‘Starfleet Academy’ Could Be Star Trek’s Most Relevant Chapter Yet, According to Creator Alex Kurtzman

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy marks a bold new chapter in the legendary science fiction franchise, shifting the focus from experienced Starfleet officers to the next generation of cadets. Set in the 32nd century and following the events of Star Trek: Discovery , the series explores a Federation still recovering from the “Burn” and the challenges of rebuilding across a divided galaxy.

The new perspective introduces a group of young recruits who are not only learning Starfleet’s ideals, but also seeking to redefine them to inspire unity again. Led by Oscar-winning actress Holly Hunter as Captain Nahla Ake, Starfleet Academy brings together a cast of new faces, including newcomer Sandro Rosta , Bella Shepard ( Wolf Pack ), and Karim Diané ( One of Us is Lying ). The show also stars Paul Giamatti ( The Holdovers ), Tatiana Maslany ( The Monkey ), Kerrice Brooks ( My Old Ass ), and Tig Notaro (Star Trek: Discovery).

In the Collider Interview Studio at San Diego Comic-Con 2025 , Steve Weintraub interviewed the core cast, along with showrunner Alex Kurtzman , about all things Starfleet Academy . The cast discusses Hunter’s cool-but-commanding captain, Diané’s excitement about playing a Klingon that goes against the species’ status quo, and their favorite episodes. Kurtzman also discusses why the series now holds the largest set in North America, and teased a credit sequence unlike anything in past Star Trek releases.

Holly Hunter Steps Into the ‘Starfleet’ Captain’s Chair

The role was always written with her in mind.

COLLIDER: Holly, how would you compare your captain to the previous captains that have been on Star Trek?

HOLLY HUNTER: I can’t. I can’t compare. I can’t. First off, they’re incomparable, just starting with William Shatner. I grew up watching him with my parents, so I could never compare myself. I can’t compare myself with any actor either. No actor or actress.

How is she as a captain? How does she react to tough situations? What is she like in the chair? Because each captain on the show is slightly different.

HUNTER: Well, I think that would be more of a question for my co-stars.

KARIM DIANÉ: [Laughs] Holly’s not a regular mom. She is a cool mom. That’s the vibe, for real.

ALEX KURTZMAN: Here’s the truth. We wrote this part for Holly Hunter before we knew Holly Hunter. As we were developing it, because I am, like, an obsessive fan of all of her films — I’ve never told you this, but I’m telling you now — she was the voice in our heads when we were writing it. And the fact that we sent it to her, and she responded right away, was such a gift, because we had already kind of tuned our ear to it. Then we had this amazing experience of getting to sit down with her and go through all the scripts and read them out loud together, which was really fun.

HUNTER: Yeah, it was really fun.

KURTZMAN: Because it’s in your head for three years, but then you actually hear Holly Hunter do it, and it all comes to life in a way that was pretty amazing.

HUNTER: But you could just call me Holly. [Laughs]

KURTZMAN: No, I’m just calling you Holly Hunter from now on.

Why ‘Starfleet Academy’ Resonates With the Present Day

“You have a generation of kids who are facing the mistakes of their elders.”

The thing about Star Trek shows is that some of their openings are music and some of them have words, if you will. What are you doing for this show on the credit sequence?

KURTZMAN: I’m definitely not answering your question, but what I will tell you is that it’s super cool. I’m really excited. I look at credit sequences now, like on Severance, for example — amazing, amazing credit sequence. There’s such an art to the process of building a credit sequence. What you want to do is find what is that visual metaphor that then becomes the show in an interesting way. So, I’m really excited. It’s very unlike other Star Trek credit sequences, but there’s something very familiar about it, too, that just speaks to the idea of the whole show.

Do you think that each season will be a different credit sequence, or is this the credit sequence?

KURTZMAN: I’m going to say the first two seasons are going to be this credit sequence.

So one of the things that, for your character, is that they’re releasing later today, a lot of the character names. But I don’t actually know your character’s name.

HUNTER: Nahla Ake.

Okay… I have so many questions. I’m going to stop. So, this series takes place after Discovery. How much debate did you guys have in terms of when this series would take place, and was it always going to be after Discovery?

KURTZMAN: It was always after Discovery. It was always the 32nd century, because whatever Trek show you’re making has to individuate. It has to be its own show. It has to have a reason for being other than the other Star Trek shows. And in the 32nd century, you’re dealing with a post-Burn world where trust in government has broken down, where the Federation is rebuilding, where people are divided, where there are all these major issues.

