Star Trek’s Wil Wheaton on How Wesley Crusher Found His Place After TNG

This post contains spoilers for Star Trek: Prodigy.

With the exception of Miles O’Brien, Wesley Crusher may have suffered more than any other Star Trek character. Not so much on screen, though few of us would be able to recover from a sharp “Shut up” from Captain Picard. Rather, Crusher has suffered off-screen, at the hands of viewers who hated having a precocious kid on the Enterprise during The Next Generation era and started groups devoted to imagining the character’s death.

Although Wesley has cameoed in the years after he left TNG with the Traveler, including in Picard and Lower Decks, it was still something of a surprise when Wesley returned in the second season of Star Trek: Prodigy in a more involved role. It was an even bigger surprise that fans welcomed him back with such elation, something that came as a real joy to Wesley performer, Wil Wheaton.

“I’ve been waiting 30 years for this. I never would have thought this would have happened like that,” Wheaton told Den of Geek over Zoom when we caught up with him about his role in Prodigy and the fan reaction to his character’s return. Here’s what else the actor told us about the joys of playing Wesley Crusher in 2024.

From the Enterprise to Time and Space

Wheaton’s preternaturally smart Wesley Crusher left Starfleet Academy in the Next Generation season seven episode “Journey’s End” to join a mysterious figure called the Traveler. Since then, his mainline appearances have been relegated to a couple of cameos, with a coda at the end of Picard’s second season as the only real in-canon portrayal of Wes as the Traveler.

At least until the Prodigy‘s second season, in which Wesley arrived in full Traveler mode. With his trench coat and beard, Crusher bore more than a little resemblance to a certain Time Lord from Doctor Who, which wasn’t a mistake.

“The Travelers are this collective that manipulate space, time, and thought to move around through the universe,” he explained. “They go around the galaxy and just make sure that forces like the Loom [the universe-devouring monsters in Prodigy] don’t intrude and collapse realities. They protect universes, that’s their big responsibility. They cruise around on starships and ride around the realities experiencing things.”

For Wheaton, the similarities were undeniable. “I just could not ever get past the fact that it sounds a lot like a Time Lord,” he says. “It just seems so like the Doctor gets around with the TARDIS and the Travelers get around by using space, time, and thought.”

When Prodigy showrunners Dan and Kevin Hageman and writer Jennifer Munro approached Wheaton about working on an updated version of Wesley, the Doctor, specifically David Tennant‘s Tenth Doctor, was an obvious inspiration.

“It turns out, I’m just a nerd who’s written fan fiction about Wesley as a Time Lord for about a decade,” he confesses. When he got the call, Wheaton shared many of those Time Lord-inspired ideas to the Prodigy team. “I had spent a fair amount of time thinking about this stuff, and the coolest thing was that before I even got through half of the things that I had thought of, they were nodding their heads and saying ‘That’s exactly where we’re going.'”

Wheaton’s admission doesn’t just speak to his fandom of all things nerdy, but also to his stewardship of the character. Where Wesley’s “know it all” behavior in TNG grated some viewers, his non-linear thinking and motormouth tendencies in Prodigy won over today’s fans immediately. But it wasn’t pandering. Rather, Wheaton sees this Traveler version of Wesley as a natural extension of the character introduced in TNG.

“I started thinking that, the Doctor would experience billions of years in what appear like maybe 50 years of linear Earth-based time,” he explains. “There’s no reason that the Travelers, including Wesley, wouldn’t experience that as well. And I just let my imagination take off.”

Wheaton is quick to acknowledge that he did not create Traveler Wes alone. “It was a collaboration,” he says. “I had tremendous support from Kevin Hageman in finding exactly where Wesley was going to land.”

That process meant that Wheaton would have to modulate his performance, even more than his most recent takes on the character. “Wesley has a real particular tone in Picard that matches the show,” he recalls. “That was not the right tone to have Prodigy. He needed to have more energy, he needed to be a little funnier and a little less grave.”

However, the more serious Wesley from Picard is just one of three versions of the character that Wheaton has played recently, having also revisited the younger Starfleet Cadet from the TNG episode “The First Duty” on Lower Decks. While they are all the same character, the different Wesleys offered Wheaton a chance to challenge himself as an actor. “Each one is different,” he explains. “This Wesley is playing jazz, this Wesley is playing EDM ,and this Wesley is playing metal. It’s just a different style.”

“One of the things that I love to do as a voice actor is try a take where I go way farther, way bigger, way more than we will ever possibly use and then bring it back,” Wheaton says. “Once I have done something so outrageously wrong, I have this freedom to push the limits and find how far I can go before I get into that space.”

Wheaton credits his ability to get into character to other popular nerdy franchises. “I had played Perceptor on Transformers: Titans Return and Transformers: Power of the Primes. He’s a scientist, and he’s stuck in his head and distracted,” he says, before pointing to real world people he knows. “I imagined Perceptor as kind of like Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, and I pulled a little bit of that for Wesley. It wasn’t quite right. It didn’t have the energy. So then I tried Doc Brown [from Back to the Future], but that energy was a little too much.”

