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Star Trek’s Melissa Navia loves playing Ortegas because, unlike Spock or Pike, she gets to chart her own course
Melissa Navia says creating a brand-new hero in Strange New Worlds is freeing — and producers already have big plans.
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Melissa Navia is boldly going where no one has gone before.
Many of her Star Trek: Strange New Worlds castmates are playing characters that have been portrayed by other actors over the years, such as Anson Mount’s Captain Pike and Ethan Peck’s Spock. This means that they have a legacy to live up to and some baggage attached to their characters.
However, Navia’s character, Lt. Ortegas, is an original creation for the series, and she finds that liberating.
“When season one came out [fans] professed their love for Ortegas, and I’m forever grateful to them for that,” Melissa Navia says during a Star Trek spotlight panel at New York Comic Con. “I always say that what we do is half of the work, and the fans and this franchise are the other half. And to be on a crew with so many legacy characters, with characters that people have grown up with, and who they have such an adoration for, and then to be creating this new character.”
“It’s great to play a character where you know where they’re going. I love that for Ortegas, we don’t know where she’s going.”
However, that doesn’t mean the producers don’t have some cool plans for the character.
“There’s been storylines and pieces of her that I’ve known about since the beginning. I’ve spoken with Henry [Alonso Myers] and Akiva [ Goldsman about it], and they’ve always influenced what I’ve done with her and what you’ve seen on the bridge and what you’ve seen throughout the show.”
Space may be the final frontier, but there's no end to Popverse's love of the Star Trek universe. Hop aboard the starship Enterprise with our Star Trek watch order, explore strange new worlds with our upcoming Star Trek TV shows and movies list, seek out the new life of the franchise, and boldly go where no Star Trek film has ever gone before - with Quentin Tarantino?
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