Last week at the official Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, we had a few minutes to catch up with Star Trek: Discovery actor Rekha Sharma, who played two versions of Ellen Landry — the right hand to Gabriel Lorca in both the prime and Mirror universes — during the first season of the show.
Sharma returned to the Trek franchise in 2019 by way of Star Trek Online, where she revisited Starfleet’s version of Landry in Rise of Discovery, a storyline set in the months before ‘prime’ Lorca was replaced with his alternate-universe counterpart.
We caught up with the former Battlestar Galactica co-star to chat about her role in Star Trek Online and more.
TREKCORE: The first season of Star Trek: Discovery shares a dark sci-fi tone with Battlestar Galactica. Did your time playing Tory Foster on that series prepare you to take on the role of Ellen Landry?
REKHA SHARMA: Yeah, certainly…. I would say yes, it did help prepare me for my role on Discovery, even just being on a ship. Part of me felt like I was home when I walked onto the Star Trek sets because being on a ship is familiar to me, being on a battlestar, being on Colonial One. Something about walking on those semi-circle hallways, and just being surrounded in metal feels very much at home. [Laughs]
[They are both] essentially war stories, and so once you put yourself into that world of ‘we’re running, we could be killed at any moment,’ I think that hangs around, that stays with you. Of course, there are different things about the Star Trek story, but there is definitely some crossover.
TREKCORE: You’ve portrayed two versions of Landry, both in the ‘prime’ universe and in the Terran Empire. Which was more difficult to play?
SHARMA: I don’t know if I can say one is more difficult than the other. I’ll say that I actually enjoyed the Mirror version more because ‘prime’ Landry had it kinda harder in some ways. It was there on the page, in the circumstance of what ‘prime’ Landry had gone through. And then, of course, when we came to Mirror Landry, we tried to figure out how is she the Mirror version, and how do we do this, and we decided to make it quite subtle.
We actually just figured it out right on the day, just before we started shooting the scene, we were like, “How can we do this?” And it was a conversation between myself, [writer/producer] Ted Sullivan and [director] Olatunde [Osunsanmi] about where does she live — and we decided not to make it a drastic change, but something more subtle.
What I realized is that given the nature of the story, Mirror Landry is actually a freedom fighter. She’s living in an oppressive culture which was kind of a simpler story, which in some ways…the Mirror Universe is less complicated for Landry.
TREKCORE: Commander Landry really has a no-nonsense attitude when it comes to her support of Captain Lorca.
SHARMA: Absolutely. I mean, he made things very clear. He was not like other captains! [Laughs]. And particularly he made them very complicated with Landry and um…yeah, very unfortunate. That’s part of the story, and I’m glad we dared to tell that. Subtly, but it was in there.
TREKCORE: Do you have any fond memories of working on the 2009 reboot of V on ABC? You were particularly memorable on that show, playing yet another villain…
SHARMA: Thank you. Yeah, you know, sometimes you gotta just be a lizard and just eat people! You gotta do what you gotta do. [Laughs] I would say the most memorable (experience) was my death, when I’m tortured to death by somebody who’s now a dear friend, Charles Mesure, he played Hobbs. It was an intense day.
TREKCORE: If you’re going to be tortured, it’s best to have it done by a friend, right?
SHARMA: Yeah, yeah, I think that bonded us for life! He was always just like, “God, you’re like, the last person I wanted to kill, and they’re making me do that.” Then I’m screaming and crying, and he’s like, “This day sucks.” [Laughs]
TREKCORE: Your support of the charity Race to Erase 22 is commendable. What encouraged you to join the fight against PTSD-related suicide among military veterans?
SHARMA: You know, I had the pleasure of meeting a couple of lovely men who are still in my life, who fought in Iraq.
One of them is Josh Flanagan, who was at our event this year. He actually flew in from Austin that morning. He’s a good friend. Also Ernesto Rodriguez, he goes by “Nerd Nesto” online, and he walked across the country 2,200 miles, he actually went a little bit over to raise awareness about this situation. He fought in Iraq for a very long time. He’s been through a lot.
Between these two men I learned a lot about it, in moving to the US. So being Canadian, and not knowing about this tragedy of 22 people on average killing themselves daily… it just shook me to my core. In my mind growing up, it was like, that was like a thing of the past. Because we learned, right? We learned from Vietnam, and we weren’t gonna do that anymore.
Something about moving to the States [from Canada] and becoming friends with these men woke me up to the fact that no, it’s happening right now, and these sweet people that I adore are struggling daily from what they’ve been through. So I was very grateful for that wakeup call, and yeah, I just want to do whatever I can.
Next year, we will be doing the [Donuts for Vets benefit event] again. I believe it’s Saturday, June 6th,, which is the day after National Donut Day [a day to celebrate men and women who served soldiers donuts during the First World War], but it happens to fall on D-Day. A lot of the fans had said they were bummed that they couldn’t come on Friday, since National Donut Day always falls on a Friday. So we thought, you know what? Let’s cheat a bit and just move it to Saturday, so that all of you who work can come on Saturday.
Rekha Sharma can be heard voicing Ellen Landry in Rise of Discovery, playable now on PC and console gaming versions of Star Trek Online.