In Discovery, the ship came and started bringing the Federation back together again, and now our kids are the first class back in over 120 years. So, you have a generation of kids who are facing the mistakes of their elders, or the issues that have been handed down to them by their elders, and are now having to deal with it. It felt like a very relevant topic. As a father, I see what my son is going through as he’s about to go off into the world, and it feels very much like what our cadets are going through.

No one has seen the show, so no one knows your characters. Can you talk about who you are in the show and what you’re excited for fans to experience with your character?

BELLA SHEPARD: My character is extremely intelligent, driven, and athletic. She’s also very empathetic and compassionate to her fellow cadets. She’s the daughter of a Starfleet admiral, so she’s got high expectations placed on her, and it’s kind of what drives her career at Starfleet Academy.

HUNTER: And she’s very even-keeled. She’s got a steadfastness and a cool head that prevails. As young as she is, and as inexperienced as she is, what is so prominently explored in the show is what you’re capable of, which is that you fill kind of, like, maybe everything.

SHEPARD: [Laughs] Yeah, you’re like, “What can’t she do?” until you see what she can’t do, and her failure is what sets her up for learning important life lessons.

SANDRO ROSA: My character is a bit of an outsider. He has grown up without institutional help, unlike the other cadets. He has, at the beginning of our story, been disillusioned by the idea of Starfleet. So, you get to actually experience his falling in love and coming to understand the values of Starfleet, community, working together for a common goal, and connection. You get to experience those things and Starfleet Academy through the eyes of an outsider, through Caleb.

DIANÉ: My character is a young Klingon at Starfleet Academy. That’s the first time I’ve said that out loud, and it feels so good! I feel like I’ve been holding on to this little secret for so long. I’m so excited to play a Klingon. It’s iconic. My young Klingon comes to Starfleet Academy, and we all know that Klingons naturally are enthusiastic about battle and about war, but my character isn’t interested in none of that. In fact, he has dreams of becoming a doctor, and he wants to save lives as opposed to take them away, which is very different from what we know about what Klingons are and always have been. That comes with a lifetime of being labeled as weak. So, his journey throughout school is hopefully a way for him to shed that “weak” label and really learn what strength truly means.

Something I know about the series is that you have the biggest set that’s ever been built for Star Trek. Are you allowed to say what the set is, and what was it like working on such a massive thing?

DIANÉ: So it’s the biggest set in North America, period. So, it’s huge. The first time we walked in, I mean, it’s a real school. It’s multiple levels. We filmed on not just the ground, but we walked up and filmed everywhere.

Was it like at Pinewood or something, like a huge stage, and then you filled that stage?

KURTZMAN: We filled multiple stages in Pinewood.

What is this set specifically? Is it the school?

KURTZMAN: The school is a ship. The ship docks on campus in San Francisco and stays there as part of the campus. So what that does is, one of the questions everybody has always faced in thinking about Starfleet Academy in prior iterations, when people were thinking about it, was how do you sustain a show when kids are just in a classroom all the time? Also, when we think about Star Trek, it’s adventures in space and exploration, and all the things that Star Trek is, and so we thought, “What if you make the ship essentially a teaching hospital? They can go to school on campus in San Francisco, but then they can deploy with the rest of the fleet and learn in the field with real captains, with real officers?” So, the idea is that you get to have your cake and eat it too.

I couldn’t put together how there was a Starship, and I’m very happy to finally know.

KURTZMAN: It’s an official Star Trek show. They go to space and they have adventures.

‘Starfleet Academy’ Brings “Real-Life Stakes” for These Cadets

Kurtzman also reveals the kinds of stories fans can expect.

Something that’s really interesting is that you guys haven’t premiered, but you have a second season that you’re getting ready to make. Alex, what did you learn in the first season, especially learning the actors’ voices, that is now in the writers’ room, or in the making of Season 2?

KURTZMAN: The first thing I’ll tell you is that this cast, to a person, is unbelievable. Unbelievable. To be able to sit in the editing room and go through every take, and just go, “Everything is so great. Which beautiful meal on the buffet table would you like to eat, because they’re all equally tasty?” It was so fantastic. What we love about our show, and our characters, is that they are not yet, with the exception of Nahla, fully formed people. They get to make mistakes that Starfleet officers are really not allowed to make, because they’re still figuring out who they are. What’s really fun about that, too, is that some of them go in thinking they want one thing, but like everybody who goes to college, they may exit Starfleet Academy realizing that what they thought they wanted when they came in is not at all what their destiny is. So that’s a really fun thing.

