Why Star Trek: Discovery Had To Get Rid Of Ryn's Beard
The third season of "Star Trek: Discovery" threw the titular ship forward in time by nearly a millennium, landing the U.S.S. Discovery in a time that was very much different from the one they left. In the distant future, the galaxy was recovering from a massive unexplained cataclysm called The Burn, wherein every single starship using dilithium crystals (that is: pretty much all of them) exploded at the same time. The Federation was wounded and shrank to an almost nonexistent entity, and a mercurial, widespread crime ring called the Emerald Chain rose in its place. The Emerald Chain was made up of greedy, vicious capitalists who used violence and slavery to keep their economic chokehold on the quadrant.
One of the characters the Discovery met in this future dystopia was Ryn (Noah Averbach-Katz), an Andorian who reluctantly served as a slave overseer for the wicked Osyraa (Janet Kidder). Ryn once led an uprising against Osyraa, but the uprising was quelled and Ryn had his antennae chopped off in retaliation. Now he is forced to implant bombs into the necks of slaves. Ryn is, as one might imagine, an unhappy fellow.
When audiences first saw Ryn, he sported a scraggly white beard (Andorians have blue skin and white hair). Later in the series, after Ryn was able to escape Osyraa, he was clean-shaven. It seems that the elimination of the beard wasn't just a character moment, but a makeup consideration. Averbach-Katz, in a Reddit AMA from 2022, noted that he was spending way too much time in the makeup chair (he already required prosthetics and blue facepaint), and the producers shaved Ryn to get their actor to the set that much faster.
The two-hour beard
Note that the makeup on modern "Star Trek" is far more sophisticated than merely slathering spirit gum onto an actor's face and pasting on a pre-made beard. Artists affix beard hairs to an actor's face one at a time, a painstaking process that has been streamlined into a two-hour drill. While Ryn's white beard looked realistic (well, as realistic as it might on the face of a blue-skinned alien), leaning in to apply every single hair was simply too arduous to continue on the "Star Trek: Discovery" shooting schedule.
When Averbach-Katz was asked about the beard, he recalled the decision to nix it for time reasons, and also admitted some anxiety on the matter. He wrote (and this has been edited for clarity):
"I liked the beard! ... However it added two hours in the make-up chair, so after the first episode, they scrapped it because it was so, so time-consuming. Each hair, glued and trimmed, one by one ... It was a lot. So I was sad to see it go, but also I understood. And I'm glad you like it! For some reason it was something that I thought fans would get angry at me about!"
Perhaps no one got mad because it was a fitting change for Ryn as a character. He was unshaven and slovenly when serving as a slave-driver, and then clean-shaven when it seemed that his salvation and rescue was at hand. The prospect of escaping the Emerald Chain was positive for Ryn, and he began to clean up as a result. A beard may seem like a minor thing, but it can communicate a lot.