‘Hell On Wheels’ actor Anson Mount made his debut as fan-favorite character Captain Christopher Pike in season two of ‘Star Trek Discovery.’ Fans praised his performance as the first captain of the USS Enterprise.
Anson Mount discussed his role and the reaction from viewers in an interview with Collider.
“Honestly, I’ve never felt such embrace from a fan base, on anything I’ve done,” he said. “It is really night and day, and I’m very thankful to everyone with Gene Roddenberry and CBS, and Alex [Kurtzman] and Akiva [Goldsman] for putting a huge amount of trust in me to be able to do it.”
Mount also revealed that Goldsmith assumed the show was about Pike before realizing that it was about the USS Discovery and wrote in the captain.
“Akiva is so busy in his film career that he didn’t need to add a TV show, but he wanted to do Discovery,” he explained. “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.”
‘The Virtuoso’ actor also explained how the show is a return to the Star Trek format of being episodic in nature.
“Well, I think that Star Trek is, by nature, episodic. Now, that doesn’t mean that Star Trek can’t be other things,” Mount said. “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.”
Ethan Peck and Rebecca Romijn join the cast Science Officer Spock and Number One, reprising their roles from ‘Star Trek Discovery.’ It was announced in March that the series had entered production.
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