Star Trek: Strange New Worlds star Anson Mount on why he’s stopped questioning the show’s writers

Anson Mount as Captain Christopher Pike in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Courtesy, Paramount+.

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After spending more than five years exploring the outer reaches of the universe as Captain Christopher Pike on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, actor Anson Mount quickly learned not to question the infinite expanse of the writers’ imaginations.

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Some of the weirder goings-on that the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise have encountered over the years may have seemed a bit quirky and bewilderingly high-concept on paper. In Season 2, a crossover episode with the animated series Star Trek: Lower Decks had characters appear as cartoons. Fan favourite Subspace Rhapsody, also in the second season, offered the somewhat alarming spectacle of Capt. Pike, Spock, and their crewmates spontaneously burst into song after an accident involving a quantum probability field, which had them expressing themselves and acting out their duties through elaborate musical numbers. Early on, there was a time when Mount would approach showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers after receiving an unorthodox script and ask, “Are you sure this is going to work?” Eventually, he stopped.

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“Every single time I did that, those episodes I was nervous about, would pop in terms of our numbers, in terms of audience reaction and in terms of the overall result,” says Mount, in an interview with Postmedia. “They are tremendously brave writers. They take a lot of risks and Paramount, to its credit, really did not interfere. They let us do a lot of good stuff.”

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Judging from the first four episodes of Season 4, which premières on Paramount+ on July 23, the writing team has not lost its nerve. Without giving away too many spoilers, the tone and content run the gamut. The opener is an epic adventure featuring time travel, existential who-made-who questions about creation and dinosaurs. The second is a cerebrally creepy horror story about pain, guilt and the power of fear. The third is a goofy comedy that offers a “Dude, Where’s My Car?” premise. The fourth draws on a storyline and cinematography from a classic film in Hollywood’s golden years.

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“I really like being kept on my toes creatively, forced to do different kinds of homework,” Mount says. “Genre became a fun way of speaking creatively with the writers, these sort of what-if conversations. Akiva and Henry are very collaborative writers, and they would regularly come to the actors holding area between setups and say, ‘Hey, what have you guys not done that you want to do?’ Genre just became a way of talking about that. But then in practice, what happened was that genre became different vehicles for getting at the strange new world of any given character’s emotional journey. We never do genre for its own sake. We only use it as a vehicle to get to the place where we’re going.”

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Until he boarded the Enterprise, Mount was probably best known for playing the conflicted Civil War-era anti-hero Cullen Bohannon during his five-year stint on the Alberta-shot western Hell on Wheels. In 2018, he was cast as Captain Pike in the second season of Star Trek: Discovery before taking the helm for Strange New Worlds in 2022. It was a spinoff from Discovery, but soon found its own audience. The series acts more or less as a direct prequel to the original series and takes place a decade earlier.

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This allowed writers to introduce younger versions of beloved characters such as Spock (Ethan Peck), Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), Scotty (Martin Quinn) and Kirk (Paul Wesley.) Pike’s dramatic character arc was a key plank in Season 3. His tragic story was revealed in the original Star Trek series. His ultimate fate was to suffer a disfiguring injury that puts him in a wheelchair, unable to speak or move. This was revealed to him in Star Trek: Discovery, which meant he knew he was living on borrowed time.

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However, the trippy ending of Season 3 had him parting ways with love interest Captain Marie Batel (played by Wynonna Earp’s Melanie Scrofano). She leaves Pike to become the otherworldly “Beholder,” but before doing so, reveals to him an alternate future where they married and enjoyed a full and long life living happily ever after.