At the Strange New Worlds premiere event, TrekMovie had an exclusive chat with series stars Anson Mount (Captain Pike) and Rebecca Romijn (Number One). The pair demonstrated their onscreen chemistry on the gold carpet, talking about their characters, the fun they have on-screen and on the set, and working with director Jonathan Frakes.
Beyond wrestling with the vision of his death, what other aspects of Pike have you been having fun exploring?
Anson Mount: I think you just said. I think “fun” is one of our call words on this version of Star Trek. We wanted to get back to that sense of adventure, fun, and excitement. I think there’s something deeply optimistic in Star Trek. First of all, the idea that we’re still going to be around. But also, that it’s in our nature to explore and to reach out. So it’s important that the captain have that sense within himself as well.
And besides sitting in the captain’s chair, what has been the most “Oh my God, I’m in Star Trek!” moment for you?
Rebecca Romijn: For me personally, it was the first time walking into the bridge set during the second season of Discovery. It just hit me, physically. I think all three – Anson, Ethan and I – all looked at each other. We had no inkling the series was going come, but it was like, “Is there any chance that they built this set just for a one-off?” It was incredible! As a Trekkie, as someone who loved The Original Series, it was just magical.
Anson Mount: Especially because a lot of sets on other projects you walk in and always half of it is missing for the lights and the camera, but our sets are so immersive and functional. You feel like you’re on the Enterprise.
Ethan Peck as Spock, Anson Mount as Pike, and Rebecca Romijn as Una in publicity shot for Strange New Worlds
So there were some jokes during a panel last year about a Lower Decks / Strange New Worlds crossover…
Rebecca Romijn: That sounds crazy.
Could you ever see a way to do that?
Rebecca Romijn: I don’t know how they could possibly…
Anson Mount: That’s for smarter people me to figure out.
Rebecca Romijn: Yeah. We’re not smart enough to even answer that question… It sounds amazing.
Anson Mount: I think Star Trek – as Akiva [Goldsman] always says – can be a lot of things. And we got a great staff of writers who are throwing us a lot of really fun curveballs. And we’re taking some big swings. And we’re lucky that we have CBS, Paramount Plus, Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment to trust us to do that.
How much does Una change as we go through season one and into season two?
Anson Mount: Well, she’s gotten taller. [laughs]
Rebecca Romijn: I keep growing. [laughs] No. Well, she’s got something that she’s hiding… So that will continue to be explored and sussed out. I can’t really speak to it without revealing any more than that. But it opens up some bigger conversations going into season two and yeah, we’re just going continue to explore that, that side of her.
Rebecca Romijn as Una in publicity shot for Strange New Worlds
The characters’ stories are serialized, so do you have season-long arcs for each of your characters?
Anson Mount: That’s definitely there, yeah. There are longer arcs…
Rebecca Romijn: Arcs that bleed from season one into season two. But they are still standalone episodes.
You have shot around seventeen now, is there a favorite episode so far?
Anson Mount: No. That’s like asking me who my favorite child is…. It’s hard because the episodes are all so different, sometimes even in terms of genre. It jumps into lots of different styles. And we’ve been encouraging our directors to take big swings. So if there’s anything that I’m proud of, it’s that. We are taking advantage of the plasticity that is Star Trek.
You have been with Jonathan Frakes this past week?
Anson Mount: Yeah, he’s there right now.
What’s that like?
Rebecca Romijn: Amazing.
Anson Mount: We can’t get him off the set. Once an actor always an actor.
Is there singing?
Rebecca Romijn: There’s singing, yeah. He starts in the hair and makeup trailer in the morning, as every director does. [laughs]
Anson Mount: You know when you’re done with his shot when he yells, “Cut, print!” It’s become a saying on the set, “Cut, print!”
Anson Mount in publicity shot for Strange New Worlds.
More NYC SNW interviews to come
Stay tuned all week as we share more gold carpet interviews from the New York premiere of Strange New Worlds with the cast and creatives. Check out our earlier interviews with Strange New Worlds co-showrunner Henry Alonso Myers and executive producer Alex Kurtzman.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds debuts on Thursday, May 5 exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S., Latin America, Australia and the Nordics. The series will air on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi Channel and stream on Crave in Canada. In New Zealand, it will be available on TVNZ, and in India on Voot Select. Strange New Worlds will arrive via Paramount+ in select countries in Europe when the service launches later this year, starting with the UK this summer.
