Holly Hunter and Sandro Rosta on joining the 'Star Trek' universe

To land the role of a rebel cadet in “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” Sandro Rosta, 26, had to take a chemistry reading over Zoom with Holly Hunter.

“I felt as intimidated as possible,” he says over a latte in a midtown Manhattan hotel restaurant, just before Hunter joins our conversation. “But I was trying to stay calm.”

Rosta had never acted professionally on screen before; Hunter was the Oscar-winning star of classics ranging from “The Piano” to “Broadcast News.” She was already set to play Nahla Ake, the rector of the degree school where eager students train to explore the galaxy. She hoped to win the role of Caleb Mir, a distraught young man whom she recruited for her show.

For Rosta, however, Hunter was also Helen Parr, the animated superhero mother of “The Incredibles.” “I'll be very honest,” he confesses. “I'm a big geeky nerd. So yeah, I've seen 'The Incredibles' a billion times. That's what I had in my head.”

He didn't have to worry about disappointing Mrs. Incredible. When Hunter arrives at our table in an elegant black skirt, her warmth toward Rosta is immediately evident. She smiles at him as she speaks.

“I felt a connection with Sandro immediately,” he says in his simple Georgian tone. “It was easy and strange because it was Zoom. Zoom is kind of a nonentity. I don't feel much of a connection to Zoom, but I did feel a connection to you when we read.”

While Rosta and Hunter are at opposite ends of their careers, they are both completely new to the “Star Trek” universe. Neither of them had much experience in the 60-year-old sci-fi world created by Gene Roddenberry before signing on, but together they make up the new face of the franchise and their characters share a complex connection that makes their pairing crucial to the series, which mixes youth drama with space exploration. The Paramount+ series, one of the major projects set to be unveiled this year for the franchise's 60th anniversary, begins streaming Thursday with two episodes and then airs weekly thereafter.

In the opening scenes of “Starfleet Academy,” which takes place in the 32nd century, we see how Nahla, then a Starfleet captain, was responsible for sending Caleb's mother (Tatiana Maslany), an accidental accomplice in the murder of a Federation officer, to a rehabilitation camp. (Caleb's mother, in search of food, mistakenly aligned herself with the evil space pirate Nus Braka, played with seething menace by Paul Giamatti.)

As a child, Caleb resisted being taken into Federation custody and instead ran away. Tasked with becoming chancellor of Starfleet Academy, Nahla seeks out Caleb, a rogue technical genius, who offers her the chance to receive an education and the chance to find her mother once again. Caleb resists, but Nahla isn't the traditional authoritarian either.

“I had ideas that Nahla was a more fluid creature,” says Holly Hunter, who plays the 400-plus-year-old half-Lanthanite.

(Bexx Francois / For The Times)

In fact, when Hunter first received the offer to join “Starfleet Academy,” she had a lot of ideas for co-showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau about how this 400-plus-year-old half-Lanthanum alien should behave.

“I had ideas that Nahla was a more fluid creature,” he says. “Someone who was like liquid, like water.” I wanted it to be “feline” and “tactile.”

Kurtzman, current “Star Trek” manager, and Landau were happy to comply. They knew Hunter's presence was the wild card that set this show apart from the other “Trek” projects.

“When we were looking to cast Nahla, we knew we needed an actor who could be different from any other captain while still maintaining the authority that a captain requires,” Kurtzman says in a video interview. “We also knew we wanted it to be quirky because he's over 420 years old and he's reached a point in his long, long life where he decides he doesn't want to wear shoes on the starship anymore.”

The opportunity was a surprise to Hunter, but also intriguing. She reflects that being an actor is like being at “roulette” or at the “craps table.”

“You're rolling the dice, you pick up the phone, and your life can change,” he says.

He didn't worry much about what had happened to him. As for her science fiction background, she was more inclined to read JG Ballard than to watch “Voyager.” It dove into the history of the storied franchise, but didn't delve too deeply.

