EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: STAR TREK: DISCOVERY's Elias Toufexis on L'ak's Motivations and What the Breen Really Look Like

Elias Toufexis plays L’ak in STAR TREK: DISCOVERY season 5. Images: Paramount+ / Paul Archuleta/FilmMagic.

The following article contains SPOILERS for Star Trek: Discovery episode 507, “Erigah.” You’ve been warned!

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The latest episode of Star Trek: Discovery marks the end of Elias Toufexis’ current run on the series. Toufexis first appeared on DISCO in the season 1 episode “Context Is For Kings” as Cold, a convict being transferred to a penal dilithium mine along with convicted mutineer Michael Burnham. Now seven years have passed in the real world (over nine hundred years in the show) and a lot has changed for Burnham and the USS Discovery and her crew. Cold, presumably, lived out the remainder of his days mining dilithium and Burnham is now a Starfleet captain in the 32nd century.

Toufexis, who this season plays the Breen prince and fugitive L’ak, is a long-time Star Trek fan who knows enough about the franchise to understand the import of his character. “When I first got the role, I would have taken it anyway,” he tells me. “I didn’t even know how many episodes it was. I thought it was one, or maybe two. But I was like, oh, cool! I get to play some species, I don’t know what it is, they didn’t tell me.”

Toufexis was told that he would be under a prosthetic, which he describes as, “they pour plaster all over you and you try not to have a panic attack.” “Right before I ‘went under,’ so to speak,” he continues, “I asked for some concept art and they showed me some concept art of L’ak and [I said] what is he? Nobody’s told me what he even is. Is he a new race?’ And they said, ‘No, no, no. He’s a Breen!’”

As Toufexis relates it, there was a slow burn before he realized exactly what that meant. “It’s funny,” he tells me, “because I’m such a nerd that my first thought was, ‘Well, he can’t be a Breen; Breen don’t take their helmets off!”

The production team informed him that he’d be the first Breen the audience had ever seen without his helmet, “and then my mind went through the machinations and I realized, ‘Not only do I get to do the show and I get to be a cool bad guy, now I’m making Star Trek history! My mind went, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to be in the manuals and the magazines and all that stuff!”

Toufexis is clearly living out a Star Trek fan’s dream and he knows it, but doesn’t take it for granted. Still, he didn’t realize how major L’ak would turn out to be for DISCO’s fifth and, as it turned out, final season. When he found out, he was “so excited!”

When we met L’ak and his partner-in-more-than-crime Moll (Eve Harlow) in DISCO episode 501, “Red Directive,” it appeared that they would be the “big bads” for the season. In episode 505, “Mirrors,” however, we learned that there’s more to the Bonnie and Clyde pair than meets the eye.

L’ak and Moll require the MacGuffin of the season, a powerful and ancient weapon, to pay off an erigah, or Breen blood debt, which is haunting the couple. They are being chased by L’ak’s uncle, Primarch Ruhn (Tony Napo), who wants to use L’ak’s position as a prince to gain the throne for himself. It’s all very Shakespearean, with L’ak standing in for Hamlet (in the play of the same name) and Ruhn doing a pretty good impersonation of King Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle.

“It’s very funny you say that,” Toufexis tells me after I point this out. “That’s where I went. I went ‘Hamlet and Claudius’ with it. The prince who doesn’t want to be a prince; didn’t want to go to school; just was melancholy all the time. Luckily, his Ophelia doesn’t drown.”

In this case, though, the roles are reversed. No, Moll doesn’t drown herself, but L’ak, DISCO’s proxy for Hamlet, does kill himself by overdosing on tricordrazine, a drug that we know, from Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Ethics,” can kill a Klingon if used improperly. From L’ak’s perspective, his death might have several advantages, but it is unclear whether he took his own life intentionally or by accident.

Toufexis clarified, “What I played was, he knew this could happen, but he was hoping it wouldn’t. I played that he did the calculations and it was like, 80% this is not going to work out, but it’s worth it, because I need Moll to be free. And everything they’ve done up to now is that type of calculation. They’re doing all of this stuff that really shouldn’t be working out. They keep getting in over their heads. That was just another step of ‘I’m in over my head, but hey, it’s worked out so far!’ But he knew that this might be a sacrifice, and he did it anyway.”

L’ak’s relationship with Moll is Shakespearean, too (think Romeo and Juliet), but there’s more to it than that. “Moll loves me because of our differences, not despite them,” L’ak proclaims in the latest episode, entitled “Erigah,” and then adds, “I didn’t even think that was possible.” That’s about as Star Trek a message as there is. But the Breen don’t see L’ak’s worth as anything other than a pawn in a chess game for the throne.

L’ak takes his helmet off for Moll, which Toufexis thinks may be a big reason why Harlow’s character fell in love with him. He even forms a solid face, which is forbidden among the gelatinous Breen. “He does it for her, but he also does it for him,” Toufexis tells me. “It’s almost like a ‘screw you’ to his uncle and the Breen and all this world that he’s been forced into that he doesn’t want to be in. And he takes this form because he’s like, ‘I’m gonna take this form because this is me, this is how I feel comfortable.”

Toufexis also has an interesting perspective on the Breen’s true form. “The helmet is one form that they never take off, which is refrigerated to keep that gelatinous form, which is their true form. I still think that the face they put on where they take of the helmet, I think that’s a fake face. I feel like they’re just jelly. I don’t know that for a fact; that’s just the way I kind of saw it.”

L’ak’s story in large part is about being true to yourself as opposed to what others want you to be. It’s a relatable motivation. So does Elias the actor relate at all to L’ak the Breen prince?

“I’m not a prince,” Toufexis points out. “I’ve never rejected my family, but I do reject the notion that you can tell me what I can be. You can’t. So I can definitely relate to that. I can be whatever I want to be. Star Trek is all about analogies, right? So you can bring in the analogy of trans people or minorities or you can bring in whatever analogy you want and play it that way and just say, ‘No. I’m me. I’m whoever I want to be.’ [L’ak] is very complex and I got to play all that complexity, whether it’s talked about openly or not.”

“Watching that scene,” Toufexis wraps up, “where he finally says, ‘This is who I am. Why do we have to change’ to his uncle, I’m like, ‘This is exactly Star Trek. This is everything Star Trek is in this one scene.’ I loved it. I was so proud to be playing that stuff.”