‘Star Trek: Section 31’: How Michelle Yeoh Made That Major Cameo Happen (VIDEO)

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Star Trek: Section 31.]

You can thank Michelle Yeoh for that major cameo in Star Trek: Section 31.

As first heard, then finally seen at the end of the movie, Yeoh’s friend and Everything Everywhere All at Once costar Jamie Lee Curtis makes a cameo as Control.

“When they said, ‘We need someone who’s going to come right at the end, and she’s the admiral,’ has to be someone that we all go, ‘Oh, wow, right away, Jamie Lee Curtis,'” Yeoh tells TV Insider in the video interview above. “Yeah, no-brainer.”

She admits she didn’t want to feel like she was taking advantage of her “darling friend,” but Curtis’ manager encouraged her to reach out. “Bless Jamie. If she doesn’t believe in something, she won’t do it. But she loves Star Trek and she loves me.”

Executive producer Alex Kurtzman adds that Curtis was “so gracious. She and Michelle obviously are dear, dear friends. The second we asked her, she said, ‘I would do anything for Michelle.’ And she just did it. She was so, so fun. It is that amazing thing where an actor who is just like one of the best actors in the world shows up for two hours, comes and just destroys it, just kills it, has the best time, gives you 70 versions of the same line — each one of them could have been in the movie — and then walks out the door, just a murderer. She’s so good.”

That was also the first thing they filmed, executive producer and director Olatunde Osunsanmi shares.

Jan Thijs / Paramount+

Executive producer Craig Sweeny, who wrote the film, reveals that in the script, he “phrased it very non-specifically, just sort of like, it is somebody that you recognize: “I thought the most likely outcome would be we get a recognizable face from Trek. So then it wound up being her. Oh my God, I’m an enormous fan. Halloween was among my favorite movies as a kid, so it was a chance for me to be a fanboy.”

Curtis’ role bookends a movie that includes incredible fight scenes. Yeoh makes sure to call out stunt coordinator Christopher McGuire and his team and director of photography Glen Keenan.

“The most important this is, what is the drama in [the scene]?” explains Yeoh. In the first major one, in which Georgiou uses phase pods — to put who or what it’s on at a different frequency —  to try to keep a device (unknown at the time) from a masked invader, her character sees it as, “I’m just teaching you, Section 31, how to do your job, basically. She’s just so badass.” They were able to play with that as the fight moved from room to room of the Baraam night club.

“With Chris and Tunde, what we had to work out very clearly was this one was more like tongue-in-cheek. It was showing all the different weapons that she had,” Yeoh details.

Also part of that fight is Section 31 member, Melle (Humberly Gonzalez), though she’s killed in her attempt to stop the masked invader. “Listen, I was in heels in a very tight and revealing dress, bald, in a very slick bar. I did have a lot of bruises. I’m not going to lie,” Gonzalez shares. “but I have a knack for fighting. I’m not going to lie. Even the stunt team was like, you should do more fight movies. So I’m training for it.”

Jan Thijs / Paramount+

As the director, that scene was very exciting for Osunsanmi. “It moved from room to room to room, and we had to figure out the physics of it — when did a punch land and when did a kick land versus when did it go through someone,” he explains. “Everything had to be shot twice, sometimes three times, depending on what VFX needed. And it was wonderfully unpredictable and an extension of Michelle Yeoh’s character, Philippa Georgiou, who is also wonderfully unpredictable. You just don’t know what’s going to happen next with the fight like that.”

The next fight comes after the team learns that it’s Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok), a small alien in a Vulcan conveyance, who is the mole. He takes control of Zeph’s (Robert Kazinsky) suit. The team — minus Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl), who’s tied to a chair due to suspicion she’s the mole — takes off in pursuit.

Ruygrok shares that the stunt team worked with the actors on scenes like that. “We were allowed room to play,” he says. When it comes to his character and fighting, he likens it to a teenager playing a video game — but with 10 arms. “How would his movement be? How would Fuzz’s movement be within a Vulcan conveyance? And I think the idea was that he would pop left, right, up, down, and I was jumping off walls doing some s**t. For me, it was like a circus dream technically to be able to do a lot of the physicality that I love. That’s my background, gymnastics. So to bring that feral-like savageness to fighting was something that I really, really enjoyed.”

Kazinsky says it was the complete opposite for him. “We wanted to do a very grounded, very no bending of arms, swinging kind of thing.” That sequence was shot in one day, which was tough on him with the suit. It “weighed so much,” he shares, adding he was “just dripping in sweat. But when you see it onscreen, you’ll be so impressed by what everybody’s doing. There is a story being told in every single punch being thrown.”

The last major fight came between Georgiou and her childhood love San (James Hiroyuki Liao). They’d both fought in the competition to become the Terran emperor, but he hadn’t been able to kill his family while she could. She then spared his life but burned his face, and he worked for her until he seemingly poisoned himself … only to be the one after that mysterious device. She tried to stop him from using it — the Godsend would incinerate everything in its path, a chain reaction between planets — and it was while defending herself that she kicked a sword back into his neck, and he died.

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“It’s not just a fight sequence,” notes Yeoh. “It’s like, how do you stop someone and make them listen to you? So it was a very interesting time for Chris and Tunde and myself to work out that sequence. And fortunately, James is also so capable of those action sequences. The drama was very, very important for us.”

Osunsanmi points out what’s so “fascinating” about that fight scene is Georgiou is “deflecting, deflecting, deflecting. That action sequence, that fight sequence is about love and it’s about atoning for your sins and it’s about her trying to show him perhaps a better way to handle this and him not being able to accept it. There are many opportunities, perhaps when he had the phaser in his hand, that he could have taken her out. But it was love that prevented that from happening. And so it was a very unique sequence in that love was the prevailing emotion in it. And I don’t get to do that very often, most filmmakers don’t.”

Watch the video above for more from the cast about Curtis’ cameo (especially Kacey Rohl’s reaction) and the fight scenes.

Star Trek: Section 31, Streaming Now, Paramount+

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