Holly Hunter Explains Chancellor Ake (Including Why She Sits Like That)

The following contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

The premiere of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has to cover a lot of ground, from introducing over a dozen new characters and establishing what everyday post-Burn society looks like, to reminding viewers of why an organization like this should exist in the first place. But let’s be honest, for a not insignificant number of viewers (*cough cough* me *cough*), the real draw here is the presence of Holly Hunter, the Oscar-winning actress who has joined the franchise to play Nahla Ake, one of the most intriguing new characters that Star Trek has introduced in quite some time. 

To what is the likely surprise of no one, Hunter is great, deftly holding a multitude of tensions simultaneously within her performance. Effortlessly shifting between gravitas, an almost painful sincerity, and a certain kind of playful oddness, she serves multiple roles within the world of Starfleet Academy, much like the ship she captains.

“First of all, we have Holly Hunter,” series creator Alex Kurtzman told Den of Geek when asked about finding a balance between the many tensions at the heart of this character. “And when you have someone like Holly Hunter, you can take extraordinary risks that you might not be able to take with an actor who couldn’t pull that off.” 

Ake quite literally contains multitudes. She’s both an educator and a leader, a captain and a chancellor, and someone who remembers the heyday of the Federation and experienced life after The Burn that changed the galaxy forever. She’s both a touchstone of the past and a guide into the future, and it’s a dichotomy that no other character on the series’ canvas can match. 

“The character is over 415 years old, so she’s lived an enormous amount of life. That affords her a unique perspective on everything,” Kurtzman said. “And because she was a mother and she lost a child, it gives her a unique perspective on what it means to raise the kids of Starfleet Academy, which also qualifies her to be a great chancellor. So, she’s a captain who is happy to walk around the bridge without shoes on, but the minute the chips are down, and something really goes wrong, she takes that chair with real authority.” 

For Kurtzman, however, it’s her quirky irreverence and genuine emotion that make Ake both interesting in her own right and an effective teacher to the kids in her charge.

“As the chancellor of the school, I think [Ake] represents the things that were always my favorite things about the best teachers I had, which were that they were quirky and they thought differently,” Kurtzman said. “They didn’t think like everybody else did. And they would challenge you with interesting questions, and they would give you the tools to answer them yourself, but they would never give you the answer. So her irreverence, I think, was maybe born of that experience. But she’s a very emotional creature. And I think because Holly always grounds her performance in something emotionally real, it gives you freedom to do anything. You can go very broad when you have an actor who’s that anchored.” 

Ake is largely unlike any other character we’ve met in this franchise before, save, perhaps, for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Pellia, a fellow Lanthanite and general weirdo. Surprisingly relaxed and low-key, Ake’s age is perhaps best reflected in the very particular ways she interacts with the world around her. Specifically, the fact that the Academy’s new chancellor seems positively allergic to sitting on chairs correctly, instead choosing to sprawl, lounge, and/or drape herself across virtually any surface she encounters. But, according to the woman who plays her, those choices are very intentional ones.

“Initially, it did come from the image of water, that I wanted her to be a kind of fluid character. I wanted to have a kind of feline thing in the physical world because I’m 420 years old, and what does that mean?” Holly Hunter said when asked about her character’s very specific way of moving about the world. “How could that manifest in a different way that would not just be flouting protocol because oh, I’m a rebel? It’s not as simple as that. It’s more selfish. It’s more interior, but the interior has been made totally not precious. It’s just part of her now. The barefoot thing was something that Alex had put in the script that I just loved, and it kind of snowballed from there. When I got on set, I saw how adventurous the furniture could be for me.”

It turns out that Paul Giamatti, who plays the space pirate Nus Braka, is a big fan of his co-star’s “adventurous” sitting choices and what they reveal about the world their characters inhabit.

“It reminds you that these are real places that you live in, you know what I mean? It does something great,” he said. “The first time I saw her do it, I thought ‘That’s brilliant. That’s so great that the captain is sitting like that in the chair.’ Because then it made it a real place, too. Not only for [her] character, but it suddenly made the whole thing [feel] like, right, these people actually inhabit this place. It’s not some stage or set they walk on to. It’s an actual place they live in, which is cool.” 

While Starfleet Academy is technically the story of the kids who form the first cadet class at the institution in a century, the show also firmly establishes Ake and Braka as fierce adversaries, whose past interactions have not only shaped and molded the people they’ve become but also help reflect some of their own inner insecurities. And for the actors who play them, their face-offs are also just fun.

“When you face off with an adversary, it’s fun to come at it with real appetite rather than holding yourself back from the engagement,” Hunter said. “I really felt this was saying yes, just saying yes to an opponent.”

“And he’s a worthy opponent,” Giamatti chimed in. “It’s fun to go at it, it’s pleasurable [for them both].  

However, when it comes to Braka, his feelings about Ake are much more complicated than they may initially appear.

“What’s very true for my character in the myriad ways that I look at her…is that I look at her and I see and feel all kinds of things: Envy, jealousy, a need for a kind of confidant or a mother or a friend or a teacher,” Giamatti said. “I think [Braka] resents being shut out. You’ll find out at the end of the whole series why he’s so pissed off about everything. And I think he feels very disenfranchised, that there’s an actual real desire for recognition from her underneath all of it. He wishes that he could have a mentor and a mother and a sister and a friend who would guide him the way she’s guiding all these other kids. And he’s a kid, but he’s not getting the attention anymore.” 

The antagonistic relationship between the two also reflects some of the deeper ideological issues at work in the world of the Federation post-Burn. (And perhaps even in the one we’re living in today.)

“I think Nus Braka comes from a place of anger,” co-showrunner Noga Landau said. “He represents a force that is active in the world right now, which is the force that is trying to divide people. And it’s trying to tell people, ‘You can’t trust each other because you’re this and you’re that, and there’s no common ground.’ Nahla represents a very different approach. She represents exploration and reason and science and the things that bring us together, the common ground. There is not a student that Nahla would turn away from Starfleet Academy simply because of who they are or where they come from. She’s a person who brings people together. She represents the best ideals of the Federation in that sense.” 

New episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with the finale on March 12.