How Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Got Paul Giamatti To Play Its Villain

You might have seen that celebrated actor Paul Giamatti is playing the bad guy on "Star Trek: Starfleet Academy" and wondered how the producers talked him into doing that. But actually, it was the other way around.

Giamatti — an Oscar nominee best known for his film roles in "Sideways" and "The Holdovers" — plays the villainous Nus Braka in the new "Star Trek" series premiering this Thursday on Paramount+, and he's been a huge "Trek" fan for years. ("I'm a big 'Deep Space Nine' fan," Giamatti tells TVLine in the video embedded below. "That's probably my favorite iteration of it.") And as co-showrunner Alex Kurtzman remembers it, Giamatti was the first to suggest a "Trek" role for himself.

While Giamatti was doing press for "The Holdovers" a couple years back, "someone asked him, 'What part do you want to play more than anything?'" Kurtzman recalls. "And he said he wanted to play a Klingon. So we reached out to his agent and said, 'Is that real?'" Soon enough, the agent replied that Giamatti "would love to talk. And we had the most amazing conversation where he just was expressing his love for 'Star Trek' and how deep it was for him."

Kurtman says they offered Giamatti "one of six roles, figuring he would only want to be in an episode. And he said, 'No, I want to be the season villain.'" The producers jumped at the chance because, as Kurtzman points out, "we now have, in our first season of 'Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,' a villain that's gonna really be memorable. Villains are hard. They're really, really hard. And it gave us a wonderful compass for really arcing out the challenges that everybody faces over the season. They're all really put into motion because of Nus."   

Giamatti's character Nus Braka is a part-Klingon, part-Tellarite space pirate who has a long history with Holly Hunter's school chancellor Nahla Ake. Giamatti has mentioned legendary "Star Trek" villains like Gul Dukat and Khan as inspirations for Nus, "but he really is his own thing in a lot of ways," Kurtzman insists. "That's because Paul is his own thing. He made it his own thing." Later this season, he hints, we'll see that "all great villains believe they're the hero of the story. They believe they're doing the right thing, and they're doing what they're doing for emotional reasons, and that is absolutely true for Nus Braka."  

Press PLAY above to hear more from Giamatti and Kurtzman about this new "Trek" villain, and let us know your early impressions of "Starfleet Academy" in the comments.