Bella Shepard Keeps Outlasting the Franchise Shows That Made Her Visible

Bella Shepard

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 17, 2001 Royal Oak, Michigan, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Oz the Great and Powerful, Witch Hunt, The Merry Gentlemen

Bella Shepard has done her most visible work inside other people’s mythologies. First came a werewolf drama built by the creator of Teen Wolf, then a Star Trek spin-off carrying decades of canon and a fan base that argues over every frame. Both times she was handed a lead, and both times the question of how long that lead would last was settled somewhere far from the set. The real subject of her career so far is what an actor can build inside a story she knows may not be allowed to finish.

Michigan is where the story starts. Shepard grew up moving between Waterford, Flint and Grand Blanc, and her first screen credit arrived through her grandmother, who sent the girl’s photo to an open casting call for Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful. The result was a small speaking part as a Quadling child in the Disney fantasy, and it was enough to change the family’s map: not long afterwards she was living in Los Angeles.

What followed, for a girl born in Royal Oak on 17 December 2001 who had made her debut in that 2013 Raimi film, was the standard apprenticeship of a child actor in that city, a run of single scenes and short arcs. She appeared in the paranormal docuseries My Haunted House, played Lexie in two episodes of the CBS comedy Life in Pieces and turned up as a young girl in Netflix’s Grace and Frankie. None of it asked her to carry anything, but it taught her the rhythm of a set before most actors her age had seen one.

The first role she could live in was Alice Hargrave in A Girl Named Jo, a period drama set in 1963 about two friends from opposite sides of a small town who dig up its buried history. Shepard stayed with it across three seasons, from 2018 to 2019, and has said the character changed considerably over that run; she has also described the series as a way of introducing the civil rights movement to younger viewers. Around the same time she played the teenage version of Aleida Diaz in the seventh and final season of Orange Is the New Black, preparing by studying Elizabeth Rodriguez’s performance and working on the character’s dialect, a small piece of craft that matters when a flashback has to convince an audience that already knows the adult.

Guest work kept coming: Regan in The Wilds, Tati in the iCarly revival, Kelly in Elle Callahan’s 2021 horror film Witch Hunt. Then, in June 2022, Paramount+ named her one of the four young leads of Wolf Pack, Jeff Davis’s adaptation of Edo van Belkom’s 2004 novel. She played Blake Navarro, a rebellious student bitten by a werewolf during a wildfire stampede, alongside Armani Jackson, Chloe Rose Robertson and Tyler Lawrence Gray, with Sarah Michelle Gellar as an arson investigator and Rodrigo Santoro in the adult cast. In interviews around the January 2023 premiere, Shepard talked about the werewolf as a metaphor for teenage anxiety and family pressure, and about how much it meant to her to see strong young women at the centre of a genre show.

Here the public record gets less flattering, and it is worth reading carefully. Wolf Pack was savaged on arrival: a 44 per cent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, a one-star review of the first episode in The Guardian that singled out wooden acting and incomprehensible plotting, a Variety notice that found even Gellar wan. Yet the same eight episodes repeatedly appeared in the weekly top ten of streaming originals in the United States, and Davis had made clear before release that the show was a separate universe from Teen Wolf, whatever the shared studio and crew suggested. The series was cancelled in January 2024 despite preparations for a second season. The complaints about the acting fell on a whole young cast working through dialogue the same critics called nonsensical, and the cancellation removed any chance of seeing what Blake might have become once the writing settled.

The pattern repeated in a different key with Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Shepard was announced among the cadets in July 2024 and revealed a year later as Genesis Lythe, the first Dar-Sha to enter Starfleet, a new species marked by facial ridges and no eyebrows. Genesis is an admiral’s daughter determined to make a name of her own, and the writers gave her a flaw worth playing: the star cadet of her class turns out to have altered her own recommendation letters, and gets caught trying to erase them just as Captain Nahla Ake, played by Holly Hunter, is about to recommend her for the Pre-Command track. Shepard has explained that she preferred to come in clean. “I was playing a brand-new species that’s never been seen before, so I wanted to start with creating her and her world, and then I slowly dipped my toe into the Star Trek universe as a whole after that,” she told TrekMovie. The franchise still means something personal to her: her grandparents were viewers of the original 1960s series.

The show premiered on Paramount+ on 15 January 2026, with Paul Giamatti as its villain and Robert Picardo back as the Doctor, and it ran into a fight it had not picked. Critics were broadly positive, with 85 per cent approval on Rotten Tomatoes, but audience scores there and on IMDb were review-bombed within days, amid a wave of online attacks branding the series “woke”. On 23 March 2026, after the first ten episodes had finished their weekly run, CBS and Paramount announced that the second season, already filmed, would be the last.

In between the two franchises Shepard also played Shelby in the Netflix Christmas comedy The Merry Gentlemen, opposite Britt Robertson and Chad Michael Murray, a reminder that her range is not limited to genre television. But it is Genesis who will define the next stretch. Shepard has said that the cadets’ second year is “crazier than the first year” and that Genesis “goes on a very beautiful journey in season two”.

That journey reaches Paramount+ in March 2027, when the final season of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premieres with Bill Nighy and Rosemarie DeWitt among its guest stars. No project after it has been announced. For an actor who has twice built a character inside a story with a clock on it, what she chooses once Genesis leaves the academy will say more about her than either franchise has had time to.

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Tags: actors, American television, Holly Hunter, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Bella Shepard, A Girl Named Jo

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