American actor and clown, a Tony Award winner, who played Su'Kal, the isolated Kelpien whose grief caused the Burn, in the third season of Star Trek: Discovery.
Bill Irwin is an American actor, clown and theatre maker, born in 1950. He won a Tony Award for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and is known on screen for Mr. Noodle in Sesame Street, Rachel Getting Married, Interstellar, in which he voiced the robot TARS, and Legion.
In Star Trek: Discovery he plays Su'Kal, a Kelpien who has lived alone for more than a century inside a decaying holographic nursery on a dilithium planet in the Verubin Nebula. The episode Su'Kal reveals that his cry of anguish at his mother's death, amplified by the planet, set off the Burn.
Irwin's gentle, childlike performance continues through There Is a Tide... and That Hope Is You, Part 2, in which Saru coaxes Su'Kal into leaving. He returns briefly in the fourth season on Kaminar.