Warning: SPOILERS for the Star Trek: Discovery episode “Erigah” are ahead!
After making a guest appearance as Cold in Star Trek: Discovery Season 1, Elias Toufexis returned for Season 5 to play L’ak, who’s been looking to acquire the Progenitor technology with his lover, Eve Harlow’s Moll, so they can finally stop being fugitives. L’ak stands out as the first Breen to have their face shown in the Star Trek franchise, but just a few episodes after that was revealed, the character is no more. “Erigah,” which just dropped on the 2024 TV schedule, saw L’ak accidentally dying by his own hand. While speaking with CinemaBlend, Toufexis opened up to us about how he “sussed out” this twist was coming early on and what made his scenes in the latest Discovery episode so difficult to film.
Why Elias Toufexis Figured L’ak Was Going To Die
L’ak was injured towards the end of Star Trek: Discovery’s fifth episode, “Mirrors,” and although he and Moll (whom some say looks like Ashoka’s Shin Hati) were able to escape from the ISS Enterprise in a warp pod, the Federation was able to recapture them in “Erigah.” He was in bad shape at the beginning of the episode, but there’s a chance he ultimately could have recovered. Unfortunately, L’ak decided to inject himself with a massive dose of tricordrazine as a distraction so that Moll could escape, but he ended up giving himself an overdose. Here’s what Elias Toufexis told me ahead of “Erigah” releasing to Paramount+ subscribers of how he reacted when he learned about L’ak’s fate:
I had sussed out that L’ak was either going to die or something had to happen to him, because in the story it seemed that the Breen and the Federation needed a reason to up their conflict a little more. So I knew something had to do with L’ak, and I was like, ‘I bet you he’s gonna die.’ So when I got the [script for] Episode 7, I wasn’t surprised, let’s say. I thought as a story, this makes sense as a catalyst for the last few episodes of the season, right? I was sad because I love going to work. Although there was a part of that’s like, ‘Oh good, I’m not going to have to wear that makeup again.’ There was that part of me. But for the most part, I knew it was coming.
So Toufexis was smart enough to predict that L’ak wouldn’t make it out of Star Trek: Discovery alive, and the death did indeed worsen the conflict between the Federation and Breen. Primarch Ruhn, L’ak’s uncle, arrived with his Breen troops to Federation headquarters demanding his nephew’s release. The situation was already incredibly tense, with Ruhn prepared to go to war with the Federation if he didn’t get his way, but L’ak’s death pushed him over the edge. As far as what shooting his final moments as L’ak were like, Toufexis said:
The day we shot it, it was sad in spurts, but it was all about what Eve [Harlow] was doing, and Eve was so great in it that it made it easier for me to play that death scene because she was so good. And then when we yelled ‘Cut!’, we’d calm down a bit and get back to the happy set that Star Trek: Discovery is. Then it would get sad again, but just for a couple minutes. And then when I was done done… they’re so great there, I got to give a little speech and all that kind of stuff about how happy I was to work with everybody, which is all the truth. One of the greatest sets I’ve ever been on. Yeah, it was a sad day, but I also got to do a really great death scene in Star Trek. Hard to complain, really.
As for why Ruhn was so desperate to get L’ak back, it was revealed that the latter was the Scion of the Breen Imperium, i.e. a direct descendant of his species’ emperor. Ruhn needed L’ak in order to properly rule the Breen, but his nephews death ruined that plan. However, after watching the love of her life die, Moll informed Ruhn about the Progenitor tech that she and L’ak had been hoping to trade to the Breen to erase their erigah. Now she’s willing to help the Breen acquire that tech to use against the Federation, though she’s only doing this because she believes it can revive L’ak. In order to avoid war, inspiring captain Michael Burnham and her superiors agreed to hand Moll over, though Booker disapproved of this.
Why Elias Toufexis Had Difficulty Shooting His Scenes In “Erigah”
Whether or not L’ak will be brought back to life by the Progenitor tech remains to be seen, but if this is indeed the character’s last appearance, then it was a pretty inactive finish to his story. Because L’ak was so badly injured in “Erigah,” he was confined to a bio-bed, and as Elias Toufexis explained below, that didn’t make for an easy acting experience:
It was very difficult. I remember reading that episode and going, ‘I don’t move this entire episode. I’m in this dumb bed.’ You want to know the really annoying thing about that? It’s that any scene that was around that bed when L’ak was kind of in the background, that’s still meant I had to sit through six hours of makeup, even if I didn’t shoot anything because they might to catch pieces or they might grab you, and you never know, right? So you have to cover it up. So there were days when I never even got filmed, but I was in the full makeup. It was hard, and also it’s like, the makeup is a certain way, so there’s only some way you can sit without the makeup getting squished on your face… without the prosthetic, I mean. So I was trying to find ways to look normal under these weird camera angles when I’m lying in a bed. It was all technical stuff like that that bothered me.
Yet despite all that discomfort, Toufexis was understanding of why it was necessary for him to be laying down throughout the entirety of this Discovery episode. Besides, he now has an interesting statistic for the role that he can share about his time on “Erigah.” In his words:
From a story point of view, it didn’t bother me. He’s injured, he has to be lying down. It was all technical stuff that was kind of annoying that week. But I did the math, and because of that background stuff… the episode took about two weeks, that one week, I was more L’ak than I was me in terms of hours spent. It was just so long and constantly in the makeup for so many hours, and then go home and sleep, and then come back and put it all back on again.
There are now just three Star Trek: Discovery episodes left, so head to Paramount+ these next three stories to see how this corner of the franchise comes to a close. If you’d rather look further ahead into the future, look through the lineup of upcoming Star Trek TV shows.