While Paramount+ has recently said goodbye to one Star Trek series (Picard) and will be to another this year (Discovery), there are other projects coming — and one that fans and stars hope joins that list. So, of course, when TV Insider caught up with Picard‘s Michelle Hurd on the red carpet for Law & Order: SVU‘s 25th season celebration — she left the NBC drama in its second season — we had to ask about possibly seeing her as Raffi again.
“I love Raffi. She’s my favorite character,” Hurd shared. “We have hands, fingers, everything’s crossed for Star Trek: Legacy. I know that right now they’re working on Section 31 for Michelle Yeoh. And then they’re going to do Starfleet Academy. That’s going to be a series. And then if the fans still want it, they’ll start working on Star Trek: Legacy.” (And if you’d love to see Hurd and Yeoh team up in the world of Star Trek, you’re not the only one: “Wouldn’t that be phenomenal?” Hurd said. “I need to make a phone call.”)
There had been talk of Section 31 (as a series) for quite some time before what is now going to be a movie was officially greenlit in April 2023. In the movie, Emperor Philippa Georgiou joins a secret division of Starfleet tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets and faces the sins of her past. And it was just before that, in March 2023, that Paramount+ ordered Starfleet Academy to series. It will follow the adventures of a new class of Starfleet cadets as they come of age in one of the most legendary places in the galaxy. Star Trek: Legacy is, right now, just a hope, of another series to continue telling the stories of the characters after Picard, but there’s nothing in development.
Hurd is also open to reprising her SVU role, Monique Jeffries. “I would love to, obviously,” she told us. “I’m assuming that every actor that graces the stages of Law & Order would like to visit again. And it was my first series regular out of college. I feel like whenever I see pictures, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, that’s baby Michelle.’ And as an artist, I’d love to come back just because I’ve matured and you want to revisit a role and see what you can do and bring to life. Plus, I’d love to see where Jeffries would be, and it would be great to see she’s like a Supreme Court justice, or she’s a judge, or she’s a DA.”
But since she loves playing perfectly imperfect characters, she’s also up to seeing that Jeffries “stumbled — just as long as we can see her stumble and succeed,” Hurd explained. “Because I’m also very conscious of the fact that I’m a woman of color and I’ve tried very hard to make choices in my career to represent women of color in a strong, empowering way, to let all the little brown and Black kids that are looking for representation see something on the screen and go, ‘Hey, I can do that. She’s doing it. I can do that.’ So I hope it would be something that it would be empowering so I can continue this journey that I’m trying to do of living a legacy of women of color.”
