RICCONE, ITALY – The official anniversary is not until September, but the Italian Global Series festival kickstarted the festivities celebrating six decades of “Star Trek” on Wednesday night. With the season four premiere a few weeks away, Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn, and Celia Rose Gooding were on hand on behalf of “Star Trek Strange New Worlds,” as were “Voyager” and “Picard” fan favorite Jeri Ryan and “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” and “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” director Nicholas Meyer. The franchise’s cultural cache has ebbed and flowed over the years, but it’s always reflected creator Gene Roddenberry’s hope for an optimistic future. No matter how dire the state of current world events. In fact, sometimes it’s predicted the future in the best way possible.
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“Any kind of art, including science fiction, is inevitably the result of the time and place in which it is created…of when and where it’s conceived,” Meyer says. “Whether you’re talking about Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Harlan Ellison or Ridley Scott, it doesn’t matter.”
Tying that narrative thread into his own contributions to “The Undiscoverd Country,” Meyer notes, “What was interesting about ‘Star Trek VI’ was that we knew exactly what we were talking about. What if the Berlin Wall came down in outer space? Who am I if I have no enemy to define me? And we actually predicted the Soviet Union coup before it happened. We were in the cutting room when poor Mr. Gorbachev disappeared, and nobody knew if he was alive or dead. And all Paramount could think of was this is incredible for the movie, but nobody seemed to be worried about poor Mr. Gorbachev alive or dead, but it was like good for the movie. But the coup in our film happened before it happened in Russia because we just thought it was coming.”
Ryan’s “Star Trek” experience was in front of the camera, a part of a second generation of “Star Trek” actors who have played the same character over multiple iterations and creative directions of the franchise. She first portrayed the Borg assimilated human Seven of Nine on “Star Trek: Voyager” in 1997. Proving anything is possible, she then reprised her role on “Star Trek: Picard” beginning in 2020. While “Seven” became more “human” upon her return, Ryan doesn’t believe that the core audience of the show has changed significantly over the years.
“I will say the initial appeal of Seven, her initial audience was much narrower, and it was a very predominantly male fan base in the beginning until the character began to progress and people began to see beyond the silver catsuit,” Ryan says with a knowing smile. “When she was out of that silver catsuit, which was just over the top and kind of ridiculous and problematic in many, many, many ways that have nothing to do with just being a little bit over the top and ridiculous, but literally problematic because of the fabric with the lights and the… Anyway, it was a whole thing, which made it even more of an issue than it should have been. But once you got into the character, she was embraced by a wide variety of fans already on ‘Voyager’ that a lot of neurodivergent people really related to the character, which I really felt touched by because my son is on the autism spectrum. That meant a lot to me. And I’ve had so, so many neurodivergent fans over the years who said that she really helped them because it was their journey as well trying to discover social skills and discover how to interact.”
Seven’s sexuality became more fluid on “Picard,” a change Ryan embraced wholeheartedly. It turns out that character trait was initially part of Seven’s origin back in the ’90s that was never explored.
“There was a huge LGBTQ+ audience for Seven already. And then with ‘Picard making her a queer character as part of canon, making her bisexual, that was a huge embrace of the community that I heard a lot of people appreciate,” Ryan notes. “And Jeri Taylor, who was one of the showrunners on ‘Voyager’ when I was brought on initially, that was apparently, I didn’t know this until much later. That was apparently her original idea for Seven. She wanted her to be bisexual then because it’s the perfect character to have done that with. She wasn’t even human starting out. She wasn’t born. She would have had no preconceived notions of sexuality or social norms or anything. But that was a very different time, and networks were not ready for that at that point. And so they sort of were a bit scared to do that.”
When Mount appeared on “Star Trek Discovery” in 2019, he had no idea he was embarking on a whole new career arc. His performance as Christopher Pike, the original captain of Gene Roddenberry’s “Star Trek” television pilot, immediately became a fan favorite. And, before anyone knew it (thank you, Peak TV era), a spin-off in “Strange New Worlds” was taking flight. Mount has a legion of followers, but feels he’s quite different than the quietly confident Pike.
