Key Points
Showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau explain how they turned a spaceship into “a training hospital” for Starfleet cadets.
The Star Trek: Starfleet Academy creative leads preview Holly Hunter’s Chancellor Nahla Ake, who’s both captain of the U.S.S. Athena and head of the school.
From an East Coast college vibe to trees on the spacecraft itself, Landau explains how “we’ve added elements that make it feel alive.”
There’s a reason why a show like Star Trek: Starfleet Academy hasn’t been made until now. How do you follow a class of unseasoned cadets during their learning period but still make it feel like Trek with regular space missions?
“It’s hard to come up with a circumstance and a buy-in where you can still have Star Trek adventures with real stakes and real peril, but it’s also a school,” Noga Landau, a showrunner on the new series with Alex Kurtzman, tells Entertainment Weekly. “It’s really important that viewers know that these kids actually go on real Star Trek missions and there is real Star Trek peril and complex situations that they have to navigate.”
The duo since cracked the code with the U.S.S. Athena, a spaceship that doubles as the Starfleet campus when it docks on Earth. “We really did liken it to a teaching hospital,” Kurtzman says. “You can only learn by getting thrown into the fire.”
Brooke Palmer/Paramount+
Tig Notaro as Jett Reno, Sandro Rosta as Caleb Mir, and Romeo Carere as Ocam on ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’
Holly Hunter is the woman in charge. As Chancellor Nahla Ake, the actress serves two roles: the captain of the U.S.S. Athena when it takes flight and the president of a school overseeing her students’ education. “You’re sort of talking about ‘the cool mom,'” Kurtzman describes. “It’s a very specific voice that you need. She has to have the authority of the captain, but also she needs to be the head of a school and be nurturing in that way, but also be tough. She really is in her own category as a captain.”
Set in the 32nd century, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy follows the first class of cadets to attend the school after 120 years. Sandro Rosta stars as Caleb Mir, an orphan who’s been searching for his mother (Tatiana Maslany) for a long time, not knowing if she’s alive or dead. He realizes his best shot to find her is to join Starfleet Academy.
“The second scene of the pilot is Tatiana, Holly, and Paul together,” Kurtzman says, referring to Paul Giamatti, who plays Nus Braka, a Klingon-Tellarite hybrid and the chief antagonist of the season. “Just the firepower in the scene is so extraordinary.”
Michael Gibson/Paramount+
Zoë Steiner as Tarima Sadal and Sandro Rosta as Caleb Mir on ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’
The showrunners plucked Rosta out of acting school after seeing his audition for Caleb. “We cast him mere days before we were going into production,” Landau recalls. “He was the last piece of casting. He locked into that role from the first moment. I will never forget him sitting next to Holly. You’ve got a Hollywood legend sitting next to an adult man who’s never been on camera before, and to see the two of them play those roles together, it was instant.”
Karim Diané, George Hawkins, Bella Shepard, and Zoë Steiner portray some of the other cadets in this freshman class, but none received a bigger reaction when they first came out at San Diego Comic-Con than Kerrice Brooks. The actress plays S.A.M. (Series Acclimation Mil), a newborn hologram and the first of her kind to enroll in Starfleet. An attendee at that Con panel shouted to the bubbly Brooks back in July, “I love your energy!”
“The character of S.A.M. was not written for Kerrice in any way. She was a very different character originally,” Kurtzman says. “In the very first round for S.A.M., we saw a bunch of actors and none of them were quite right. Then we saw Kerrice, who had a very different voice than the character that was written. Noga and I called each other and we were like, ‘We are in the presence of a genius. We actually need to rewrite the character for her.’ And so we did. We cast her right away, and then we adjusted the voice for Kerrice.”
John Medland/Paramount+
George Hawkins as Darem Reymi, Kerrice Brooks as S.A.M., and Sandro Rosta as Caleb Mir on ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’
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As for the ship itself, the showrunners brought an East Coast college vibe to the set. A certain Ivy League institution in Boston was a mentioned inspiration, even though the primary Earth location is San Francisco. Kurtzman and Landau tease other elements of the space craft, which transforms into the actual Starfleet Academy building when it touches down.
“It has trees in it. It looks like a Star Trek vessel, but we’ve added elements that make it feel alive,” Landau says.
And not for nothing, but they’re both fans of The West Wing, particularly the extended walk-and-talk camera shots. “The set is two levels,” Kurtzman says. “We built many sets, but what we’ll call the atrium is a two-level set where you could probably have a walk-and-talk that’s five pages long and never have to cut.”
Hopefully that applies to the show at large — never having to call cut. All of these sets were built with the foresight of getting a second season. The series is now well into filming its sophomore run. If viewers buy into this concept of a mobile academy, season 3 won’t be far behind.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy will feature at a Stark Trek Universe panel out of New York Comic Con this Saturday at 3:15 p.m. ET. The series will premiere on Paramount+ in 2026.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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