In this week’s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the simmering tension between Lieutenant Spock and Nurse Christine Chapel finally hit a boiling point in “Charades” — as the two officers finally faced their feelings head on after Chapel fought to get Spock restored to his half-human, half-Vulcan self.
 
We sat down with Nurse Chapel herself, actor Jess Bush, to talk about growing into the role of Enterprise’s best nurse… and of course, the growing Chapel-Spock romance.
 

Note: This interview occurred before the SAG-AFTRA contract expired on July 12, 2023.

TREKCORE: Christine really gets to shine in this episode — and besides all the Spock scenes, we get to see her solve a medical mystery. We get to see her really stick up for herself in her career, assert her independence, and it’s really great to see. How satisfying is it to get to explore the deeper life of this character who previously, in the Original Series, basically existed to pine away for Spock?

JESS BUSH: It’s deeply satisfying, and it’s also a great honor to be trusted with that task. I think the writers have done a friggin’ wonderful job of being really intentional about how they were gonna flesh this character out because Majel [Barrett] was famously unsatisfied with what she got to do.

And as you said, she kind of existed as just this reason for Spock to show his emotionless-ness. So it’s been just such a privilege to be entrusted with that. It’s also just been really fun. Like, the cool stuff that they’ve given me to do this season has been so good.

TREKCORE: Your version of Chapel is really fun. She’s got a lot of spunk, you know, moxie, and a lot of vigor. When you look at Majel’s version, she’s a little more sad; she’s almost defeated. Knowing her journey to when she gets older, how does that affect your choices in how you play her?

BUSH: Well, when I watched her performance, I didn’t really get sad from her. I got kind of, like, salty — like she’s kind of sarcastic and dry. So I kind of looked at that and kind of reverse-engineered what the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed version of that person would be, when she maybe hasn’t been totally knocked down yet.

TREKCORE: How about the medical aspect of it? Where do you draw from for the actual being-a-nurse part?

BUSH: I’ve read a lot about the type of person that is drawn to the nursing profession. Memoirs of nurses, books about combat med stuff —

TREKCORE: Right, because she’s also a veteran of the Starfleet-Klingon war.

BUSH: Yeah. It’s a constant learning process, because the field that Chapel is working in, the things that I have to do are kind of a mix of all the different types of medical professions that I could be in today’s world. So it’s pulling pieces in from everywhere.

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TREKCORE: She’s very open and honest with her patients, which is really fun to watch — “This won’t hurt… much!” — but she’s also very compassionate.

BUSH: I’m really familiar with this character now. Reading into what internally drives someone to be in that profession is also really informative to how she behaves at work, what she cares about when she’s on the floor, and how she approaches people, how she wants people to feel, what she knows of herself and what that can provide to people. I feel like that honesty and candidness can be really helpful in making people feel safe in times when things are uncertain.

TREKCORE: It makes the sickbay feel like a very safe place.

BUSH: Yeah, like, “I’m gonna tell you what’s going on, find a way to laugh about it.”

TREKCORE: “Weird shit is happening, and I’m not gonna sugarcoat it.”

BUSH: Totally!

TREKCORE: It’s probably quite interesting to play a character whose future you know. How does it complicate things, when you must portray your budding relationship with Spock — knowing that this is a person that your character will ostensibly never get over? 

BUSH: Our job is to be present, so I can’t think about that. That’s something that we can’t really entertain, if we’re gonna live the truth of this moment. We don’t know what’s gonna happen in real life, so part of the job is ignoring that.

TREKCORE: When you learned that Spock diverted the shields to save Chapel, and then you gave this beautiful, heartfelt speech about your feelings… it was a beautiful moment, but all against a digital character. Does that make it harder to bring up those emotions, when you’ve got nothing real to play against?

BUSH: Well, I mean, yeah — I was talking to a dot on a screen. But you know, coming clean in that moment and all the vulnerability that was there was more about Spock and me and my internal journey. And so I guess I just focused in on that.

I focused in on the relationship with Spock, what I wanted for him — and also the fear of being real. I think that was the biggest part of it, was like, just really feeling the fear of exposure and pushing through that, struggling with that.

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TREKCORE: Last season in “Spock Amok,” she was emphatic about not wanting anything serious — so what makes things with Spock different? 

BUSH: You know, she behaves like that, that she wants nothing but casual surface-y fun things — but that’s not what she really wants. That’s just a way to protect herself, and the way that she feels about Spock is too special to tarnish with that protective stuff. So she’s forced to be more honest and take the opportunity to get something that she actually really wants with someone that makes her feel safe and seen.

TREKCORE: One of my favorite parts of the episode is the scene with the cure to Spock’s condition. Instead of listening to what he’s about to confess — something that sounds very important and emotional — she hits him with the cure right away and says, “Go back to your life.” That’s such a bold choice. I can’t imagine being that strong… like, I would wanna hear what that person had to say!

BUSH: Well, it’s the right thing to do, I think. I think that she knows that it would be very, very hard to resist leaning into his humanness, if she did hear what he had to say. And she knows that that’s not the right thing to do, so she cuts him off.

She wants to do the right thing, you know, like, it’s not up to her. It would be selfish and almost like indulgent of her to take advantage of his humanness.

TREKCORE: That’s a lovely way to put it. But also then, there’s that kiss, which is just a lovely moment between you two — and it’s Christine that decides to kiss him first! How was that moment choreographed between the two of you, and from a character perspective, how did she make that decision?

BUSH: Intimacy scenes are always really scripted. They’re always very choreographed, just for everybody’s safety — but on a character level, I think it just gets to the point where she’s like, “We gotta stop thinking about it. Like, we just gotta follow our guts and experience this because if we think too hard, it’s just gonna mess it up and I can’t wait any longer. We have to act on it to see.”

The journey of the episode and where Chapel is in that moment, she’s just like forced to be fucking honest with herself in that moment and be like, “This is what I want.” Like, “No matter what the conditions are, no matter how complicated it is, I want this and I know that this is how I want to behave right now.”

And I think that the journey towards that honesty has been stretching through the whole episode, and she arrives at this point where she’s like, “You know what? Fuck it — this is what I want!”