The latest entry in the Star Trek franchise brings fans inside Starfleet Academy
When creating a new series for the iconic science fiction franchise Star Trek, showrunner Alex Kurtzman had to ask himself big questions about past and present. “If we were going to make a show designed to bring in a new audience of young people who have no experience of Star Trek, and also appeal to all the people who love Star Trek and are steeped in 60 years of it, how do you do that?” he says. “And how do you speak to this moment?”
In a politically fraught world, Kurtzman didn’t have to stretch his imagination to find a guiding principle for Starfleet Academy. “You’ve got a generation that’s inherited a very divided world, and it’s their job to figure out a way to find optimism,” says Kurtzman, the father of a teenage son. “I see my son hold both of those things: I see him hold this sense of an uncertain future and also this absolute youthful exuberance that anything is possible, and it’s beautiful. That’s what Star Trek is really about.”
For Kurtzman, a long-time producer of Trek films and TV shows, nailing Starfleet Academy wasn’t just about making the young cadets resonate with an audience. “In many ways it was just as important for the teachers to be as interesting as the students,” he says. “What I kept saying to the writers’ room is that we cannot make a show where when the adults show up onscreen, the kids want to fast forward. They have to be just as interested in the adults.”
With Oscar winner Holly Hunter in the role of Chancellor Nahla Ake, curiosity is all but guaranteed. “She’s a 400-year-old Lanthanite, and I’ve never seen a captain like her before,” says Kurtzman’s co-showrunner Noga Landau. “I also think that her spirit and her sense of adventure, it percolates through the mood of the school. Then you bring the cadets into it, and there’s an energy to Starfleet Academy that has the fun of Hogwarts, and it has the discipline of Xavier’s School for Gifted Children, but it’s also totally its own thing.”
The students at Starfleet Academy represent the many species that have become well known to Star Trek fans. To embody those races, the actors dug deep into past series. “I watched a ton of episodes that Klingons were in, just to get an understanding of this culture,” says Karim Diane, who plays Klingon medical student Jay-Den Kraag. “But at the same time, this is a very different version of a Klingon, so that also gave me space to explore a little bit. Jay-Den is not a traditional warrior. He doesn’t want to go into battle, he wants to be a doctor. So [it was about] creating a new character in context of what’s come before.”
Joining a franchise like Star Trek may be a dream come true for a young actor, but for Sandro Rosta, who plays series lead Caleb Mir, the process of landing his first big role felt somewhat unreal. “As an actor, especially a new actor, you get really good auditions but you’re not going to book them. So, you send [the tape] off in good faith that you’re going to do the best work you can, then you forget about it,” he says. “I have, to this day, yet to feel the truth of what this is, in my bones. I’m just extremely blessed to be able to play in a sand box as beautiful, sacred and important as this one.”
Having now immersed himself in the franchise, Rosta found the strongest connection between past and present in Star Trek: The Next Generation. “The Next Generation represents the golden era. Our show is set in a time where that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. The fact that we are starting from ground zero means that we need to rediscover how to get back to that place of having a society that follows rules in a way that is not restrictive but inclusive, in the sense that everyone has a place [in it],” he says. “I think that is something that I found to be the most impactful about Star Trek, that it does carry this [idea of] home for anyone who wants to be a part of it. And it encourages us to be the best versions of ourselves.”
While the new generation of actors come to Star Trek fresh, most of the elder statesmen have a personal history with the Gene Roddenberry series that started it all. “My dad had watched it when it was originally on in the ’60s, and when it was syndicated, he thought, ‘You’re a weird child, you might like this,’ ” recalls Paul Giamatti, who joins the cast as part-Klingon, all-adversary Nus Braka. “And I really did. I loved it.” Hunter also associates Star Trek with family time. “My dad, two brothers and I sat and watched Star Trek,” says Hunter, who was mesmerized by the aesthetic of the original show. “It was the beautiful mustard colour of the suits that they were wearing and the way they moved . . . The guys were like pieces of granite. They stood and talked, not moving until they moved to the chair. It was just very iconic and had some of the same feeling that Westerns had for me.”
As Landau pointed out previously, comparisons can be drawn between Starfleet Academy and other schools throughout pop culture, for extraordinary children. Landau and her colleagues, however, believe there is room for everyone. “We’re all genre fans,” says Landau. “Those schools and the way they were brought to life onscreen is extraordinary. And Starfleet Academy existed before all of them. It existed in the original series. In deciding how we were going to represent Starfleet Academy, we really leaned into the idea that people have been waiting for 60 years to go to Starfleet Academy, so we better deliver on the wish fulfillment.”
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy streams Thursday on Paramount+