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Sounds like if nothing else, the show will have a lot of fun and diverse episodes like classic Trek did so well. That’s why I can rewatch TOS, TNG, DS9 and ENT so much because the next episode can be wildly different from the previous one. And when you have 25 episodes a season, you have a lot to choose from. Yes, lots of duds for sure, but overall solid episodes in every season for me, even the ‘bad’ ones.
I just saw another review of the first five episodes from a great YouTube site called The Popcast. I watch their videos all the time and they are mostly a Star Trek theory site but well made and balanced. That did a great review of the first five episodes and a bit spoilerish so be warned. They did say there are growing pains as like any show and NOT to think it’s going to be exactly like TOS/TNG. It is still a bit different from those. But they emphasized the episodes are fun and mostly light which after Picard and Discovery, it’s a huge plus. They also described it similar to The Orville which I know will give some people eyerolls here but to me that’s fine. It does sound a bit more comedic and light; at least the first five episodes. Another reviewer said it felt closest to Lower Decks in terms of its comedy aspects. Not as broad obviously, just more jokes it sounds like.
We’ll see but it’s sounding like a show many fans will like and been wanting for a long time now at least.
On Sunday I read a very mixed review of the first 5 eps. He, like us, is not a huge fan of DISC and PICARD but he saw enough promise in SNW that he’s going to keep watching. As fore me, I’ve quit reading articles and reviews for now and I’m just going to watch it as soon as I can and hope for the best. The one potential problem I see is that they’ll have essentially completed nearly two seasons of eps before any feedback from the fans is available to them (if they care)! Perhaps fans such as myself won’t be smitten with an over-emphasis on informality / humor. But it will already be baked into the cake by May 5th, right?
That’s a good point. If you look at TOS, fan feedback definitely impacted mid to late season 1, because they knew what a hit they had with Spock (hence THIS SIDE OF PARADISE switching from Sulu to Spock as focus.) If they have an unplanned breakout b.g. character, like Garak was on DS9, they won’t really be able to take advantage of that at all if they’re writing more than a season ahead. (I know, the odds of getting performer and writing operating at Robinson/Garak level are somewhere between 0 and 00.)
Yes, (positive) fan feedback is what essentially brought SNW into existance! And that will be totally missing. Another concern is with the writers. Will we be getting the same mediocre writers that have run Discovery and Picard into the ground? One thing’s for sure, SNW likely won’t have anyone of the caliber of Ellison, Roddenberry, Coon or Fontana writing and polishing the scripts!
Man, if anyone of the sizable group of fans here who Lower Decks can seemingly do no wrong with start’s whining about this show being too humorous and/or casual, I swear that am going to blow my warp core…LOL
Actually I just read a review from Engadget. Maybe you read that one, but it’s the most negative review I’ve read yet. It basically says the show has promise but it still has a lot of clunky dialogue, odd plotting and bad melodrama like Discovery and Picard has. The reviewer says the episodes are interesting and better than the other two shows so far, but it’s still far from great Star Trek of old. They seem to like episode 5 the best but lukewarm on the first four.
Again, that’s just another review out of many. Most have been more positive including their take here on Trekmovie. But I do see some cracks forming too. I think it’s best to be positive but maybe lower expectations a bit. We don’t want this to be another Picard situation lol.
Yes, Tiger, that’s the one I’d read. Yeah, you’re right, best to go in with an open mind but expectations which aren’t unrealistically high.
Yeah that review was brutal lol. But it’s probably a good idea to lower expectations. And if you feel the review was off and the show is better than they described, you lose nothing! In fact a big reason why I ended up enjoying both LDS and PRO was because my expectations was much lower at the beginning and both surprised me.
“They also described it similar to The Orville…Another reviewer said it felt closest to Lower Decks in terms of its comedy aspects.”
Oh $%#@ !!!
They said it positively but yeah if others hate those shows, not a great sign for them lol. I love LDS and think Orville is fine, so I’m upbeat about it.
LOL, still hoping for the best. But I am glad you have lowered my expectations a bit, because they are unrealistically high.
I love Lower Decks (but it’s meant to be a comedy); I prefer my straight Trek to be many shades of things as TOS was, with a *sprinkling* of humor. Roddenberry wrote the show as a naval environment full of professionals, not a partying cruise ship. Probably none of the writers have military experience as Roddenberry and Coon had, I would guess? But, again, I’m hoping for the best…
Even if they did have some writers who were vets, their experience of the military probably wouldn’t shape them in exactly the same fashion as it did writers who served in WW II and Korea. We finally watched BAND OF BROTHERS and THE PACIFIC in the last couple of weeks, and they reminded me of a certain kind of poise many vets seemed to manage to carry through the war and even retain afterwards.
