the waiting room and wouldn’t hear a sound. Then I’d go in and scream bloody murder.”

In 2018, their paths crossed on a TV movie: “Killer High!” González squeals. “We played frenemies at our 10-year high school reunion. Our mascot comes to life and starts killing people.”

“Our mascot,” Rohl adds, “is a warthog.” Both women collapse into laughter.

Gradually, their gigs got bigger: Guest star spots on Canadian series. Recurring characters on the series Utopia Falls and Ginny & Georgia (González), and The Killing and Hannibal (Rohl). Christmas movies (González) and art house movies (Rohl, Red Riding Hood). But neither climbed a straight ladder; both endured what Rohl calls “sideways moves, steps back, huge leaps and then nothing. Even prior to this, I hadn’t worked for a year.”

Both went through lengthy auditions for Section 31. Rohl taped herself in her kitchen with her mom. González hesitated – until the casting people assured her she could wear prosthetics instead of shaving her head. (That’s another commonality she and Rohl – almost – share: Rohl did shave hers, to play a university student faking cancer in the acclaimed Canadian indie White Lie.) Both slogged through multiple callbacks, plus long phone calls with casting people who told them what to lean into.

Then one fine day – both in their early 30s, both with 10 years’ experience behind them – they found themselves in blue wig (Rohl) and baldcap (González), on the massive set of Georgiou’s intergalactic nightclub. Later in the filming, Rohl even got to sass Yeoh: When Georgiou snarks to Garrett, “I dislike you less,” Garrett snarks back, “If I wanted someone to like me, I’d get a dog.”

“I couldn’t quite believe I had permission to do that,” Rohl says now. “It’s helpful that Michelle is a kind human, down to earth, funny, relaxed. But as soon as we cut, I felt I needed to apologize. Didn’t want to catch a roundhouse in the face or anything. Because she can do that.”

“She can, she would, she has!” González crows.

“There are a lot of legs flying in this thing,” Rohl says.

That’s a perk of getting your Star Trek. Not only does it beef up a resume – “The hope is that it opens more doors, gets your work into different eyeballs, to more people who can picture you doing the next thing,” Rohl says – it exposes local actors to the best their business offers, and helps them dream bigger.

“Being in the orbit of a Michelle Yeoh – not to use a space pun – really pulls you up,” Rohl continues. “When someone like her, so in her power, who knows her talent and is aware of her worth, is in your peer group, that message is infectious. It gets into our work, if we let it.”

González just wrapped a series in North Carolina, The Waterfront, for showrunner Kevin Williamson (The Vampire Diaries, Dawson’s Creek), but for now, both women plan to stay on this side of the border, even post-Trek. “There are so many streamers here, there are more jobs, there are Zoom auditions,” González says. “There’s a plethora of opportunity.”

When Rohl was starting out, she had a fixed idea of the milestones she needed to hit, “but as I age and my life changes, I have interests that aren’t completely about my job. I love humans so much. I want to understand them more, connect us more. I’m always looking for the strange, underfunded gems like White Lie, where I’m super challenged and digging into nitty gritty stuff. But I’m also an ambitious person. I’d love to be on a series full time that went multiple seasons. Every show I’ve been a regular on has been cancelled after one.”

“I’ve had two do that,” González says. “But we both feel we were meant for this, so there’s no other option. There’s a lot of surrendering and trusting that it will work out. It’s a game of unknowns – but isn’t that life?”

She hopes The Waterfront gets renewed, that it has longevity, that she gets to deepen her character. Then she adds, as every savvy Canadian working actor should, “Also I’d love to do more Star Trek.”

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