Although she had first watched “Star Trek” as a child with her father, Holly Hunter didn’t fully grasp the cachet of snagging a role in one of its spinoffs until witnessing her husband’s reaction.
Hunter, the Georgia-born actor known for films like “Raising Arizona,” “The Piano” (for which she won a best actress Oscar) and “Broadcast News,” was telling her husband, a fan of the original series, about the script she received for “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.”
“Well, it seems I’m the head of a school,” Hunter told him.
“And he says, ‘Starfleet Academy?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ But then, like 30 pages in, I said, ‘Wait a minute, they’re calling me Captain.’ And he says, ‘Captain?!’ So that was fun to watch his reaction,” Hunter said in an interview with the Star.
In “Starfleet Academy,” Hunter’s character, Nahla Ake, is indeed the captain of the USS Athena as well as the chancellor of the academy.
The series is set in the 32nd century after a cataclysmic, galaxywide event known as “the Burn,” which led to many deaths, the destruction of starships and the near-collapse of the United Federation of Planets.
Showrunner Alex Kurtzman said he and his co-creators placed the series in that time frame with “the idea that we now have a generation of kids who are facing a world that’s more divided than ever and somehow managing still to hold on to this optimism, this idea that the future is not only possible, but it can be better. And obviously that’s a beautiful reinforcement of (‘Star Trek’ creator Gene) Roddenberry’s essential vision of what ‘Star Trek’ is.”
The academy’s students, the first class in more than a century, study partly in space on the Athena and partly in San Francisco, where the ship docks. But in the 21st century, it’s really Toronto that is “Star Trek” central.
“We’ve been making ‘Star Trek’ shows (in Toronto) with the same crew for 10 years,” said Kurtzman, who created “Starfleet Academy” with Gaia Violo (“Absentia”) and Noga Landau (“Nancy Drew”). “So it’s a family at this point and I can’t imagine doing it anywhere else.
“I also love the way Toronto’s grown in the last 10 years. Pinewood, the studio that we’ve been shooting at since we started ‘Discovery,’ has just become this fantastic place for us, and we’re now shooting on the largest stage in North America, which is an incredible thing.”
In fact, Hunter and her cast mate Paul Giamatti were impressed by the size and realism of the Pinewood sets.
“The sets are mind-blowing,” Hunter said, sitting next to Giamatti.
”Yeah, they all are,” agreed Giamatti, an Oscar nominee for “The Holdovers” and “Cinderella Man,” which also filmed in Toronto. “That central atrium of the school is one of the most beautiful sets I’ve ever seen … All the sets felt like you were immersed in the places, all the details. Like everything on those screens means something to somebody. It’s not just the blinking lights of the old school stuff.”
Giamatti and Hunter are both new to the “Star Trek” franchise — although Giamatti also watched it with his dad and had cherished what he assumed was the impossible goal of one day playing a “Trek” villain — but shooting at Pinewood was a homecoming for one of their co-stars.
American actor and comedian Tig Notaro returned to the role of Jett Reno in “Starfleet Academy” after playing the engineer for four seasons in “Star Trek: Discovery.”
“I had such a wonderful time working on ‘Discovery’ and the (Toronto) crew is so stellar. And so many of them went from ‘Discovery’ to ‘Starfleet,’” she said in a separate interview.
“I’m thrilled to be back and I would love to stay in the world of ‘Star Trek’ as long as possible.”
No one in the “Starfleet Academy” cast can claim as long an association with the franchise as Robert Picardo.
The Philadelphia-born actor played the holographic Doctor in “Star Trek: Voyager” from 1995 to 2001 and in the 1996 movie “First Contact,” as well as giving voice to the character in the animated 2024 series “Star Trek: Prodigy.”
The Doctor is back as an instructor at the academy after Kurtzman and Landau recruited the semi-retired Picardo in a Zoom meeting.
“They explained not only why it made sense for me to be teaching at Starfleet Academy (but) also the wonderful arc they had for my character that you’ll see late in the season … even though he’s now had 800 years of activation,” said Picardo, who’s 72.
“It wasn’t just a stunt casting thing … they really had a way of incorporating me and making my journey important with the cadets. So then it made sense and, also, I still love to act,” he added.
Nonetheless, his wife was not thrilled he was interrupting their travels for a new job but relented after returning to Toronto.
“Her memory of Toronto was that it was not the incredibly cool place that it is now,” Picardo said. “So it’s been a wonderful experience rediscovering a great city that’s gotten even greater in the intervening years since I worked there.”
Picardo’s Doctor is not the only long-lived character imparting wisdom to the Starfleet cadets. Hunter is playing a 422-year-old part-Lanthanite — a species introduced in “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” with the character of Pelia, played by Carol Kane. (That show shoots in Mississauga.)
“It’s just a recipe for, like, ‘Wow, this is what I’m doing for a living.’ It’s so fun,” said Hunter, 67.
Landau said Nahla was written for Hunter.
“She just brings this magic to any role she does, but in particular to this one. She’s a very, in the best way possible, unlikely Starfleet captain … who doesn’t like wearing shoes and who doesn’t adhere to the rules of how you’re supposed to sit in the captain’s chair.”
Landau and Kurtzman also considered themselves lucky to nab Giamatti to play the season’s villain, a half-Klingon, half-Tellarite space pirate named Nus Braka.
Giamatti, 58, not only got to terrorize Nahla’s crew on the Athena but to have a knock-down, drag-out fight with cadet Caleb Mir, played by young British Canadian Sandro Rosta.
“It was such a licence for me to just play and have a good time,” Giamatti said.
“I’m an old man now. And it felt very youthfully invigorating because of the young people in it … it just felt like a licence to feel a kind of joy.”
Speaking of the young people in the cast, the multi-species cadet crew includes a Klingon (former “X Factor” contestant Karim Diané), a Dar-Sha admiral’s daughter (Bella Shepard), a Khionian (George Hawkins), a Betazoid (Zoë Steiner) and SAM (Kerrice Brooks), the academy’s first holographic student.
Caleb Mir was the last of the core group to be cast, with Rosta coming on just days before production began.
“Sandro was still in drama school and he’s never done a TV show before,” Landau said. “And he just has this natural ability to be a star. He barely got his feet on the ground and suddenly he was in front of the camera doing what you see in our pilot.”
In a Q&A with the Television Critics Association, Rosta said he did a lot of praying after auditioning for the part.
“There’s so many people who are a part of this industry that have been hoping and praying for opportunities that we have stepped into,” he said of the young cast members. “And I’m just one of the ones who are extremely blessed to be able to play in a sand box as beautiful and as sacred and as important as this one.”
British actor and comedian Gina Yashere (“Bob Hearts Abishola”), who plays part-Klingon, part-Jem’Hadar cadet master Lura Thok, was a bit jealous of the younger actors because “I’m like, my god, you get to be in the ‘Star Trek’ family so early in your career.”
Yashere is joining the franchise at age 51, although she let the audition script languish in her inbox until her agent nudged her “because I detest auditioning.”
“I had no idea it was ‘Star Trek.’ So I read it and I thought, ‘Oh, this is fun. Somebody just screaming at a bunch of teenagers. Great, I can do that.’
When she learned it was “Star Trek,” her younger brother ” almost had a fit when he found out. He was like, ‘This is the best thing that’s gonna happen to us as a family.’ And when I found out I was gonna be an alien as well, a mixture of two classic, revered warrior species, I was even more excited. So I’m hoping people will like it.”
“Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” debuts Jan. 15 on Paramount Plus.