HUNTER: At the same time, the school is not like a traditional school, because of the safety net that kids who go to college experience. The safety net of Starfleet Academy is thin because they actually are in space, so the dangers are great, even though it’s still a total learning environment, and kind of an experimental environment. The stakes really couldn’t be higher. It’s real-life stakes.

This is a show that is not like Next Generation, where each episode is its own thing; this is obviously all tied together. When you guys were in the writers’ room coming up with the arc, how much were you thinking about, “What’s our four-year plan, what’s our five-year plan?” And how much is it season by season?

KURTZMAN: Well, the beauty is you have to have a four-year plan because college is four years long.

Well, I mean, I don’t know what it is in Star Trek land, but you know.

KURTZMAN: What I think we’ve found, and I would say that Starfleet is kind of the sum total of everything we’ve learned on all the shows, is that, yes, there are serialized stories that take you from beginning to the end of the season and that will carry into Season 2; however, we really do have standalone episodes. So, once the story has been established, and everybody gets together, we begin to foreground certain characters as the lead of each episode, and then everybody comes together, so that by the time you get to the finale, you know everybody very, very well. So it’s kind of a perfect balance, I think, of Next Gen standalone episodes where there’s a case of the week, or an alien of the week, or a diplomatic problem of the week, but then by the end of the season you realize it all weaves together into a bigger story. We’re sort of doubling down on that in Season 2, but that’s the structure of the show.

So Season 1 comes out early next year. Is the plan to try to have it come out every year? Because right now you’re ahead of the game, which is very, very rare for a show. Are you thinking every 12–18 months, hopefully you can have a season?

KURTZMAN: Holly, what do you think?

HUNTER: I was very interested in what you were going to say. We all are.

KURTZMAN: Okay, yes. Once a year would be great.

HUNTER: But we have two seasons! We already have two.

KURTZMAN: We start shooting our second season in less than a month. We do have a plan for Season 3. You know what’s so fun, Steve, is that when you start breaking a season, inevitably you have too many ideas, and you go, “Oh wait a minute, this is cool. We should do this next season.” I always want to leave enough room to have improvisation happen, with no pillars we are trying to hit. But we just came to the end of Season 2. We’re about to write the finale, which is kind of amazing, and it’s exactly where we wanted to go. But when we started Season 2, it isn’t exactly how we thought we’d get there. It’s really fun.

The thing that I like about what Paramount+ is doing, which is so fucking awesome, is they’re already doing Season 2. The biggest problem with streaming is they make the first season, and they see how it goes. “Oh, it was a hit. Now let’s do a writers’ room. Now let’s put out the show,” and it’s like two years later.

KURTZMAN: For us, it’s almost three.

“Shit Gets Real” With Paul Giamatti in ‘Starfleet Academy’

“There’s a terrible shift.”

For all of you guys, which episode of the first season is the one that you cannot wait for fans to see, and what do you think fans will say after they watch the finale?

SHEPARD: Well, after you watch the finale, you get the whole shebang after that, and you know what we’re about. A lot of shit goes down in the finale. So, I think people are going to be blown away. My episode that I would choose, maybe Episode 3.

DIANÉ: I was going to say the same thing. I was going to say 3. I think 3 is a lot of fun.

SHEPARD: That was really fun to film, so that’ll be fun to talk about, too, and see how the fans react to that one. So I guess I’ll say 3.

HUNTER: I think Episode 6ix is… Wow. That’s a little mind-bending because there’s a terrible shift in what you realize the capabilities are of good and evil, of what’s at stake. There’s an opening. It’s a little revealing. It opens the show up a bit more than you thought it was going to be, that the opening was going to be that broad-ranging.

I’m assuming Paul Giamatti plays into this.

KURTZMAN: He does, and shit gets real in 6. Everybody gets tested in a way that they don’t expect in 6. He’s just unbelievable.

DIANÉ: Yeah, I was about to say, while we’re on Paul Giamatti. I cannot wait until y’all see what this man does on this show. He is so good. Iconic.

It’s almost like he’s won an Oscar or something. By the way, when you guys announced he was going to be in it, I was like, “What the F is going on? This is going to be awesome.”

ROSA: I would agree with the choices so far, [Episodes] 3 and 6, I think, are incredible. I’m particularly excited for Episode 9 for reasons you’ll find out.