American stage and screen actor, a Tony Award winner for The Humans, who played Luq, the gentle palace servant on Rigel VII, in the Strange New Worlds episode Among the Lotus Eaters.
Reed Birney is an American actor, born in 1954, with a distinguished theatre career that brought him a Tony Award for The Humans in 2016. On screen he is known for House of Cards, in which he played Vice President Donald Blythe, and for the films Mass and The Menu.
In the second season Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode Among the Lotus Eaters he plays Luq, one of the Field Kalar on Rigel VII, where radiation strips people of their memories each night. Luq befriends the amnesiac Pike, La'An and M'Benga and explains his people's belief that forgetting is a mercy.
When Pike recovers his memory inside the shielded palace, Luq follows him and regains his own, including the grief he had been spared for years.