Rapp: Lt. Stamets Is Super-Smart With A Softer Side
2 min read
In a new interview with StarTrek.com, Anthony Rapp spoke cautiously about his Star Trek: Discovery character Lt. Paul Stamets.
Rapp is cautious because he doesn’t want to give away too much before the show premieres. “I’m wondering how much I can talk about,” he said. “It’s not just what I’m not allowed to; it’s that I wouldn’t want to. I’m like an anti-spoiler person as a consumer of culture.”
But then Rapp goes on to describe Stamets. “I think that when you first encounter me I’m a little…Stamets is super-smart and is the expert in his field, and so he encounters other people and can be a little impatient, or flinty, or short with them,” he said. “So, part of the journey is getting to know these people with whom I’m first sort of like, ‘Who are you? What good are you to me?’ And then getting to know, ‘Oh, maybe you are some good to me.’ Seeing the evolution of my character’s relationship with all these other people.”
Rapp also addressed the relationship with Dr. Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) and what fans can expect to see, again being very cautious with his words. “And then you also get to see the softer side in my relationship with (Hugh),” he said. “More than that, I don’t really want to touch on too much because it just gets into the spoilery stuff.”
It took Star Trek a long time to include a gay couple. “I think some of it is network pressures,” said Rapp. “I don’t know, honestly, what conversations were happening with producers. I don’t really know. This is all pure speculation. I’m pretty sure that [Jonathan] Frakes did go on record that he advocated for that for that non-gender character to express as male, though. I think, right? Or something like that. So, there were missed opportunities, you could say, but I don’t…It is twelve years since the last series occurred on TV and a lot has shifted in TV, in general, since then. I just think it’s a confluence of all those circumstances. For better or for worse it just has been… I think it was a blind spot probably more than anything. I don’t know if it was willfully avoided. I can’t speak to that.”
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