Yesterday at the Toronto Comicon, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds stars Anson Mount, Ethan Peck and Christina Chong held a panel where they discussed the impact of the new Star Trek series that serves as a prequel to The Original Series, where the trio’s Captain Christopher Pike, Spock and La’an Noonien Singh explore the galaxy aboard the USS Enterprise in the year before James Kirk became its captain.
Star Trek, of course, is a franchise that has been running for nearly 58 years with several different television series and feature films, not to mention the amount of expanded material through novels, comics and video games. Strange New Worlds itself is something of a spin-off of Star Trek: Discovery as Mount’s Pike and Peck’s Spock were integral characters in its second season. Mount spoke about how Strange New Worlds can attract new viewers who may be nervous by its spin-off factor, much less thinking they need to catch up on close to six decades of media in order to understand the series.
“We’re blessed with two showrunners who have two incredibly large sets of brass cojones and believe Star Trek is established enough as an institution that it can be a lot of different things,” he told the audience. “It has become strong enough that it is malleable to an extent that maybe we’ve never realized before. We do want to be the show that’s pushing that way.”
Peck also agreed, especially in how Strange New Worlds largely returns to Star Trek‘s episodic format where there is a new adventure every week instead of the longform serialized storytelling both Discovery and Star Trek: Picard have taken. “You can hit tones, places, adventures that would be so difficult to reach if you were in a serialized form of storytelling. To be able to jump around gives us a lot of creative freedom on every level of production, from set design, writing, acting, costume. I really think it’s unbridled creatively in that way.”
“Star Trek needs to have room for the big idea of the week to be the star,” Mount further emphasized. “When you’re working in a serialized fashion, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I think Discovery wanted to do that and did very well with it, but if you want to have these big idea episodes you have to clear the palette every week in order to have room for that. Another thing I think the writers have done really well is balance that with having longer arcs.”
Strange New Worlds does put a lot of significance on its character development. We know, for instance, where legacy characters like Pike, Spock, Nurse Chapel and Kirk end up, but we don’t know how exactly they got there. Then of course there’s big question marks hovering over the characters who are not in TOS, namely Chong’s La’an Noonien-Singh, a descendant of one of the franchise’s most popular villains, Khan.
“Listen, I’ve had a lot of people come up to me and say ‘We’re really worried your character is going to die’ and I’m like ‘Really? Do you know something I don’t?'” Chong said, with her dog in attendance who had a cameo in the episode ‘The Elysian Kingdom’. She also ‘joked’ about where she would like to see La’an end up, especially with her family’s backstory. “I think I would love somehow for La’an to have some kind of superpower that turns her evil and that becomes her downfall and then she dies… but not until the very last episode of the very last season!”
It would certainly fit a classic Star Trek trope played out through many of the series where a crew member gains some type of powerful ability that corrupts them before returning to the status quo in some way.
As for Peck, though, he had incredibly big shoes to fill as Spock, played throughout the TOS series and films – including the rebooted Kevlin Timeline films from J.J. Abrams – by the late Leonard Nimoy. Due in no small part to Nimoy, Spock is arguably the face of Star Trek with his Vulcan motto ‘Live long and prosper’ and hand gesture being one of the most well-known pieces of pop culture around the world. To date, Spock has only been played by Nimoy and Zachary Quinto. So what was Peck’s initial reaction to gaining this iconic role?
“Not [to] screw it up,” Peck simply stated. “Really from the beginning, I was trying to do the best Spock that I can. That sounds really obvious, but it’s going to be impossible to separate the actor from the performance, especially with this sort of role, because I have to paint by numbers in many ways. When I prepare my scenes I always have Nimoy’s voice resounding in my head and check in with how he might say it.”
Chong, however, never watched much Star Trek and her role as La’an is pretty much her entry into the larger franchise. An enormous part of Star Trek‘s appeal is because of the bright future it envisions for humanity as it moved past our current day conflicts and differences, embracing a unity by giving prominent roles and positions to people of other ethnicities. Chong is half-Asian and half-British and was asked by a fan, who is also half-Asian, about embracing her mixed-race identity and being an inspiration for a new generation of fans.
Chong gave a particularly poignant answer, saying “For me, growing up I was always bullied as a kid for being part Chinese. That brought a lot of shame to me because I felt embarrassed. My dad would come to pick me up at school and I knew the bullying would be really bad the next day. It was always something until I came into my late teens I would try to push away and shun because it hurt. Going into the acting industry at the beginning people didn’t know where to put me. There were like ‘Is she white? Is she Asian? She doesn’t look Asian enough.’ They weren’t casting diverse, especially in the UK. A lot of my roles came from America to begin my career because they’re much more forward thinking when it comes to diversity.”
Chong credited one of her agents for helping her break out of this trend. “For a long while I struggled and when I met an agent he said ‘No, you’re just you. We’re selling you, parading you, as you and your energy. It doesn’t matter what the role is and what the name of the role is.’ He would force casting directors to rethink. Once he started doing that he believed in me, I started to believe in myself more and that’s how my career started. Being able to be that in Strange New Worlds for other people to look up to… those moments are so special and make this job even more incredible.”
In its two season run Strange New Worlds has also boldly gone to places previous Star Trek series have not, such as season two’s crossover with the animated Star Trek: Lower Decks and finally bringing the franchise into a genre-type it has never done before: the musical.
Strange New Worlds‘ ‘Subspace Rhapsody’ saw the Enterprise come into contact with an anomaly that made everyone sing out their feelings in grand Broadway-like musical numbers. The only way to stop it was to play along, resulting in the crew and even those in other parts of the galaxy engaging in song and dance. On his reaction to the musical episode, Peck had only one word: “Shock.”
‘Subspace Rhapsody’ proved to be pretty popular among fans, a fact Mount credited to the show’s production crew and support from CBS. “We’re supported by an incredible production team in Toronto. They are very good at what they do. I never sensed a bottleneck, crunch time, high pressure situation because we started so early. Tom Polce, who is the music supervisor for all of CBS, came in and started working with us quite early and we were doing vocal coaching quite early and we recorded the whole album before we started shooting because you have to. In fact, there was a lot of pressure alleviated on the day because some scenes didn’t have to have sound at all. They had already been done.”
Chong – who is a trained singer and revealed during the panel a dream role of hers is to play Roxy in the musical Chicago – was excited at the prospect of a Star Trek musical and its possibilities. “I did this whole jazz number and this dance thing with glitter, this whole sequin shebang. I got my song and it was a ballad, I wanted something more dancey, but it was great!”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is currently filming its third season in Toronto. There is no word on when it will premiere.
Ricky Church – Follow me on Twitter for more movie news and nerd talk.