“My wife will tell you I know very little about leadership. I was a senior patrol leader in the Boy Scouts, and that’s about it,” Mount jokes. “But I feel like I’ve learned a tremendous amount about leadership while playing this role. Just by trying to pay attention when people talked about leadership. There are very few things that I knew about Pike going into my conversations with [showrunners] Akiva Goldsman and Henry [Alonso Myers] before we started. And one of those things was I said, ‘Look, all I know is that when a member of the crew needs to come and talk to him about something, everything else on his desk is pushed aside. And he has 100% focus on that person because he’s smart enough to understand that his greatest tool is his crew. And his superpower, if he has one, is to turn his crew into a larger mind because Pike’s dirty little secret is that he’s not sure that they knew what they were doing when they chose him to be captain.’ So that’s when Akiva out of the blue said, ‘I’m picturing dinners at the captain’s table.’ I was like, ‘What?’ But that gave me an idea.” I said, ‘Oh wait,
every captain gets one thing. They get one request. Can’t bring his horse. So what if he gets a kitchen?’ And that’s when Akiva and Henry said, “We’re getting off this phone call. We’re calling Jonathan Lee, the designer right now, and we’re getting you a kitchen.’ And that’s where that came about.”
Mount continues, “That’s just the type of leadership that we have with Akiva and Henry. They are so confident in their craft that they often come to us and go, ‘Give us ideas. Best idea wins, go.’ They’re not protective at all. So, everything was very much a dialogue. I mean, we were lobbying for a musical episode, and they gave us one. We lobbied for a puppet episode. They gave us one. We lobbied for film noir. We got it. I learned a lot by watching my showrunners, I’ll tell you.”
Romijn, who has had quite a year shooting both the final season of “New Worlds” and reprising he role as Mystique in “Avengers: Doomsday,” thinks her character, Una Chin-Riley, aka Number One, is beginning to truly spread her wings. And just as the series comes to an end. She notes, “Now that she’s been cleared [of the court martial], she is living authentically as we should all be able to live. We get to move forward and see Una in a much freer space where she requests more of a leadership role, more time on planet to lead missions.”
As with Pike, Number One, portrayed by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, was a centerpiece of the original “Star Trek” pilot, but NBC executives simply weren’t ready for her yet.
“According to what I heard, test audiences and executives did not believe that a woman could be in its position of command,” Romijn shares. “So they scrapped it. And it’s taken this long for us to finally get to flesh out these characters, 60 years later. The longest pilot-to-series jump in history, I would have to say. So, I think that in keeping with Rodberry’s original vision, we now finally get to have an Enterprise bridge crew that is full of women and men, of course. It’s a mixed bag as it always should have been.”
Two mainstays of “Star Trek” lore, Spock and Uhura, portrayed by Leonard Nimoy and Nichelle Nichols, made it from the landmark series to the J.J. Abrams cinematic reboot to new incarnations on “Strange New Worlds.” That responsibility is not lost on the Grammy-winning Gooding, whose portrayal of a young Uhura is just the second professional gig of her career.
“Something that I am really grateful for about our show is that it’s a prequel,” Gooding says. “We all know Lieutenant Nyota Uhura. Whether you watch ‘Star Trek’ or not, you know this character. She’s been iconic for decades. And what our show gets to do is establish the beginnings. And something really exciting and attractive to me about this Uhura was that she is not the person who she becomes. She’s very different. She’s much more introspective and insecure and cerebral, and she’s dealing with really serious imposter syndrome. I think it was really important to humanize Uhura because when she was originated in the ’60s, black women did not have the space and opportunity to live fully and authentically. We were the help or descendants of enslaved individuals, or we were so trapped in the past. And now in 2026, while we still have a very long way to go, I think it was really important to me to give her an authentic and recognizable origin story.”
She adds, “I’m lucky enough to be on a platform with millions of people watching our show. It’s been incredible. I hope that fans in season four see the growth that I’ve been yearning for, for years now. It’s been the pleasure of a lifetime.”
“Star Trek Strange New Worlds” season four debuts on July 23 on Paramount+.
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