Haven’t seen very much in the same vein with those not belonging to ‘greatest generation’ which makes me give the notion of a greatest generation more credence than I probably did when I first came across it, even though I had firsthand evidence of it growing up. Two of my uncles were pretty big stuff in WW II, a flier who did endless sorties and wound up a Colonel by Korea, and another guy who was an ace in languages and spent time deep-cover inside Germany. The Colonel evinced a quiet pride in his years of service but never went into any detail of his experience, at least within my earshot as a kid.
Unlike the Colonel, his brother was some kind of genius, and after the war went back to finish up his degree at Stanford, but a drunk creamed his car and left him in largely Pike-like state for his remaining 35 years. It was really difficult visiting with him, because he could barely say anything in English and it took forever for him to get out even a simple sentence, but he could actually still speak German a little bit better (different part of brain involved when learning language maybe?) I took 4 years of German in high school, but clearly languages weren’t my thing because I still wasn’t able to have anything like a regular conversation with him, which I still feel bad about, because you just knew there was all sorts of brilliance behind those eyes, locked up in his head. I don’t think I would have had the fortitude to even try to live with such limitations, but his wife never left his side for all those years, and geez, I’m losing it just thinking about all this again, cuz grace class and courage are really more than just buzzwords.
Sorry (and also not sorry) for digression, but I’m just concurring that we won’t likely see people shaped in the same way by war writing for SNW. And even if they were, they’d still be at the mercy of rewrites by TPTB. Am wondering if Mount has a deal that would let him quit after any given season, based on how he feels about the show; that might provide incentive for TPTB to actually try to deliver the goods on scripted material (or might also be why they’re bringing in Kirk so early, because they expect to lose Mount by season 3.) Am thinking that his position has to be better (as in more flexible) than, say, Mulgrew’s. Still figure that if she had her druthers she’d have jumped ship from VOYAGER by early or mid run when I did.
Good points. But also, in the post-WWII era, the TV industry was in it’s formative era, and it was much easier for people from other disciplines to move into TV. Now, unless you are rich and can get in through the backdoor as an Exec Producer/financer, you pretty much need a 4-year film or media degree, followed by some shit jobs in areas supporting the industry (pay your dues), before anyone would consider you at one of the networks, streaming services, etc.
Well, Mount seems to be a very optimistic guy (and seemingly pleased with the show so far) so I’m really puzzled why they’re bringing Kirk into the mix in Season 2. Makes no sense.
It won’t make sense until we get to see the episode. They have been reassuring us that the show will still be based on Pike. I kinda wonder if they also want to see how we react to Kirk because I can see them introducing him now. Doing a full run of SNW then doing a post TOS series with Kirk/Spock et al.
If we don’t like him then they could recast with another actor using the excuse of oh its an older kirk.
Totally off topic, but I wanted to do a good deed for the day: Hamiltonbooks.com has got that RODDENBERRY VAULT on blu=ray for $6.95 plus shipping. They also have some Trek art books and tons of other good stuff, usually at outstanding prices. Now go buy them all up so I don’t feel compelled to take advantage of the pricing. (Actually, I probably should buy this, just because the last disk of s1 I have doesn’t play well, and this would let me get CITY and SS and OPERATE again on a disc.)
Kev, will you be using your wife’s account to buy the stuff? Haha – just kidding! We’ve got history, my friend. ; )
Honestly? She just bought me the UHD of TMP-TVH on Amazon(somebody was selling it for under $40 new), so I don’t know if I want to push too hard on more Trek stuff with her right now. Even though I am bracing for some unpleasantness on the way they processed the VFX shots for UHD, I suppose I had to go this route, because it turns out both of my blu-ray copies of TMP went bad — I watched TMP last week, and one disk had three points where I had to skip over a scene (including the tag) and the other would only play the damned abrams trailer at the front of the disk over and over again, like some SNL skit about the nature of Hell being endless pain. I’m having a pretty bad attrition rate on blu-rays lately, much more than dvd.
Oh, my ‘joke’ was referring way back to when you wrote an Amazon review of ‘These Are The Voyages’ using your wife’s account. But that’s ancient history and water under the bridge. So no more attempts at humor from me! It’s odd that you’re having problems with some Blu-ray discs. I own hundreds and have had only one or two stop working over the years. Perhaps your player is the source of the trouble?
