Wilson Cruz has been one of the most impressive actors on the set of Star Trek: Discovery since the show launched. Playing Hugh Culber, the USS Discoveries doctor and counselor, Cruz has stood out for his presence and delivery, earning him a heap of new fans during his time on the show.
While Discovery has its share of talented actors and actresses, Cruz has proven to be one of the show's absolute best, so much so that he was tasked with doing something quite hard to do; create a whole new character. In the third episode of season five, Cruz takes centerstage as not just Culber, but as a new entity, named Jinaal.
Culber is forced to take on a Trill symbiont to further uncover the mystery of the Progenitor's technology, meaning Cruz had to change up a lot of who Culber was to make this new character seem more realistic, and as Cruz told TrekMovie.com, it wasn't exactly the easiest thing to do, saying;
"“I mean, when I tell you the anxiety involved in creating this character… Jinaal was a mountain I had to climb. And thank god, they sent it to me a little early, I had a couple of weeks to figure it out...So then I kept coming up with ideas, because you know, my imagination goes wild, I’m going to try to all these millions of things and not be able to settle on anything...It was really important for me to get it right, because it really set up the rest of the of the season for me. And I really wanted Jinaal to stay with Culber throughout the season, and you’ll see why towards the end. "
Cruz did a great job changing up the characters. It's not easy to do something like that, especially while having to figure out who both characters are independent from one another. It's not often we get to see how a Trill character affects established characters, usually, it's the other way around. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine showed three different iterations of the Dax characters Curzon, Jadzia, and Ezri. They all got to be different versions of Dax, so none of them had to worry about changing up who they were on the fly, for lack of a better term.
Cruz's handling of the role was impressive and well-received, and we're excited to see where the characters go from here.