Starfleet Academy’ first look welcomes Paul Giamatti’s alien (exclusive)

The question the writers of Star Trek ask themselves with every new show is, “Why is this one unique?” Strange New Worlds, now in its third season, embraces camp and experimentation to give us episodes that are either a musical, documentary, or whodunnit murder-mystery. Picard felt like a nostalgic sequel to The Next Generation, while Lower Decks remains the Rick and Morty of the Trek franchise (even beyond cancellation). And so on.

With Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which is expected to launch its freshman season in 2026, executive producers Alex Kurtzman and Gaia Violo developed an idea about the next generation… not the Patrick Stewart-led classic series, but of Starfleet. 

“If you’re going to do a show about a young generation facing the future and you want it, as all Star Trek does, to be a mirror that holds itself up to the world as it is now, to situate the show in the halcyon days of the Federation would, in some ways, be dishonest,” Kurtzman, a showrunner on Starfleet Academy with Noga Landau, tells Entertainment Weekly. (The halycon days was a time period when the Federation of Planets enjoyed peace and prosperity.) “Our children are facing a lot of challenges right now and they are our hope for the future.” 

As seen in EW’s exclusive first look at the show, the latest Trek entry is set in the 32nd century and revolves around the first class of Starfleet cadets at the academy after 120 years. “They’ve got a lot riding on their shoulders, and they are meant to reestablish and rebuild everything that we all know and love about Star Trek,” Kurtzman continues. “They convey hope and they search for hope, and that felt like an extremely relevant message to talk about now.”

Landau adds, “It’s wish fulfillment. Every week it’s about a new part of coming of age. One week that can be a prank, war erupts another week, a romance begins another week, we encounter an alien species for the first time and we don’t know what the hell we’re doing [another week]. But at the end of every episode, what we want our audience to feel is, ‘I want to go to Starfleet Academy.’ Even in the deepest, darkest depths of character problems and drama, you get such a good feeling from watching this show [of] how much you want to be there so badly.”

The creative leads are keeping many of the character details under wraps until the big Star Trek panel at San Diego Comic-Con this Saturday, but they confirm Holly Hunter plays the lead of the series, that of the captain and chancellor of the academy. Landau calls the Incredibles and Broadcast News star “an incredible force of nature” and notes, “We’ve never seen a captain like this before.”

Sandro Rosta plays a key role as the audience’s window into the show as a new cadet. “One of the key relationships really is between Holly’s character and this cadet,” Kurtzman says. “Once the cadet enters into the school and meets all the other cadets, the balance of the storytelling begins to shift slightly. By the end of the season, you really feel like you have this incredible understanding of everybody and how they function as a group.”

Karim Diané, Kerrice Brooks, George Hawkins, Bella Shepard, and Zoë Steiner also star on the series, which has already been renewed for a second season, which starts filming this year. Tatiana Maslany of Orphan Black and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law will feature in a recurring guest star role.

The showrunners say longtime Trekkies will see familiar colors of earlier Trek shows within the fabric of the new story. Some of that will be overt, like the presence of Tig Notaro’s Jett Reno, Oded Fehr’s Admiral Vance, and Mary Wiseman’s Sylvia Tilly, all of whom hail from Star Trek: Discovery. Kurtzman and Landau also confirm viewers will see connections to Next Generation, Voyager, Deep Space Nine, and even animated kids show Prodigy. 

“We made sure that the halls of our school are properly named for the most legendary people in Starfleet,” Landau teases. 

She also notes Robert Picardo, returning as the Docter from Voyager and Prodigy, will “continue his story forward in a way that fans of Voyager are going to find really satisfying.” 

Then there’s Paul Giamatti, who takes a prominent role as the main villain of the show, a piece of casting that quickly came together after the Oscar nominee started making the press rounds for his 2023 film The Holdovers. He expressed during interviews that his dream role is to play a Klingon in Star Trek. “We looked at each other and we went, ‘Is he kidding?! Well, let’s call his agent and find out,'” Kurtzman recalls. “Within, I think, less than an hour, [his agent] called back and said he would love to meet.” 

On a Zoom call, Giamatti explained how significant Star Trek was to his relationship with his father. The showrunners gave him the first five scripts of their show and offered him five different parts. He chose the villain.

“He had such a great time putting on the makeup. He loved sitting in the chair,” Kurtzman adds. “We were worried it was going to take too much time, but he said, ‘No, I love it. It really lets me drop into the character.'” 

Giamatti’s alien transformation is revealed in EW’s Starfleet Academy photos. Character specifics, again, are being saved for a later time, but Kurtzman does confirm Klingons will be a part of the show; more specifically a “Klingon hybrid species who are several of our main characters.” Could that be Giamatti’s particular role? “It might be,” Kurtzman responds. “We’ll see.”

Their goal was to create a role that continued the grand tradition of complex Star Trek villains. Giamatti, in particular, embodies that real-world mirror the showrunners spoke of earlier. 

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“One of the things that we see all across the world now is how much hate is relied on to sow division between things that connect us as human beings and how hate is used as a bludgeon to destroy empathy, which I think is ultimately what Star Trek is about,” Kurtzman explains. “At its core, it’s about: We may not look the same, but we are the same. Finding that common ground and figuring out a way to understand our differences is at the heart of what [Star Trek creator Gene] Roddenberry was talking about.”

Without revealing too much, Kurtzman explains that Giamatti’s character “represents a tide that has swept across the world in a very profound and upsetting way,” he continues. “I say this without taking a political stance. That is part of what it means to invite everybody into the tent. One of my favorite things about Star Trek is that it reaches across the aisle. People on all sides of the political spectrum love it for different reasons. That is something that we really wanted to hold true to here.”

Landau adds, “That’s really the whole point of Star Trek is to remind people of what real sci-fi optimism looks like. Part of that reminder comes from learning how to view others not through a lens of intolerance and hate and disgruntlement, but through a lens of empathy and unity and peacemaking.” 

Learn more about Star Trek: Starfleet Academy at the Star Trek Hall H panel at Comic-Con this Saturday at 12:30 p.m. PT.