Movies - TV
Why Ryn’s Beard Couldn’t Stay In Star Trek: Discovery
By WITNEY SEIBOLD
The third season of "Star Trek: Discovery" threw the titular ship forward by nearly a millennium, introducing a character named Ryn (Noah Averbach-Katz), an unhappy Andorian.
When audiences first saw Ryn, he sported a scraggly white beard with his Andorian blue skin and white hair. Later in the series, after Ryn can escape Osyraa, he is clean-shaven.
Eliminating the beard wasn't just a character moment. In a 2022 Reddit AMA, Averbach-Katz noted that he was spending too much time in the makeup chair.
"Star Trek" makeup is quite sophisticated. 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, leaning in to apply every single hair was simply too arduous to continue on the "Star Trek: Discovery" shooting schedule.