Rebecca Romijn Reveals Exciting New Star Trek Canon For Number One
Something new for Number One!
Rebecca Romijn has plenty of secrets about her character known as Number One in the upcoming series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, but she’s only letting a few of them slip. The X-Men actress recently sat down with Comicbook to chat about her performance in the soon-to-be series and gave us an idea of what we can expect from the rebooted character. From the gate, she was ready to reveal that Number One now has a name and that name is Una Chin-Riley.
The actress confirmed that the decision behind the name was a way of paying homage to celebrated Star Trek novelist, Una McCormack, who has written a slew of books surrounding the worlds of Deep Space Nine, Discovery, and more. And although Rebecca Romijn has admitted to not taking the dive into any of those novels herself, she hopes to work Una Chin-Riley into Star Trek canon along with the rest of the greats. To complete her goal, Romijn will need to give the character previously known as Number One her own flair as prior to Strange New Worlds, the Star Trek personality had very little screen time. This should be made easier by the fact that Romijn teased that Una Chin-Riley is hiding something. Giving no further clues other than dropping that the character likes to keep busy and stay on top of her game, we’ll just need to wait until the series airs to find out what Romijn is talking about.
The history of Number One goes all the way back to the very beginning days of Star Trek: The Original Series. In the show’s original pilot, “The Cage,” Majel Barrett stepped into the role where she appeared as Captain Pike’s (Jeffrey Hunter) first officer. With just 14 minutes in front of the camera, the lore surrounding Number One has only lived on in Star Trek based novels and comics – until now. With Rebecca Romijn taking over the character, she’ll carry Una Chin-Riley off the pages and onto television screens everywhere when Strange New Worlds lands on Paramount+ May 5.
Developing a character from any franchise is tough, but Star Trek fans are rather particular about how their favorites are portrayed, giving Rebecca Romijn a big task to complete. Of this, the actress says that she completely understands why the fans are so diehard and adds that she and the team behind Strange New Worlds are also fiercely “protective of this franchise,” promising eager viewers that they’ll do right by them. Because she hasn’t read the novels and because her only previous taste of the character was from her 14 minutes of screentime where Number One was busy “dealing with the tasks at hand,” Romijn says that she’s been vigilantly picking up “little bits of information” where she can.
We’ve got a great feeling about the new life Rebecca Romijn will be breathing into Una Chin-Riley aka Number One. In fact, we have high hopes for the new series as a whole. Led by Anson Mount as Captain Pike, the ensemble cast of Strange New Worlds is made up of Ethan Peck, Christina Chong, Jess Bush, Celia Rose Gooding, Melissa Navia, Babs Olusanmokun, Adrian Holmes, and Bruce Horak. The series promises to take viewers to planets they’ve never seen alongside characters they want to know more about. And with the filling out of long lost legacy characters including Romijn’s Una Chin-Riley, it looks like the show will do exactly that.