“Then I tried The Professor from Gilligan’s Island,” he adds with a laugh, before coming to the prime inspiration. “Then I just asked myself, ‘What about the Doctor?'”

With the other writers onboard, Wheaton found his voice for the frantic, kid-friendly adult Wes. “We put it through some kind of filter and ended up with Wesley the Traveler. There was this moment when he’s got the kids into the safe room in the ziggurat and he’s listening to jazz, he’s talking about his friend Riker, and he’s praising Miles Davis. And then he remembers, ‘Oh yeah, there’s the kids!'”

Wesley Crusher’s Continuing Mission

Of course Wesley would think of the kids, because he was the original Starfleet kid, which makes him the ideal advisor to the youths on Prodigy. When asked about any advice that Wesley would have for the youngsters following in his footsteps, Wheaton doesn’t have to look far.

“He’d tell them the same thing that I told my children: Be honest. Be honorable. Show up for your friends and your family. Always do your best and accept that your best is going to be different from moment to moment and from day to day. Don’t put pressure on yourself to be perfect, accept that you’re going to make mistakes.

“And then the last thing that I tell kids is, ‘Choose to be kind.’ There is a huge difference between choosing to be nice and choosing to be kind. I’ve met lots of nice people who are deeply unkind because nice comes from here and kind comes from here,” says Wheaton, pointing to his head for the first quality and the his heart for the second.

“Wesley is like a Time Lord, so he might have two hearts,” Wheaton continues with a smile. “One heart belongs to Wesley and one heart belongs to me. And those two hearts come together. So his choice to be kind comes from here. Yeah, and he rejects being nice. He chooses kindness all the time.”

Wheaton’s decision to keep Wesley connected to himself makes sense, given the amount of time he’s spent playing the character. “I have an odd position as the youngest elder in the Star Trek universe. In a lot of ways I still feel like a kid when I talk to people, and when I sit down with the cast of Lower Decks, I feel like I’m talking to peers, even though they’re all so much younger than me. When I talk to people from Strange New Worlds, I feel like I’m talking to adults and I’m a kid. And I really felt like that when I was interviewing the cast of Discovery, even though they’re all younger than me.”

Because of that position, Wheaton is in a unique place to offer advice. “I told the Prodigy actors that Star Trek is going to change their lives. But how much it changes their lives is very much up to them. ‘If you want it, you are part of a family that’s always going to be there for you,’ I told them. ‘And if you don’t want that, that’s okay. But you always have a place to go home’.”

Wheaton’s sense of connection with Star Trek goes beyond his individual experiences and connects with his appreciation of the ideals of the franchise. “We look after each other,” he says of the other Star Trek actors. “We always had the Original Series cast looking after us. We’ve done our best to look after everyone that’s come after us.”

“So I wanted to share with all of them that Star Trek is something that’s much bigger than all of us. Star Trek is not just a show. It’s an idea. It’s a philosophy. It’s an aspirational hope for a better world,” Wheaton says of talking to his youngest castmates. “It is the promise of the future where the thing that makes you weird and sort of an outsider today makes you real special and real valuable in this future. We have chosen as a species to reject our differences, to let go of the petty, stupid things that don’t matter and work together so that we can all live the best lives possible.

“That is the future I’ve wanted, ever since I was a little kid and I saw Star Trek for the very first time on a black and white TV in the 1970s and I didn’t even know what it was. Every one of us that works on Star Trek has an opportunity, a responsibility, and a privilege to carry this torch for a minute, do our best to not let it go out, to take really good care of it, and make sure as many people see it as possible. And then we hand it off for someone else to care for it.”

“It is a privilege for me,” he concludes. “I think Wesley feels the same way to almost sit on the other side of the glass from the universe and just watch them all and be so proud of them.”

Of course, thinking about the passage of time and his journey with Star Trek, Wheaton cannot help but think back about his worst experiences with the franchise. Far too often, fans who hated Wesley Crusher couldn’t separate their feelings about the character from their feelings about Wheaton as a person. He’s getting the flip side of that now, with fans so happy that Wheaton is still part of the franchise, but he hasn’t forgotten those hard days.

“There a little me who’s a teenager who’s in his bedroom alone crying because people have been so fucking cruel to him online and or at a con,” he confesses. “I wish I could just go back to him and tell him ‘my dude, come here. It’s going to be a really long wait, but I promise you the appreciation is going to come, because I am feeling it.'”

The change in fan reaction isn’t something that Wheaton takes for granted.

“I cannot say thank you loudly enough. It means so much to me. The kindness, the celebration from family. It’s not just people saying it’s cool. The massive celebration. Oh my God, it had to be him. He’s everything I wanted him to be.”

And if the fan reaction is any reaction, Wesley is everything Trekkies wanted him to be, too.

Star Trek: Prodigy is streaming now on Netflix.