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Star Trek: SNW: We Need Anson Mount to Release His Lorca Audition Tape

We need Star Trek: Strange New Worlds star Anson Mount to drop his audition tape for "Discovery's" Capt. Lorca for the holidays - please?

It's safe to say Star Trek: Strange New Worlds star Anson Mount has emerged easily as the quintessential Captain Christopher Pike as much credit goes to The Original Series actors Jeffrey Hunter and Sean Kanney. Hunter was the original captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise in the original TOS pilot "The Cage," which was later repurposed into "The Menagerie" with William Shatner's Captain James T. Kirk firmly at the helm as part of the cast overhaul. Kanney played the heavily scarred and near-paralyzed version whose injuries led to requiring mobile assistance as Hunter had no desire to lead the NBC series or return. Since the season one episode, Pike has been revisited twice with Bruce Greenwood playing the Kelvin universe timeline alternate in the J. J. Abrams 2009 soft cinematic reboot of Star Trek, and Mount was cast in the role properly in the Prime universe starting with Discovery on Paramount+ season two. On social media, the actor revealed he almost played a very different character in Captain Gabriel Lorca, played by Jason Isaacs.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Star Anson Mount Teases His Lorca Audition for 'Discovery'

"I MAY have come across an old audition tape of myself as Captain Lorca. It brought a smile," Mount wrote before teasing, "Should I throw caution to the wind and post it? Or would anybody even care?" Lorca was the captain of the U.S.S. Discovery following the U.S.S. Shenzhou's loss at the Battle of the Binary Stars, saw its captain, Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) lost in battle and the bulk of the crew abandoning ship. Upon the former first officer, Michael Burnham's (Sonequa Martin-Green) court martial for mutiny, she was stripped of her Starfleet rank and able to only serve on a provisional basis as a science officer given her experience as a human raised on Vulcan alongside her adopted brother Spock (Ethan Peck).

While Discovery was battling chaos from the war with the Klingons, Pike took over provisionally to run the crew while the U.S.S. Enterprise faced repairs. As the series progressed, we'd see the truth about Lorca while Burnham worked her way back up the graces of Starfleet and eventually to the captaincy. With the warm reception of Mount, Peck, and Rebecca Romijn's Una Chin-Riley (aka Number One), Strange New Worlds was born to pick up on Gene Roddenberry's original vision of TOS in 1966, this time as a prequel series when it premiered on Paramount+ in 2022.

Aside from Leonard Nimoy's Spock being the only TOS cast member to be retained from "The Cage," the entire Enterprise crew and characters were recast while the original first officer, Number One, played by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry would be recast as Nurse Chapel. While the idea of Pike, Spock, and Una remained the core, that's where the similarities end, with creators Akiva Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman, and Jenny Lumet opting to blend even younger versions of TOS characters like Celia Rose Gooding playing a younger Nyota Uhura, originated by Nichelle Nichols and Jess Bush taking over Barrett-Roddenberry's role of Chapel. Chief Medical Officer Dr. Joseph M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) became the SNW doctor (with Booker Bradshaw playing him in TOS in a guest starring role) before TOS's Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley). In "The Cage," the CMO was Dr. Phil Boyce, played by John Hoyt.

As far as Lorca's fate is concerned, it's revealed that he's from the infamous Mirrorverse, where variants of the Prime characters are often found to be far more predatory and ruthless as they're introduced in the TOS episode "Mirror, Mirror." Mirror Lorca, who hid his true intentions from Discovery, took the identity of Prime Lorca as the Mirror counterpart, revealing the grim fate of his Prime counterpart. Not long afterward, Mirror Lorca would also die at the end of the season leaving Saru (Doug Jones) as Discovery captain. Seeing Mount's audition as Lorca makes this even more intriguing since if we were to ever see Mirror Pike on SNW, he could tap into that.

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