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Melissa Harris-Perry: Now listen, it's May the fourth as in "May the fourth be with you", as in Star Wars Day.

Lucille: Here's some money. Go see a Star War.

Melissa: Just to be clear we are aware that this next conversation might cause more controversy than George Lucas's edits to the original trilogy. By the way, Han definitely shot first.

Greedo: [Alien language]

Han: Yes. Tell Jabba that I've got his money.

Melissa: Now we're about to go boldly where no public radio show has gone before on May the fourth and to be clear there's really just one character who could have made this a voyage worth taking.

Commander Uhura: I'll have Mr. Adventure eating out of my hands sir and I'll see all of you at the rendezvous. Oh, and Admiral, all my hopes.

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Melissa: That was the incredible Nichelle Nichols in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Nichols originated the role of Uhura in the Star Trek television series. When it premiered in 1966. This Thursday a new Uhura will board the USS Enterprise.

Christopher Pike: Welcome aboard everyone. Cadet Uhura, very happy to have you aboard.

Cadet Uhura: Glad to be here.

Melissa: Actor Celia Rose Gooding will be taking on the role of Uhura in a Paramount Plus reboot, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Now Gooding is a relative newcomer to the entertainment world, but she's already got a Tony Award nomination to her name for her supporting role in the musical Jagged Little Pill. That couldn't come as too much of a surprise since she's the daughter of Broadway royalty. The one and only, LaChanze.

I spoke with Gooding about her exciting career and taking on a role with a lot of history.

Celia Rose Gooding: I did not have nearly as much understanding of how incredibly powerful and impactful this role is. My mother is a massive Trek fan. I remember being young and going to watch the movies and I remember sitting with her in the front row and craning my neck up to watch Zoe Saldana's Uhura. That was my first introduction to Uhura. Then once I found out about this project, immediately my mom, she like grabbed a bunch of blankets and popcorn and was like, "We are marathoning the original series." We got a good chunk of the way through before I had to head up to Canada.

Melissa: I want you to tell me more about your mom. I promise I'm going to ask you all kinds of questions about yourself but your mom is amazing.

Celia Rose Gooding: She's an icon. My mom she is incredible actor, incredible person, incredible mother. She made her debut in the industry of entertainment on Broadway, she had a theater background. She did musicals like The Color Purple, The Donna Summer Musical, Dessa Rose. She has an incredible resume and I remember growing up and watching her and being fascinated by the entertainment industry and wanting so bad to be an incredible storyteller and creative and I'm every day, slowly but surely, making my way there.

Melissa: She's a Tony Award winner. Is that right?

Celia Rose Gooding: She is a Tony Award winner. She won her Tony Award in 2006, I believe.

Melissa: You received a Tony nomination for your performance in Jagged Little Pill.

Celia Rose Gooding: Yes, I did. I got a Tony nomination from the show and the cast album won a Grammy. It was incredible how successful that musical was.

Melissa: On the one hand your performance was incredible. It was an incredible performance but you also once you left the production and when Broadway opened back up, you didn't return and you released a quote talking a bit about about harm and about trans and non-binary communities. I just wanted to give you a chance if you wanted to weigh in on that a bit more.

Celia Rose Gooding: Yes, totally. I think everything I said in my statement still stands true to this day. I'm incredibly proud of the work that I did and incredibly proud of the Frankie that I put out into the world. I think that once Broadway opened up again I had a reckoning mentally of just where I wanted to be in my career and what I wanted to do with the voice that I had and how little time there was to, I don't know, turn it around and produce a show that I really really wanted to be a part of.

I took a step back and realized that I think that was the proper time for my departure so that when the show reopened and it went back into rehearsals again it had a new Frankie Morgan Dudley who's incredible, who could give themselves to the show in a way that I didn't think I could at the time.

Melissa: Now you're departing on a multi-year mission to seek out strange new worlds and seek out new life and new civilizations and to boldly go where no one has gone before. Are you now a trekky?

Celia Rose Gooding: I would say I'm a trekky by association. My knowledge of this universe is growing every day as I continue to work. I'm trying my best to have a degree of separation from it so I can come from it as a character who doesn't have a lot of information is Trek as a universe but as a multiyear spanning thing I try for my character to only show up with the information that that character would have on the day. I try and keep my respect for the canon and the franchise has already been established. I try and keep and hold a decent amount of respect for that. I also try and keep my distance as to not oversaturate my brain with knowledge that may not be helpful for the character I'm playing.

Melissa: Can you say a bit more? Is that something that you are developing particularly around this role or is that typically how you prepare for a role?

Celia Rose Gooding: It's typically how I prepare for a role depending on what the universe is around that character. I think Star Trek is very specific because it is such a massive franchise and there's information about it everywhere. There's a wealth of knowledge. I try and receive all the stuff that is helpful for my character like my character's background and where Uhura is from and her family life and maybe the things that she was doing before she showed up to Star Fleet. Everything that happens in her future I try and keep my eyes off of because I don't want to let that knowledge infuse its way into my character play.

Melissa: I know you've talked bit about Uhura representing a kind of universality that she's a linguist. How has that informed how you're thinking of this embodiment?

Celia Rose Gooding: I think she has, not naivety, but a lack of knowledge of the world that she's stepping into at this moment when we meet her. I think that that is incredibly helpful for me as someone who's in this same place and audience members who may not necessarily have a huge history of knowing Star Trek and want to really get a fresh perspective and a set of new eyes and a new point of view and I think that's what Cadet Uhura is providing in this first season.

