Michelle Hurd: My Mother Taught Us to Lead With Love and Not With Fear

Michelle Hurd sits down with Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes on Dropping Names and the first thing she gives them is her father. Hugh Hurd was 18 when he shipped out with a Black battalion in World War II, and he was one of the soldiers who walked through the gates of Dachau, where the prisoners who crawled out of hiding called the men who freed them black angels. Ten years later a hand reached out on a New York City bus to ask whether he thought a face like that could ever be forgotten. From there Michelle keeps going: her father in Shadows, the very first John Cassavetes film, Peter Falk pretending his glass eye had fallen out in Times Square, Godfrey Cambridge as her godfather, Maya Angelou raising money for Doctor Martin Luther King at cabarets her dad helped organize, and Hugh on Broadway in The Little Foxes with Elizabeth Taylor, who gave up her first class seat to go sit with the cast. She also explains why a Black father and a white mother sat their three daughters down in front of Star Trek every week so they could watch Nichelle Nichols take up space.

The rest is just as good. Michelle talks about playing Raffi Musiker on Star Trek Picard opposite Patrick Stewart and Michael Dorn as Worf, and Jonny confesses that he tried to make her look strung out for a scene and the makeup department told him she was simply too fine to ruin. She describes the survivor guilt of being the only member of the original Picard cast held over after the others were let go, and what Terry Matalas told her about why. There is a producer who once phoned to say their research proved a woman of color could only be taken seriously with straightened hair, which is exactly why Raffi has a mane of curls in the 25th century. There is Bruce Campbell climbing on top of the car from Ash vs Evil Dead to apologize to two hundred people, a story worth the whole episode on its own, and a Charles Bronson anecdote from Brent that lands as its perfect opposite. Plus her sister Adrian at Alvin Ailey, Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell on Anyone But You, her husband Garrett Dillahunt on Deadwood, and a genuinely clear explanation from the secretary treasurer of SAG AFTRA about how actors lost their health insurance.

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