Kerrice Brooks, the dancer who made Starfleet Academy’s hologram feel human

Kerrice Brooks

Photo: Kevin Paul / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 6, 2000 Washington, D.C., United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	My Old Ass, The Prom

Halfway through the first season of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, a cadet who is only a few weeks old sets out to learn what became of Benjamin Sisko, the captain who stepped out of history at the end of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The cadet is a hologram named SAM, and the episode brings Cirroc Lofton back as Sisko’s son, Jake. Kerrice Brooks, who plays SAM, described those scenes as an attempt at “trying to connect to a past that I know that I’ve come from.” It is a striking thing to say about a character written to arrive with no past at all, and it is the clearest account of what Brooks has done with the part: she took a being made of light and gave it a lineage.

The role was not meant to look like this. Alex Kurtzman, who runs the series with Noga Landau, has said SAM was originally conceived quite differently and was reshaped around Brooks’s approach once she was cast. On screen, SAM is the first Kasqian admitted to Starfleet Academy, a member of a holographic species, technically weeks old but programmed as a young adult. Brooks describes her as “like a newborn; everything is so fresh to her,” a cadet who “brings absolutely no baggage.” The joke underneath the casting is that Brooks came to the franchise carrying almost none either.

She did not grow up a Trekkie. By her own account she avoided Star Trek for years and only found a way in through Star Trek: Discovery, whose far-future setting Starfleet Academy inherits; she has since called the franchise “a beacon of hope,” and a New York Comic Con panel in 2025 moved her to tears of joy. Before acting took over, her first profession was dance. A Washington, D.C., native born in 2000, Brooks worked as a professional dancer behind Billie Eilish, Kanye West, Lil Nas X and Kelly Rowland, and her earliest screen credits came through that door: a student dancer in Ryan Murphy‘s Netflix musical The Prom, the short The Cypher, single episodes of On My Block, Family Reunion and How We Roll.

The credit that changed how the industry introduced her was My Old Ass, Megan Park‘s comedy about Elliott, an Ontario teenager played by Maisy Stella who meets her 39-year-old self, Aubrey Plaza, during a mushroom trip on the last summer before university. Brooks plays Ro, one of the two best friends who share that trip, opposite Maddie Ziegler as Ruthie. It is a supporting part in a film built around Stella, but it was her feature debut, the film premiered at Sundance before Amazon MGM Studios bought it, and the National Board of Review later placed it among the year’s ten best independent films. The same year she turned up as Melissa in Feeling Randy, Dean Lent’s comedy set in the 1970s.

Paramount announced her as a series regular on Starfleet Academy in July 2024, alongside Bella Shepard and George Hawkins, joining Holly Hunter as the academy’s chancellor, Sandro Rosta, Karim Diané and Robert Picardo, back as the Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager. The production handed her a curated list of Deep Space Nine and Voyager episodes; during filming she went on to watch all of Deep Space Nine. Her reference points were specific. She named Jake Sisko, the android Data and David Jonsson‘s synthetic Andy in Alien: Romulus, and she kept a journal in SAM’s voice, logging how the hologram spent her hours and what she was learning.

The fifth episode, “Series Acclimation Mil,” written by Tawny Newsome, is where that preparation shows. Brooks has recounted Newsome telling the writers’ room that “if we’re going to make a character that’s supposed to be the future of humanity, then it has to be a Black woman,” and she still sounds startled by what the episode brought with it: “They even let me talk to Avery Brooks.” Several reviews of that hour called it her best work in the role. The eighth episode, “The Life of the Stars,” took SAM home to Kasq, with Picardo’s Doctor stepping into the role of a father figure.

Here the story stops being simple. Starfleet Academy opened with a Certified Fresh rating from critics and an audience score dragged into the forties by review-bombing. Elon Musk and White House aide Stephen Miller attacked it publicly, Fox’s Gutfeld! called it “woke trash,” and even some sympathetic critics were cool: IndieWire’s Ben Travers wrote that “almost every aspect of the series’ YA side falls flat.” The show never reached Nielsen’s streaming top ten, and in March 2026 Paramount confirmed that its second season would be its last. Brooks did not hide behind the press line. At a fan panel that spring she admitted that “all I saw was negativity, if I’m being honest,” and she pushed back on the shape of the criticism: “Don’t just say, like, I hate it because it’s DEI.” The awkward truth for her is that the cadet with no baggage became the face of a series that drew more argument than viewers, and that the youthful register some critics found thin is exactly what SAM’s wide-eyed newness is built on.

The cancellation did not end the work. The second and final season was shot between August 2025 and February 2026, and at New York Comic Con on October 10, 2026, Paramount+ set its premiere for March 2027, with Brooks back as SAM and Bill Nighy and Rosemarie DeWitt joining the cast. By then the next door had already opened. In June 2026, Deadline reported that Brooks had joined the untitled Universal event film from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the duo behind Everything Everywhere All at Once. Matt Damon leads it after Ryan Gosling moved on, with Sandra Oh, Charles Melton and Sean Kaufman, and Brooks arrives in the same announcement as Silvia Dionicio, Jackson Kelly and Thalia Dudek. The plot and every character are still under wraps.

The calendar now does the arguing for her. SAM’s last semester reaches Paramount+ in March 2027, and the Daniels film is dated for November of the same year. For the first time since the hologram made her visible, audiences will see Kerrice Brooks out of Starfleet uniform, in a film the Daniels are still keeping secret, and that is where the question SAM raised gets its answer: how much of the cadet was the character, and how much was her.

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