Isa Briones Came Ready to Kick Butt

In the premiere episode of Star Trek: Picard, Isa Briones’ Dahj gets several ass kicking action sequences. Sitting with StarTrek.com and others at the TCAs earlier this month, Briones shared how she prepared for these intense scenes.

“It was really exciting because I used to do martial arts when I was younger and I did it for a while and I was one of those kids who was at the dojo seven days a week. Right after school, I would go and train, and then wait to do my homework at midnight because I wanted to be there. But I stopped kind of early on because I was like, oh, I'm going to do acting, I'm going to stop this,” Briones told a roundtable of reporters.

“I don't know why I stopped, but then when they said, ‘Okay, you're going to learn a fight sequence,’ I was so excited and it felt kind of like coming home, in a way,” she continued. “I've done musical theater before and you're supposed to know how to dance and everything, but I've found that martial arts come so much more easily to me than dance has ever been.”

Briones spoke about her stunt double and the team behind the amazing scenes in Star Trek: Picard. “We had a great stunt team, great stunt coordinator, and I did a month of training for one of the bigger scenes that you've seen in the trailer. It was a lot of hard work, especially since my body wasn't quite in the groove of that, but it really was so exciting getting to go back to that and do a lot of it. I still had an amazing stunt double, Kiera. I can throw a few punches, but I can't really do flips. So she took care of a lot of that heavy duty stuff, but it was really amazing getting to do that.”

We can’t wait to see the journey that Briones and her character go on throughout the series.

This article was originally published on January 24, 2020.