I have over 1200 Blu-Rays and have never had an issue that cleaning the discs didn’t fix. That being said, my two players are high-end Panasonics.
Mine is a phillips, but I haven’t done comparisons on the tech and the brands. All I know is to never buy LG TVs again, going by the last 3 (they keep blowing up while just barely still under warranty, and so they get replaced with ‘equivalent’ newer models that also start smoking after awhile.)
Ohyeah, I remembered, just wasn’t dwelling on it (for now anyway :)
I seem to just have trouble handling discs. maybe hands aren’t sterile enough. I was traumatized to take my Criterion MEDIUM COOL out and see what looks like peanut butter all over it (that one only has one hiccup.) I’m just really rough on all forms of media, which is why I liked laserdisc, it seemed very hard to hurt those. I found a signed copy of Pohl’s GATEWAY for cheap and was going to sell it online, but figured I’d read it first. Even reading gently, I still managed to break the binding before I was halfway through. And don’t get me started on the DS9 companion, that book is practically designed to disintegrate in your hands. The last time i found a copy, I wound up just hole-punching the pages and putting it in a big notebook rather than try to handle it physically.
It might be the player … I got a UHD player for cheap at Goodwill (they get stuff direct from Target that didn’t sell, so it was still new), but that was back in 2016. Funny thing is that I still don’t have a UHD TV! Still trying to figure out a way to make having that as a business expense, but it would be too big to put in what passes for my office.
If it is the discs, are there any of these cd/dvd cleaning gadgets that actually work, either on dvd or blu-ray? Every time I read reviews, it seems like most of the systems are considered ripoffs.
Oh, I think that explains things (your rough treatment of media). I always grab and hold my discs only by the edges. So, very frankly, I’ve never owned a cleaner!
ORDERED !!!
Thanks, dude!
Brother and sister Trekkers – I’ve got a question: What time will SNW begin streaming in the Central time zone? Would it be 1 AM Central time?
I imagine it will premiere the same time all the other shows have started in that time zone.
This will be the first time I’ve attempted to watch early AM. How does it work in your time zone? I know 12AM is the official debut but I’m wondering if that starts from the Eastern or the Pacific time zone?
It starts from the pacific, so central would be 2AM.
OK, thanks!
Oh sorry, I understand now. I will say whenever it’s suppose to officially start, check an hour earlier. Kosh says 2 a.m. but it could really start at 1 a.m. I am from California and the shows are suppose to start 12 a.m. here. But actually they been starting roughly an hour early. That’s been happening since season 3 of Discovery and I pretty much watch shows around 11 although Picard has been starting a little later lately. It’s NOT a guarantee and it may be different in other time zones, but definitely check.
I’ll do that, Tiger. Thanks!
The shows start streaming as early as 11:10 pm on Wednesday night PDT. I’ve been watching new episodes at that time since they started streaming new episodes of STAR TREK. I tweet (and post on IG), with a screenshot, when they start streaming. So I have the evidence this is the case. There are exceptions, because for the first time in a long time (I think two weeks ago now) an episode of PICARD didn’t drop until midnight PDT…right at midnight exactly. But usually (99% of the time) they’re streaming as early as 11:10 pm PDT/PST if not a few minutes before. My twitter handle is the same here if you want to know for sure when they’re streaming.
Thanks for the tip!
This is all my interpretation — but I think you can sort of tell that at first they probably don’t think the Lower Decks crossover thing is that great of an idea, and then later, upon reflection, they then tote the company line and say it would be “amazing.” LOL
*shudder*.
Huh. I read that the opposite way: as them trying to hide the knowledge that such a crossover *is* happening. I think they’re genuinely excited/amused about it and trying to keep the secret.
But I could be wrong!
I was actually at the NYC Premiere on Saturday and I have to say I was extremely impressed by what I saw. Those two episodes they showed us was just so Star trek and so very much captured the TOS era for me, and this is coming from someone who isn’t really impressed with Picard and Discovery, though I still watch those anyway. But yes, like I said, they definitely captured the TOS essence with the first two episodes, and I sure hope they keep it going forward. And that is all I will say lest I spoil anything. In case it wasn’t obvious, yes, the premiere was amazing, and it was my very first time going to one. I had work the next morning and was so extremely tired, but it was so incredibly worth it for me, and I would definitely do it again if I get an opportunity to do so.