“I am honored to announce that my beautiful voice will be joining Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” a prerecorded video of Stephen Colbert told the crowd in Empire Stage in the Jacob K. Javits Center during the Star Trek Universe panel at New York Comic Con on Saturday.
Producer Alex Kurtzman introduced Colbert by describing his role: ”In high school, did anybody have, like, morning announcements? So we were like, who is the perfect to be our morning announcer?” It seems Paramount isn’t done with Colbert after all.
Of course, other big-name talent were announced at last year’s New York Comic Con. Both Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti were in the room with the show’s panel discussing their characters.
“Since about 7, 8 years old, I would watch [Star Trek] with my father,” Giamatti said. “So I grew up with it, all the iterations of it. I’ve always sort of been saying it to people: gosh, I wish I could be on Star Trek one day. And I would say, gosh, I wish I could play a Klingon. And it’s sort of happened. I play a half Klingon, half Tellarite. And the Tellarites are these really, really aggressive pig people, and I was like, OH YEAH!” I’m the bad guy. There’s a great tradition of bad guys. I get to do it. So I’m as happy as a pig in shit.”
To keep the Star Trek series from being entirely Earth-bound, the creators made a critical component of the students’ training take place on a starship. Holly Hunter plays the chancellor and captain. Hunter too said she watched Star Trek with her father at age 8.
“The challenge of playing the captain in this particular situation, the part that was offered to me, is that she is 422 years old. And that was so interesting. Like what kind of life you could live to see people born and die and be born and die and go in and out of your life? And what that could do to who you are,” Hunter said.
They debuted a new trailer for the series as well:
