To land the role of a rebellious cadet in “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” 26-year-old Sandro Rosta had to do a chemistry read over Zoom with Holly Hunter.
“I was intimidated as I could possibly be,” he says over lattes at a Midtown Manhattan hotel restaurant, just before Hunter is set to join our conversation. “But I was trying to keep my cool.”
Rosta had never acted professionally on screen before; Hunter was the Oscar-winning star of classics ranging from “The Piano” to “Broadcast News.” She was already set to play Nahla Ake, the chancellor of the title school where eager students train to explore the galaxy. He was hoping to win the role of Caleb Mir, an angsty young man whom she has recruited for her program.
To Rosta, however, Hunter was also Helen Parr, the animated superhero mom of “The Incredibles.” “I’ll be very honest,” he confesses. “I’m a huge nerd geek dude. So, yes, I’ve seen ‘Incredibles’ a billion times. That was the thing that was in my head.”
He didn’t have to worry about disappointing Mrs. Incredible. When Hunter arrives at our table in a sleek black skirt, her warmth toward Rosta is immediately evident. She beams at him as she speaks.
“I felt a connection with Sandro immediately,” she says in her straightforward Georgia lilt. “It was easy and that was weird because it was Zoom. Zoom is kind of a nonentity. I don’t feel a lot of connection with Zoom, but I did feel a connection with you when we read.”
While Rosta and Hunter are at the opposite ends of their careers, they are both utterly new to the “Star Trek” universe. Neither of them had much background in the 60-year-old sci-fi world created by Gene Roddenberry before signing on, but together they make up the fresh face of the franchise and their characters share a complex connection that makes their pairing crucial to the series, which mixes YA drama with space exploration. The Paramount+ series, one of the lead projects being unveiled this year for the franchise’s 60th anniversary, begins streaming Thursday with two episodes and then streams weekly thereafter.
In the opening scenes of “Starfleet Academy,” which takes place in the 32nd century, we see how Nahla, then a Starfleet captain, was responsible for sending Caleb’s mother (Tatiana Maslany), an accidental accomplice to the murder of a Federation officer, to a rehabilitation camp. (Caleb’s mom, searching for food, mistakenly aligned herself with the villainous space pirate Nus Braka, played with seething menace by Paul Giamatti.)
As a child, Caleb resisted being taken into Federation custody, instead going on the lam. When charged with becoming chancellor of Starfleet Academy, Nahla seeks out Caleb, a rogue technical genius, offering the chance of an education and the potential of finding his mom once again. Caleb is resistant, but Nahla is not your traditional authoritarian either.
In fact, when Hunter was first approached with the offer to join “Starfleet Academy,” she had a lot of thoughts for co-showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau about just how this over 400-year-old half-Lanthanite alien should behave.
“I had ideas about Nahla being more of a fluid creature,” she says. “Somebody who was like liquid, like water.” She wanted her to be “feline” and “tactile.”
Kurtzman, who is the current steward of “Star Trek,” and Landau were happy to comply. They knew that Hunter’s presence was the wild card that differentiated this show from the other “Trek” projects.
“When we were looking to cast Nahla, we knew that we needed an actor who could be different than every other captain yet maintain the authority of what a captain requires,” Kurtzman says in a video interview. “We also knew we wanted her to be quirky because she’s over 420 years old and sort of come to the point in her long, long life where she decides that she no longer wants to wear shoes around the starship.”
The opportunity came as a surprise to Hunter, but an intriguing one. She muses that being an actor is like being at the “roulette wheel” or the “craps table.”
“You’re rolling the dice and you pick up the phone and your life can change,” she says.
She didn’t worry much about what had come before her. As for her sci-fi background, she was more inclined to read J.G. Ballard than to watch “Voyager.” She did dip her toes into the lore of the storied franchise, but didn’t go too deep.
“The fun part is having something like this be presented to me and reading it and saying yes,” she says. “And not really thinking about, oh, the ramifications of how many people have been captains before me. In a way, that’s just not my business.”
Because Nahla and Caleb are so linked, Landau says they knew they had to cast an actor that was equally authentic to Hunter to play opposite her. They saw over 400 actors for the role.
“Every time we would see someone interpret Caleb, we would look at each other and we would say, ‘Do you think that guy’s ever actually been in a fight before?’” Landau says. “Because Caleb has been fighting his whole life just simply to survive.”
Kurtzman told Rosta, a recent graduate of the Oxford School of Drama, about that criteria after the audition process. Rosta wasn’t trying to portray that, but it was true — describing one bad spat in his early high school years in Toronto. Throughout his youth, he bounced around between Canada and the U.K.
Rosta was cast about two weeks before “Starfleet Academy” started shooting, but the first table read made it clear to Landau and Kurtzman they had chosen correctly. Landau takes out her phone to show me pictures of Rosta and Hunter leaning in close to each other, displaying an intimacy that’s not typical for a sterile meeting room. It was their first in-person meeting.
Rosta credits Hunter for making him feel at ease.
“I felt under the most amount of pressure I think I’ve ever felt because this is like a make or break moment,” Rosta says of that moment while Hunter beams at him. “We either send this guy back or we do this thing.”
He was most worried about working with Hunter. In our conversation, he turns to her, “You just gave me permission to exist nowhere else except within the one square meter of where we were sitting.”
It’s an “anti-bulls—” quality Rosta attributes to Hunter. She’s not aware that she has this meter, but that’s evident in person and in the character of Nahla. Hunter wanted it to be clear that Nahla, who has tragedy in her own past, wasn’t trying to adopt Caleb. Their relationship was far more nuanced than that.
“I didn’t want to be enmeshed with him,” she says. “I didn’t want to be codependent. I didn’t want to be an enabler. I wanted there to be autonomy for this human being.”
Similarly, Hunter herself didn’t want to position herself as a mentor on set to Rosta and his colleagues who play the other cadets. They were her co-workers, not her underlings.
“How I feel about all you guys is you guys are my collaborators,” she says. “They are my fellow actors. I’m not their disciplinarian.”
Neither is Nahla, really. She has a sly way of imparting lessons, often with playfulness. Hunter wanted to lead with softness on screen, even though she bumped up against some of the militaristic protocol of the Federation after she was told Nahla couldn’t have glasses of wine in her office. Typically, Hunter says, she’s resistant to projects that offer messages. But messages about the values of imparting empathy are part of the bread and butter of “Star Trek” and she welcomed that.
It’s “a way forward,” she adds. “That communication and collaboration and community and empathy and listening is transportation to connect. I think that’s what we all do as actors. We want to connect.”
Rosta and Hunter have now been working on “Starfleet Academy” for about two years. While they are in New York for the show’s premiere — held, appropriately, at the Cullman Hall of the Universe in the American Museum of Natural History — they’ll soon have to return to Toronto to finish up filming the already ordered second season. Still, though they’ve been embedded in the hyper-realistic sets for some time now, they are just now experiencing the reactions of audience members, including the legions of dedicated Trekkies.
Rosta was admittedly more of a “Star Wars” person before this venture, but he says he understands having a deep connection to a franchise. His mother became obsessed with “The Next Generation” after he was cast as Caleb. She accompanied him to the premiere. “I told her, be honest,” he says. (She loved it.)
Hunter, meanwhile, is excited to meet her new public.
“It’d be fun to go to a convention,” she says. “Like, wow, what would that be like?”
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