Star Trek: Starfleet Academy – The Strange Klingon Tick Paul Giamatti Brings to His Villain

Star Trek has given popular culture some of its most memorable villains: Khan Noonien Singh, Q, and the Borg. With the new series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, veteran actor Paul Giamatti hopes to extend that run with his character, Nus Braka. As a character of both Klingon and Tellarite descent, Nus Braka allows Giamatti to draw from the whole history of Star Trek, but there’s one aspect of the character’s most honorable ancestry that struck the actor.

“I remembered reading something about Klingons standing too close to people,” Giamatti told TrekMovie. “And I thought, ‘I’m going to stand too close.’ So I’m always getting way too close to people, like the physical body space.”

Close-talking may be something that most viewers associate with a Seinfeld annoyance more than they do anything from Qo’noS, but Giamatti’s not wrong to identify it. The first Klingons seen on The Original Series were haughty and imperious, and while John Colicos wouldn’t exactly get in William Shatner‘s face when his character Kor challenged Kirk, he certainly filled up the space. After their redesign in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the Klingons became more aggressive, and then close-talking became more common within the empire.

A bonafide Trekkie, Giamatti’s not limiting his inspiration to just the series’ most well-known enemy race. “I think I probably had in my head a lot of different villains,” he continued. “I probably had some Khan. I had sort of Chang [from Star Trek VI] and Gul Dukat [from Deep Space Nine], these kind of guys who love the sound of their own voices. These guys who love to kind of ‘blahblahblah,’ just bulls—ing, constantly. I thought of the chaoticness of Q and stuff like that.”

It’s easy to see what all those characters have in common. Each one is imperious and domineering, a military leader who openly challenges the Federation and its adherents. But Giamatti adds another, unexpected layer to Nus Braka, something he found in two other classic villains.

“The thing that I think is interesting about this guy is that—as it goes along, and by the end of it, you really see it—he is very much a kind of malformed child inside. He’s this very angry, angry, psychopathic child inside,” observed Giamatti. “Which actually made me think of Trelane, who is kind of a child a little bit. And even Q has a kind of child to him. So whether it’s unique or not, what I bring to it, I don’t know, but that’s something that became more and more important to me as I went on with it. That he’s arrested as a little boy.”

Of course, there will be more to Nus Braka than just impressions of other characters. According to early solicitations, he has a deep connection to Nahla Ake, the academy chancellor played by Holly Hunter.

How that connection will play out still remains to be seen, if it will be a lot of monologuing in the model Gul Dukat or pranks in the form of Trellane. But whatever, he does, it sounds like Nus Braka will be doing it just millimeters from his opponent’s face.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy premieres on Paramount+ on January 15, 2026.