“The fun part is being presented with something like this, reading it and saying yes,” he says. “And without really thinking about the ramifications of how many people have been captains before me. In a way, that's none of my business.”

Because Nahla and Caleb are so close, Landau says they knew they had to cast an actor who was equally authentic to Hunter to play alongside her. They saw more than 400 actors for the role.

“Every time we saw someone play Caleb, we'd look at each other and say, 'Do you think that guy's ever been in a fight before?'” Landau says. “Because Caleb has been fighting his whole life just to survive.”

“Every time we saw someone play Caleb, we'd look at each other and say, 'Do you think that guy's ever been in a fight before?'” says co-showrunner Noga Landau. “Because Caleb has been fighting his whole life just to survive.”

(Brooke Palmer/Paramount+)

Kurtzman told Rosta, a recent Oxford School of Drama graduate, about that criteria after the audition process. Rosta wasn't trying to portray that, but it was true: He was describing a bad dispute in his early high school years in Toronto. Throughout his youth, he oscillated between Canada and the United Kingdom.

Rosta was cast about two weeks before filming on “Starfleet Academy” began, but the first table read made it clear to Landau and Kurtzman that they had chosen correctly. Landau pulls out his phone to show me photos of Rosta and Hunter leaning toward each other, displaying an intimacy that's not typical of a sterile meeting room. It was their first meeting in person.

Rosta credits Hunter for making him feel at ease.

“I felt under the most pressure I've ever felt because it's like a decisive moment,” Sandro Rosta says of the first table read.

(Bexx Francois / For The Times)

“I felt under the most pressure I've ever felt because this is like a defining moment,” Rosta says of that moment as Hunter smiles at him. “Either we send this guy back or we do this.”

What worried him most was working with Hunter. In our conversation, he turns to her: “You just gave me permission to exist anywhere except within the square meter of where we were sitting.”

It's an “anti-bull” quality that Rosta attributes to Hunter. She is not aware that she has this meter, but that is evident in person and in Nahla's character. Hunter wanted it to be clear that Nahla, who has a tragedy in her own past, was not trying to adopt Caleb. Their relationship was much more nuanced than that.

“I didn't want to get involved with him,” he says. “I didn't want to be codependent. I didn't want to be an enabler. I wanted there to be autonomy for this human being.”

Similarly, Hunter herself did not want to position herself as an on-set mentor to Rosta and her colleagues who play the other cadets. They were his co-workers, not his subordinates.

“What I feel for all of you is that you are my collaborators,” he says. “They are my fellow actors. I am not their disciplinarian.”

Neither does Nahla, actually. He has a sly way of delivering lessons, often with joy. Hunter wanted to lead gently on screen, even though he ran into some of the Federation's militaristic protocols after being told Nahla couldn't have glasses of wine in her office. Typically, Hunter says, he resists projects that offer messages. But messages about the values ​​of imparting empathy are part of the bread and butter of “Star Trek” and she appreciated it.

It is “a way forward,” he adds. “That communication, collaboration, community, empathy and listening are means of communication to connect. I think that's what we all do as actors. We want to connect.”

Rosta and Hunter have been working on “Starfleet Academy” for approximately two years. While they're in New York for the series premiere, which was held, appropriately, at the American Museum of Natural History's Cullman Hall of the Universe, they'll soon have to return to Toronto to finish filming the already-commissioned second season. Still, while they've been embedded in hyper-realistic settings for some time, they're only now experiencing reactions from audience members, including legions of dedicated Trekkies.

Admittedly, Rosta was more of a “Star Wars” person before this venture, but he says he understands having a deep connection to a franchise. His mother became obsessed with “The Next Generation” after he was cast as Caleb. She accompanied him to the premiere. “I told her to be honest,” she says. (She loved it).

Hunter, for her part, is excited to meet her new audience.

“It would be fun to go to a convention,” he says. “Wow, what would that be like?”