Star Trek’s subsequent step ahead is arguably considered one of its greatest leaps again but. Although the brand new ere of Star Trek reveals kicked off with Discovery—at first a prequel set earlier than the occasions of the unique sequence, now its farthest flung future—its newest guess on the Trek universe, Strange New Worlds, is a throwback to that traditional ‘60s heyday in more ways than being set aboard a pre-Kirk Enterprise.

“One of our showrunners called it the longest pilot-to-series pickup, ever, you know? Which is really funny,” Melissa Navia, who plays Enterprise conn officer Lt. Ortegas in Strange New Worlds, recently told io9 over video chat at a press junket for the new series. Navia’s Erica Ortegas—an keen flight jockey who pilots the Enterprise by way of the myriad risks it faces week in, week out on the present—is a rarity among the many important solid of the sequence, in that she doesn’t have an fast, express hyperlink to Star Trek’s oldest previous in comparison with characters like Captain Pike and Mr. Spock, and even Christina Chong’s La’an Noonien-Singh, a wholly new character with a very acquainted identify. But even then, there’s the tiniest little hyperlink again.

“It’s a brand-new character, but her last name was a last name Gene Roddenberry had in the pilot for a character who never made it to screen. It became a different character. And so for me, it kind of became… there’s just something very symbolic about [it], as an actor and as a Star Trek fan. We’re going to be making new fans from this show, but we’re just bridging the divide, of how Star Trek connects generations. It’s been really exciting, a lot of pressure, but I think we can handle it, thanks to our amazing writers and cast.”

The concept of that strain, and the hyperlinks to the unique Star Trek sequence, performs on the thoughts of all of Strange New Worlds’ solid, whether or not it’s the trio we met in Discovery’s second season—Mount, Peck, and Romijn’s Captain Pike, Spock, and Number One, now given the total identify Una Chin-Riley right here—or new faces like Navia, Gooding (enjoying a younger Uhura), and Chong, or Jess Bush and Babs Olusanmokun as minor Trek characters Nurse Chapel and Dr. M’Benga.

“It’s been incredible to have the wealth of knowledge of where the future of the franchise is, in comparison to where we’re coming from in our series and the first season,” Gooding added. “It’s a balancing act of knowing where we’re going and what we’re doing in the present moment, so it’s been fun to have the nostalgic throwback-y set pieces with this incredibly current and dynamic dialogue and conversations about the future, like, in these moments the characters don’t know [about yet]. Uhura doesn’t know she’s going to have a future on many different starships and this is just the beginning for her. But as an actor, it’s really cool to know the future, and play the present.”

For some, that meant diving right into a franchise they’d by no means skilled earlier than. “I did a lot of homework and research—because I’m a new Trek fan—I did a lot of watching the original series in quarantine, and then also wherever Khan was, The Wrath of Khan, all of that stuff, and asking friends what certain words [mean],” Chong stated, referring to La’an—who’s the Enterprise’s no-nonsense Chief of Security on the present—and her mysterious familial hyperlink to the long-lasting Trek villain. “There was a list of words and I was marking ‘I have no idea’ under each word. ‘What the hell does that mean?’ ‘What is that?’ Because, obviously, I couldn’t understand the script unless I could understand what those words were. So, there was a lot of that going on!”

At least for a few of Strange New Worlds’ newcomers, there have been precise performances to show to. “I watched all of Majel’s performance and researched into Star Trek more broadly, and how she fits into that picture culturally,” Jess Bush—who performs Barrett’s second unique Trek character, Nurse Christine Chapel, after Number One was axed within the wake of the sequence’ first pilot—stated of her personal analysis. “Distilled her essence, so to speak, and took note of her wit and humor and used that as a seedling to generate ,and yield from. There was a certain level of that in performing the character which I think Akiva [Goldsman] and Henry [Alonso Meyers], the showrunners, handled really beautifully with the writing, and how we got to brainstorm together. They had their two cents, but I also had a license to explore, myself. Which I felt honored to do—it’s been a wonderful process.”

For Olusanmokun that was an excellent tougher choice, given Dr. M’Benga’s onscreen Trek tenure was even shorter. “We only see him in two episodes! It was trepidation, and then it was ‘Okay, I can just give him something new, something that is unknown,’ you know? That’s what I’ve endeavored to do,” the actor added. “I hope the journey we take him on and what we show of his life, and inner life is something that the fans can connect to.”

But that strain to embrace Star Trek’s historical past wasn’t simply felt on Strange New Worlds’ new stars. It was arguably much more demanding for its three returning heroes: Mount, Peck, and Romijn, who all first created these new continuations of their characters for Star Trek: Discovery’s second season, and several other Short Treks anthology minisodes. For Mount, returning as Captain Pike wasn’t simply an opportunity to develop the character he had developed on Discovery, however assist lead a present that may develop into one thing completely different to all the opposite Star Trek sequence on the market proper now. “I think the opportunity to make our own Trek show, our own way, was really the driving force of the excitement behind this,” the actor defined. “We knew going in we wanted to make something episodic—not just in terms of the new idea, or the big planet of the week—but, ‘What is the character of this episode? How can we encourage our directors to come in and really put a strong footprint on their episode? How can we find a different way to play every episode?’ We wanted to re-inject a sense of fun in Star Trek, and I hope we succeeded.”

But with at the very least a number of the strain relieved in coming again, meant there have been probabilities to push a now-familiar face like Pike even additional. “On Discovery, [Pike’s] leading a different crew than he’s used to on the Enterprise—there, you get to see him leading his crew. The sense of responsibility there, the sense of warmth… if I wanted to bring one thing to Pike, it’s that every time that door to his office opened and a crew member walked in, the most important thing in the room was not Pike, not the question—the most important thing was that crew member. That’s one of the few things, for certain, I knew I wanted to do.”

Finding that stability between respecting what got here earlier than and carving a brand new identification for these characters was keenly felt by Mount’s returning colleagues too. “It’s a lot. I feel like a caretaker, like a custodian of this very beloved character that really only got 14 minutes of screentime in the original, rejected pilot. And he only saw her perform a task at hand,” Romjin added. “We didn’t learn her name, we didn’t learn anything about her character. She’s got a name now—Una Chin-Riley—and it’s really fun to develop and flesh out this blank slate.”

“We don’t take it lightly,” the actress continued. “I think all of us who were playing familiar characters know how much the Star Trek fans protect these characters and so we were all very protective of them, and… trying our hardest to take good care of these characters.”

“It never gets normal. It never feels like something ordinary. I think the onus is more comfortable at this point—it doesn’t feel so back-breaking,” Peck, who returns as Spock after depicting a slightly tumultuous model of the character on Discovery, concluded. “Right at the beginning, I was really afraid to squander this… this is such an important character to so many people, and my work is really important to me. Those two things combined just made for something super-burdensome. I think time has alleviated the discomfort of that and continues to, but I hope it’s never something that becomes normal, or comfortable, because I think that discomfort—and that legacy to live up to—is really a great catalyst for creativity and imagination and exploring the unknown. It’s very inspiring.”

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds hits Paramount+ beginning May 5.

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