Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 on opens with Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) of the starship Enterprise living his best cowboy life. He, La’An Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong), and Dr. Joseph M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) are riding horseback through the canyons of an alien world. Captain Pike is having so much fun on this particular away mission that he insists that the trio ride on before the real drama of the episode begins.
And to be honest, Pike deserves to have his fun! The new season of the Paramount+ hit picks up shortly after the devastating events of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3. Last season ended with Pike’s great love, Captain Marie Batel (Melanie Scrofano), deciding to use her newfound Gorn powers to trap the villainous Vezda by becoming the Beholder. In doing so, Batel had to sacrifice herself in the process, but not without giving Pike a tantalizing look at what their life could have been together in another timeline.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds star Anson Mount stopped by the Decider studio this week to chat through the exhilarating Season 4 premiere, which also features a guest turn by the great Saffron Burrows as a formidable new alien leader and… dinosaurs?
DECIDER: I think I talked to you seven years ago when you were on Star Trek: Discovery about what it was like to take on this role and I remember you were so touched when you described just being on the set and filling Christopher Pike’s shoes. I’m wondering, seven years later, being with this character for so long and being through all he’s been through, what has it meant to you and has it changed you at all?
ANSON MOUNT: Yeah, I think every role that you’ve spent time with this long changes you to some degree. Really, what’s meant the most, is this franchise having enough faith in me to give me a job that kind of handed me the wherewithal and the courage to have a family, because that’s not a given as an actor, and it certainly helped my career. I think I get better both in terms of my performance and in terms of life in general, just being able to say, “Okay, you know what? Just make the decision, do it, whatever that thing might be and you’ll figure it out.” We edit ourselves too often before it’s written.
The cold open of Season 4, you guys are on horseback on an alien world. It looks like it’s so much fun. I’m curious where you guys shot it, and who enjoyed it more, yourself or Pike the character ?
We shot that in a rock quarry outside of Toronto, and I love working with horses. I did it for six seasons on Hell on Wheels. I think they’re incredible performers. Everything that they think or feel is exhibited on their skin. Any opportunity to get to work with a horse — I don’t have the space in my life to have one of my own, so I get to live vicariously through the wranglers. And I was lucky enough to have incredible wranglers on both Hell on Wheels and on Star Trek.
Funny little tidbit about that, so we actually had to lay down the proper dirt. Because it was a quarry, we had to lay down the proper sand and dirt for that running sequence to happen. It was quite a track, and we have this thing in the film industry when we want to take away footprints, or horse hooves, or horse hoof prints. You have different ways of doing that, and what we had is a big rake on the back of some ATVs and then they would run over that to get rid of our footprints. But when we went to edit, we realized that we had a track that had rake marks. So we had to edit out all of those marks in order to make it look normal.
Saffron Burrows guest stars in the premiere as this incredible Martian commander. There’s this really touching, poignant moment where she picks up through her translator that when your character says “alone,” just the word, it’s interpreted as “widower” to her. You see something flash across his face, just how it registers. What does it mean for Pike to be kind of seen in that way by this person?
Well, first of all, Saffron was incredible fun to work with. She has an amazing sense of humor, wonderful work ethic. She had to do a lot of hard stuff, and that role, many other actors’ hands could have come off as ridiculous because of the way they went with the alien features and the costuming, but she just has this natural ability to ground whatever it is that she’s in and I just was very appreciative of her talents on this episode.
Because of the episodic nature of the show, it’s easy to forget that Pike is in a place of grief, still. He’s lost probably the love of his life, who gave him this incredible gift of experiencing a full life in whatever it was, another dimension, another time, another space. But he’s trying to figure out how to cope with the rest of his fate here, and what’s going to do honor to both the memory of her and to the people surrounding him whose fates are intertwined with his.
Speaking of Batel’s loss, it seems like with his go-go-go work ethic, he’s definitely trying to distract himself from his grief. How long will that continue through the season? Can you tease how much of this is going to be part of your character’s arc, or will there be some kind of resolution or some peace found in the grieving process?
I think that the seed is already planted by the time we start the season that he’s started to think, okay, is it a complete journey if there’s no end to it? Am I holding back the people around me by staying in a place I’m maybe not supposed to be in? So that obviously will progress throughout the season. Obviously, we have a final Season 5. One of the hardest things to do in television is to end a series because everybody has an idea of what that should look like and so you’re going to disappoint 99.99% of people, but you have to choose a path and go down it and I thought we chose a pretty good one I’m very excited to share with people.
I actually wanted to ask, I know you’re in production right now.
No, we’re done.
Oh, you’re done. Okay.
Yeah, we’re done.
How was that for you guys emotionally? I know when you have a long series the crew and the cast becomes tight. Has it hit you guys yet that it’s over?
For better or worse, we shot almost all of last year, so I think we were ready for a break by the time we finished. But we also did so knowing that we had two fantastic seasons to promote over two years, so we’re gonna see each other. And that’s great. I am gonna miss my crew on the ground in Toronto. They’re just [an] absolutely incredible group of professionals who really cared about the story, every one of them, and I’d love to work with them again.
Totally shifting gears, in the premiere, I thought it was really fun that the away mission that you do not go on, it has dinosaurs. There’s some talk about who gets to go on what away mission and back and forth. Was there any part of you that was jealous that you didn’t get to be around the dinosaurs, especially because someone gets to punch a dinosaur?
My friend, I’m 53 with two young children. I’ll take a break whenever I can get it.
All right, fair play, fair play. We already mentioned the fifth and final season. This is the 60th anniversary of Star Trek. You’ve been a part of this story for almost a decade with Star Trek: Discovery, and now this series, there’s been crossover events with other shows. Are you open to playing Pike again down the line in any capacity, or do you feel like his story has been told?
Well, first of all, it’s been a tremendous honor, one of the biggest honors of my career and one of the finest jobs in my career, maybe the finest. You learn in this business to not have any expectations, but to also never say never. And really, anything can happen. You don’t know. So you never just say never and you see what the universe tosses your way. But it is heady to think that I’m part of this franchise that has almost nine hundred episodes produced over the years. I just feel lucky and I’m happy for what I got.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Episode 1 “Valles Marineris” is now streaming on Paramount+.
This interview has been edited and formatted for clarity.