List of Firefly characters

This page lists characters from the television series Firefly.

Major characters

Malcolm Reynolds

Malcolm Reynolds, played by Nathan Fillion, is owner and captain of the Firefly-class spaceship Serenity, and was a volunteer in the war between the Alliance and the Independents (aka "Browncoats"). He got the name for his spaceship from a famous battle he fought and commanded in, the Battle of Serenity Valley. When asked why he named his ship after a lost battle, Zoe comments "Once you're in Serenity, you never leave. You just learn how to live there." He is fiercely loyal to those he calls his crew.

Malcolm's main mission is to keep his crew alive and to keep his ship flying. As Firefly writer Tim Minear stated in an interview: "It's just about getting by. That's always been the mission statement of what the show is — getting by." In "Serenity", Mal says of himself: "[If the] Wind blows northerly, I go North."

Screens from Serenity suggest that Mal was born on September 20, 2468 — which would make him 49 at the time of the series Firefly — though, as the average human lifespan is 120, this would make him the equivalent of a man in his early 30s today. Mal was raised by his mother and "about 40 hands" on a ranch on the planet Shadow. Though Mal usually seems more practical than intellectual, he occasionally surprises his friends by displaying familiarity with disparate literature varying from the works of Xiang Yu to poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, though he has no idea "who" Mona Lisa is.