Posted in: Paramount+, Star Trek, TV | Tagged: star trek, Starfleet Academy

Starfleet Academy: Giamatti on Realizing "Star Trek" Dream, Gul Dukat

Paul Giamatti discusses living his Star Trek dream with Starfleet Academy, working with Holly Hunter, being inspired by Gul Dukat, and more.

One of the highlights of season one of Starfleet Academy unquestionably is Paul Giamatti's Nus Braga, the Klingon-Tellarite villain and archnemesis of Captain Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter), with an ax to grind considering his incarceration was quite an inconvenience to his criminal empire, to say the least. At the season one finale "Rubicon," we see him exposed as a fraud by Ake, Caleb (Sandro Rosta), and Anisha Mir (Tatiana Maslany) in his kangaroo court in front of his associates who joined him on board the hijacked USS Athena. Speaking at the Trek Talks 5 with Trek Geeks show (via TrekMovie.com) to benefit the Hollywood Food Coalition on March 28th to discuss (at the eight hour mark) when he got cast in the series' antagonist, and tapping into some of the biggest Star Trek villains in Marc Alaimo's Gul Dukat from Deep Space Nine and Christopher Plummer's General Chang from The Undiscovered Country.

Starfleet Academy Star Paul Giamatti on Fulfilling a Star Trek Dream and Nus Braga Inspirations

Upon getting the offer for Nus Braga in Starfleet Academy, "I didn't play it cool at all. That's completely like, I think I even, like, wept at some point. I am not; I was unabashedly on, I didn't cover up any of my enthusiasm. It's ridiculous. I mean, honestly, it's a genuine, like, wish fulfillment thing. I mean, I've gotten to do all kinds of great things. I swear to God, this is I don't need to — I mean, if this was it for me, I'd be, like, I have achieved what? How can I do better than this?" Giamatti said, and as a Trek fan, "…it's not just a childhood thing, which I loved it, but then growing up, as an adult, I'm watching TV, right? I'm having just as important a reaction to it as an adult as I did as a kid. You know what I mean? You grow up with it, and it's like you change with it as it's changing."

As far as inspiration goes, Giamatti goes into DS9's primary villain, "I love Gul Dukat, and I think the character is fantastic over the spread of what happens with him. And Marc Alaimo, that actor, is extraordinary… So it's a really great melding of character and actor. And I think only insofar, you know, I think I probably have a lot of kind of classic Star Trek villains in my head, whether I was really consciously employing anything," he said. "But I do think the Gul Dukat thing … The guy likes the sound of his own voice, I think, and he likes to kind of talk, and he likes to hear himself talk, and he thinks everybody else is probably very interested in everything that comes out of his mouth. So he's a little bit of a blowhard in that similar way, I think … Alex Kurtzman said to me, 'You know what he does in that is he plays the bad guy as, essentially, thinking of himself as the main character.' I'm the most important man in the room, in every room I walk into. So there was a bit of that going on. But any good villain, I think, is doing that I'm the most important guy on planet Earth, or whatever planet we're talking about."

The two-time Oscar nominee also tapped into a certain vibe of Plummer's Chang to go along with his passionate performance. "…he's kind of a nomad, you know, it takes it with him… That's very much the sort of idea I had going on in my head … I don't know much about pirates, but I sort of looked at stuff a little bit, and sailors in the 19th century, and they would travel and gather all these sort of marks of where they've been, tattoos. And this guy's ritually scarred on his face from who knows who, his ears clipped and shaped a little bit. And so he's got stuff he's covered, and everywhere he's been. He's a kind of map of everywhere he's been."

Before the series' premiere, Giamatti told Bleeding Cool about his chemistry with Hunter, "There's nothing I didn't like, seriously. Everything was great. I mean, getting the ball hit back at me, nice and hard like that. I mean, I always knew that it was going to be exciting and fun." For more, including Giamatti discussing the Easter Egg Trek moments he could recreate, including a reference to The Wrath of Khan, playing off of Hunter, his character's legacy despite not returning for the second and final season, and more, you can check out the full interview. Starfleet Academy is available on Paramount+

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!