Her Phasers set to stun: After battling walking dead, Sonequa Martin-Green beams in to 'Star Trek'

Sonequa Martin-Green is struggling to express her feelings.

It takes little time to realize that this is far from normal. The Alabama-born actress generally speaks in long, thoughtful streams of sparkling musicality that occasionally erupt into torrents of words, frequently punctuated by laughter and deliberate pauses in which she gathers her thoughts.

But at this moment, Martin-Green - who battled "The Walking Dead" as the ultimately doomed Sasha, courted laughs as Winston's prank junkie wife, Rhonda, on "New Girl" and threatened the very existence of Storybrooke as villainous Tamara on "Once Upon a Time" - is stumped and a little teary-eyed.

Sitting in a borrowed dressing room on the CBS Studio Center lot in Studio City, Martin-Green tried to process that she was about to boldly go where no black woman has gone before: to the center of one of TV's most beloved franchises as the lead in the new CBS