“People of Earth” introduced Star Trek: Discovery‘s newest recurring character of the 32nd century universe: Blu del Barrio’s young Earth Defense Force officer, Adira, who may hold the key to finding what’s become of the Federation.

Like their character, del Barrio identifies as non-binary, and the new-to-the-scene actor spoke with Entertainment Tonight about Adira’s arrival to the Discovery story, bonding with fellow LGBTQ actors in the cast, and why Adira’s story begins with “she” pronouns.

To start, del Barrio discussed what drew them to the role on Star Trek: Discovery.

The whole year before I got this job, I was struggling a lot with trying to understand who I was and struggling a lot with my gender.

I was questioning a lot of things and I started auditioning for non-binary roles because I knew I wasn’t cisgender and I was trying to figure myself out.

I kept getting drawn to wanting to play a non-binary role, probably because I wanted to be able to explore myself that way but I wasn’t really telling anyone about it.

So getting this job and getting to play Adira was really overwhelming at first, but overall a massive blessing because it allowed me to explore myself. I’ve grown alongside Adira.

It’s a really strange way for it to happen, but I’m so glad that it has. It’s given me a community of people here who are incredibly supportive of me. Wilson and Anthony and Ian [Alexander] are my rocks here and they’ve helped me through a lot of stuff that I couldn’t go through myself alone.

They also discussed how Adira’s journey has helped their own personal experience in life.

It’s helped me to be open about things and totally transparent about things. What helped a lot is they gave me a lot of freedom with Adira to go wherever I needed to go because I was still questioning myself at the beginning of the season.

I didn’t want to make Adira somebody who was a hundred percent confident in how they wanted to present themselves to the world because I wasn’t there yet either.

Because of that I got to sort of grow and become more comfortable with myself and allowed that to influence where Adira was and vice versa.

It just went back and forth, but I’m really grateful that they let me go in that direction because I didn’t want to play a character who was totally confident in themselves when I wasn’t yet, especially surrounding something so sensitive.

It helped me in a lot of ways and I think Adira is going to continue to grow and become more confident in the same way that I am doing.

del Barrio’s casting made headlines for their non-binary identification, and it was a surprise to some that Adira spent their first episode being referred to as “she” and “her” — rather than the expected “they” and “them” pronouns.

[The use of those pronouns were] really important for me. I care a lot about an accurate representation of Adira and trans representation, especially. Because I wasn’t yet fully out to a lot of my family and some of my friends still, I didn’t feel comfortable right off the bat having everyone use they/them pronouns for Adira because I wasn’t out to everyone yet.

So I wanted to wait until really I was, until I was in a place where I could talk to my family and my friends and tell them who I was. At that point I could then feel that this is now an accurate way for me to represent Adira onscreen as well because I’m there too. I didn’t want to rush it. I didn’t want to put pressure on myself.

I just wanted it to be as honest as possible because there are so few trans characters onscreen, and I wanted to make this character as transparent to my own experience as possible because we don’t see a lot of trans characters onscreen who are questioning, who are maybe not completely out talking to everyone about how they’re feeling about themselves.

There’s so much pressure in the media for us to be 100 percent confident and really sure about ourselves so that people watching the shows don’t question us. But there are so many people who struggle with their identity and I wanted to at least have one character onscreen do that… be able to see someone go from keeping everything inside to them sharing because that’s what everyone has to do.

As the unexpected human host of a Trill symbiont, Adira’s story is far from over — as it appears the Discovery crew will take a side trip to the Trill homeworld in next week’s episode, allowing us to learn more about this new character and their history.

Star Trek: Discovery returns for the fourth episode of the season, “Forget Me Not,” on November 5 exclusively on CBS All Access (USA) and CTV Sci Fi Channel (Canada); the episode arrives November 6 on Netflix for all other global regions.