Kurtzman: Section 31 Was Yeoh’s Idea
2 min readAlex Kurtzman spoke recently to Variety as reported by TrekMovie, and part of the discussion turned to Section 31.
It turns out that the idea for Section 31 came from one of the Discovery actors. “The truth is that for Section 31 the idea of doing that show, it was Michelle Yeoh‘s,” said Kurtzman. “She deserves all the credit for that. She actually came to me about it before we even aired the first season of Discovery. She loved playing the character and she said, ‘I know that there are a lot of young women who grew up like I did and did not see somebody like me on screen and I want to be that person.’ And I said, ‘That sounds amazing! Let’s do it.’
“But we didn’t know if people were going to like Discovery. We didn’t know if Discovery was going to work, at the time. And so I said ‘Let’s see how it works, and if we can get there let’s get there.’ She killed it. She did amazing work on the show. And then in Season Two, we really started digging into the mythology of Section 31, which had been dealt with on other shows. And we started seeing a way to do it. And so we got there.”
Kurtzman also spoke about the progress of the show, saying “Erika [Lippoldt] and Boey [Yeon Kim], who are two of our writers on Discovery, have been working with Craig Sweeny, who was a writer we worked for a long time and he ran Limitless for us. And they’ve been doing an amazing job building the show. So I’m really excited about where it’s going. And I can’t wait to see Michelle in that part. And I think people are going to be very surprised about the world that it occupies. We’ve seen stuff online where people have guessed certain things, but some they are nowhere even near guessing. So that’s pretty fun.”