Paul Giamatti, Star Trek’s Latest Villain, Just Proved His Trek Fandom to Us
Paul Giamatti isn’t just one of the big-name, Oscar-nominated stars of the next Star Trek series, Starfleet Academy (the other is Holly Hunter). He’s also a big Star Trek nerd himself, and he proved it to me when I chatted with him at the CCXP con in São Paulo, Brazil, this week.
“Seven years old, seven, eight years old,” Giamatti immediately responds when asked when his fandom began. “I watched it with my father, who was a fan from the '60s, watching in the '60s. So yeah, I go back, way back.”
Cut to half a century later, and the actor is standing in front of thousands of fans promoting his own Star Trek show on CCXP’s Thunder Stage – the Brazilian con’s version of SDCC’s Hall H. To rapturous cheers, Giamatti unveiled a clip from the latest series (this is the twelfth Trek TV show, give or take).
New Starfleet Academy Clip Revealed
In the new clip, the latest starship to take to the heavens, the USS Athena, is under heavy attack from an unknown force that seems to be engulfing the ship in a sort of cosmic sheath. As Hunter’s Captain Nahla Ake gives orders from the bridge, we see the young Academy students running to and fro in the decks below. Also spotted is Robert Picardo’s The Doctor, still swinging some 800 years after his time on the USS Voyager, as he attempts to corral the students (“Don’t panic! Breathe! Breathing is your friend!”) while acerbicly (of course) advising the captain to avoid any further direct hits to the ship. Suddenly a ship emerges in the space beyond the Athena, seemingly putting itself together from different pieces, and who appears but Giamatti’s villainous Nus Braka, who tells Captain Ake she looks “as radiant as ever” before adding that “payback’s a bitch.” End of clip!
Paul Giamatti’s Star Trek Fandom
The actor doesn’t mince words when it comes to what his favorite Trek series is.
“My favorite one probably of all of them is Deep Space Nine,” he says. “I like The Original Series. I like Next Generation. I like Voyager actually a lot. I've enjoyed Strange New Worlds a lot. Those would be top favorites. But Deep Space Nine's probably my most favorite one.”
So then going down the list of other required favorites every Star Trek fan must have…
“Yes, it would mean Sisko is my favorite captain,” he laughs. “And the Defiant is my favorite ship. I love that show. I weirdly love that show. The actors are so great on that show. All the actors on all the shows are great, but I really love that one. … I always admired Colm Meaney on Deep Space Nine because he pretty much… only 97% of what he says is technobabble. And it's so good the way he does it. And you can follow it and he looks like he really knows what he's talking about!”
Favorite episode?
“Oh, wow. Well, there's ‘The Visitor’ one when Jake gets old – that’s a classic one,” he says. “A lot of the stuff with Odo I really like. There's the episode where Jadzia almost dies on that planet and Worf goes back to save her. That was a great one. Super moving. But anything with Odo in it I really like. All that Changeling stuff is great.”
See? He knows his stuff.
Playing Nus Braka, the Half-Klingon/Half-Tellarite Villain of Starfleet Academy
Giamatti was involved in the development of his character’s unique combo of Star Trek alien races. The Klingons, of course, need no introduction, but the other half of his character Nus Braka’s genetic make-up is Tellarite, which is actually a species well known to Trek fans that dates back to the William Shatner Original Series days.
“I had been just shooting my mouth off about how much I wanted to be a Klingon,” the actor laughs. “And they were like, ‘OK, we have a Klingon [character already] and we have a lot of Klingony stuff. What if he's half? What if he's half?’ They were like, ‘We thought we'd bring the Tellarites back.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, the pig guys from The Original Series! That's two really aggressive alien types. I'm going to be really aggressive!’ So it was partially my thing about being a Klingon, but then they brought the Tellarite thing, which I thought was very funny. So I let myself get pretty hairy for the thing too!”
The actor has had some fun trying to imagine what exactly led to the conception of this half-Klingon/half-pig-man creature.
“Can you imagine those two races mating and creating this guy? Oh, my God,” he beams. “But I don't know which one – I could never decide who's the mother and who's the father. I kept thinking, is the mother a Tellarite, a female Tellarite? I was like, ‘I like that.’ I like the idea that some Klingon was attracted to this pig woman!”
None of which is to say that Nus Braka is a joke. There’s an element of whimsy to the character to be sure, but he will disintegrate you just as easily as he’ll crack a joke about you… or maybe he’ll do both.
“Well, that was the thing that they said to me when they brought it to me,” he recalls. “They said the one thing that they wanted to kind of throw to at me as an idea was that he was a comedian. He thought he was funny. And he was a very kind of showy, flashy comedian, but underneath it he's dangerous. And that combination I thought was kind of interesting. Because that's a kind of creepy thing in a psychopath, is if they're sort of funny and kind of, ‘I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.’ Everything's just a joke and it's not really. … [But] he doesn't care. He wants to destroy everything.”
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Premiere Date
Starfleet Academy will debut worldwide with two episodes on Thursday, January 15, 2026, on Paramount+, and in Japan on Tuesday, January 23. New episodes of the 10-episode series will be released weekly after that.
Talk to Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!























