Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Anson Mount Teases Episodic Adventures

Anson Mount proved popular in his debut as USS Enterprise Captain Christopher Pike in the second season of Star Trek: Discovery, which helped lead to the spinoff Star Trek: Strange New Worlds getting the greenlight at Paramount+. The series reunites Mount with co-stars Ethan Peck and Rebecca Romijn playing Spock and Number One, respectively. Its producers say the series will be more episodic than Discovery, bringing Star Trek back to its network television roots. In a new interview with Collider for his film The Virtuoso, Mount touched on why Strange New Worlds went that route instead of following Discovery's more serialized template.

"Well, I think that Star Trek is, by nature, episodic," Mount says. "Now, that doesn't mean that Star Trek can't be other things. Star Trek can be a lot of things, as we've seen in every iteration of it. But classic Trek is really founded on the big idea of the week, and the big idea of the week needs room to breathe. In serialized structure, you're trying to take care of so many relationships that there doesn't tend to be a lot of room for that. Now with that said, I think Discovery does a phenomenal job with that structure and I was very fortunate to be a part of it. Normally, serialized is my taste, as an actor, but this really felt like it needed to be episodic."

Mount also discussed what it was like being cast as Pike, learning about the spinoff, and the reception he's received from Star Trek fans. "Funny enough, I only found out after Strange New Worlds was picked up that, early in the days of planning Discovery, Akiva Goldsman, who's our showrunner, had lobbied to be on Discovery because he's a huge Star Trek fan," Mount says. "Akiva is so busy in his film career that he didn't need to add a TV show, but he wanted to do Discovery. All he had heard about was that it was going to be a pre-Kirk show, so he assumed it was a show about Captain Pike. He gets in the writers' room and he's like, "Wait, what?! This is a different show. Okay, all right. We can play with this, but we've gotta do another show." So, he was lobbying for it and lobbying for it and lobbying for it. I got lucky enough to be cast in the role for Season 2 of Discovery, and they didn't tell me any of this, thank God, because I would have been far too nervous. I just thought it was a one season gig and that was it.

"Honestly, I've never felt such embrace from a fan base, on anything I've done. It is really night and day, and I'm very thankful to everyone with Gene Roddenberry and CBS, and Alex [Kurtzman] and Akiva for putting a huge amount of trust in me to be able to do it."

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is filming its first season now. Star Trek: Discovery is available to stream on Paramount+.