We’ve got our first casting news about the upcoming Star Trek: Starfleet Academy series today, as Paramount+ has announced Academy Award-winning actor Holly Hunter will take on a lead role in the show.
Enrolling as the Chancellor of Starfleet Academy in the Star Trek: Discovery future era, Hunter’s character will be a Starfleet captain who oversees the campus, faculty, and student body in the 32nd century.
In the official statement today, co-showunners Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau said: “It feels like we’ve spent our entire lives watching Holly Hunter be a stone-cold genius. To have her extraordinary authenticity, fearlessness, sense of humor, and across the board brilliance leading the charge on Starfleet Academy is a gift to all of us, and to the enduring legacy of Star Trek.”
Hunter is one of the biggest names to join a Trek production, having won an Academy Award and BAFTA for 1994’s The Piano (with three other nominations over her career), plus two Emmy Awards (with four additional nominations to boot).
Still in pre-production, Starfleet Academy will take over Pinewood Studios in Toronto — the former home of Star Trek: Discovery — where filming is expected to begin later this summer. The studio will house the largest standing set ever used in a Star Trek production, as we reported back in March:
“Plans [include] the series’ central academic atrium, a sprawling, two-story structure that will include a mess hall, amphitheater, trees, catwalks, multiple classrooms and a striking view of the Golden Gate Bridge in a single, contiguous space. To fit it all, they plan to use every inch of Pinewood Toronto’s 45,900 square foot soundstage.”
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy “introduces viewers to a young group of cadets who come together to pursue a common dream of hope and optimism. Under the watchful and demanding eyes of their instructors, they discover what it takes to become Starfleet officers as they navigate blossoming friendships, explosive rivalries, first loves and a new enemy that threatens both the Academy and the Federation itself.”
Keep checking back to TrekCore for all the latest Star Trek: Starfleet Academy news as it breaks.