Melissa: I think before we readily used this language in pop culture, Uhura was representative of Afrofuturism. I think it just wasn't a language that we would've used but it was like, "Yo, there are Black people in space. There's Black people in the future."

Celia Rose Gooding: Of course.

Melissa: [laughs] Say more to me. I have a strong sense of how I have increasingly become interested in Afrofuturism as a way of simply laying claim to that of coarseness of it but why is that so exciting?

Celia Rose Gooding: I think it's exciting as someone who is incredibly excited about the prospect of the future and what the future looks like. I think it is incredibly important to make it absolutely and necessarily known that Black people are multiplicity because we are not a monolith, the multiplicity and the multifacetedness of Black people each and every single facet has a place in the future. It has a secure spot and you don't have to be one type of person or another type of person.

I think the incredible thing about the future and the idea of the future is that we have no idea what it's going to look like. It could be everything and anything and because the world that we live in is so diverse of course the future is only going to reflect it's best aspects of that, I think.

Melissa: What's on your playlist these days. What are you listening to?

Celia Rose Gooding: Oh, what a fantastic question. I could talk about music forever. It's like music and astrology are the only two bits of my personality. I'm listening to Alex Isley and Jack Dine's joint album called Margold. I have been waiting for this album for years and they have not disappointed. I'm a huge fan of R&B, a huge fan of Neo-soul and Alex Isley is the daughter of an Isley Brother. I don't know, I guess as a daughter of someone who is a pillar in their industry, I feel like we see each other even though she has no idea who I am. I'm like, "I relate to you. I promise." She's my favorite artist out right now.

Melissa: All right. You mentioned astrology as being your other piece. You were born in late February so what's your sign?

Celia Rose Gooding: I'm a Pisces. Actually I had a really cool 22nd birthday. My 22nd birthday was on February 22nd, 2022 and so that magical Tuesday that-

Melissa: All the twos.

Celia Rose Gooding: -everybody was talking about was-- Yes. Two is a very important number to me. It's a number of intuition. It's a number of balance. It's the first even number. I love my two so it was really cool. to celebrate that birthday up here.

Melissa: All right, so you were there turning 22 on 2/22/22.

Celia Rose Gooding: Yes. Pretty cool.

Speaker: Did you just stand and vibrate in the universe somewhere?

Celia Rose Gooding: Yes, pretty much. A friend of mine hosted this incredible Zoom party and surprised me. I thought it was only going to be a small group of people but I actually got to talk to cousins and friends who I haven't spoken to in months. I was just washed in love and I had a numerology reading which I'm getting into and I laid my tarot cards out and did a bit of reading of that. It was an incredible emotional day as all birthdays are. At least in my experience. It was really just an incredible day. I woke up the next day hungover with love. That's how I describe it.

Melissa: Certainly part of the reason birthdays are so important these days is because the pandemic has heightened our sense of life and the fragility of life. How has the pandemic also maybe pushed you to think about the types of roles that you want to do in the projects that you want to take on?

Celia Rose Gooding: Huge part of my mind right now is what I want to devote my art to and my voice to. In the pandemic, I've learned so much. I feel like I'm learning more and more every day about what I have room for. I think before the pandemic I was someone who was very wide-eyed and just excited about the world and excited about having an opportunity in this industry that I pushed through and made it through everything.

Now after the pandemic I've realized the importance of rest and the importance of just knowing when to stop and really savor time because that is something that is not guaranteed. I try my best to really devote myself to things that I know if it was the last project I ever worked on, I would be content. That's how I feel about Trek. That's how I feel about working up here and being up here. I'm so excited about this character and the Uhura that I'm going to have an opportunity to show to everyone that, if God forbid, knock on wood, something were to happen to the world, I would be totally content with this being the last character I ever play.

Melissa: We only have to go here if you feel comfortable and want to but as you say that I have to say that it pierces me in a particular way knowing that you lost your father on 9/11 when you are still such a young child. That idea of something quite suddenly just being your last must feel particularly present for you.

Celia Rose Gooding: Oh, yes. My father's energy is with me everywhere. I literally have photos of him on my, I'll call it a career shrine. I have just a couple of shelves on this cabinet. I don't even know what to call it. It just has bits of my career that I'm very proud of and things that just remind me of love and creativity and joy and process and his photo-- I wish I could send you a picture of it but it's this photo of him holding me and I'm looking into the camera and he's looking at me and my face because of the flash. Because I was a baby I'm like totally blanched out. I look like the sun. It's hilarious.

I feel that picture specifically and the idea of his eyes constantly being on me and my eyes looking forward into the future, it fuels me in a way that I get a little emotional talking about, of course, but it fuels me and I know how incredibly lucky that I am to have him as one of my guardian angels and making sure that I'm in the right place at the right time and doing all the proper work. Sometimes when I'm being a little procrastinaty I can hear his voice in the back of my head like, "Girl you know you have scenes to memorize. Turn Hell's Kitchen off."

He is very much a part of my life. He's very present with me. We talk on the way to work every day and I talk to him before I go to sleep. When it comes to thinking about death and what the ending of life can be, I think that's very subjective. I think he lives in me and through me every day. I don't think I've ever lost him. I don't think I ever experienced the loss of him. I think he's just in a different place now.

Melissa: Celia Rose Gooding is an actor and one of the stars of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Celia thank you so much for joining us.

Celia Rose Gooding: Of course. Thank you for having me, Melissa. It was a pleasure to speak to you.

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