How Star Trek brought the 'chaos bomb' of Lower Decks to Strange New Worlds

Having the actors behind Brad Boimler and Beckett Mariner on the set of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds went pretty much as you'd expect. Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome portrayed their animated characters from Lower Decks for the first time in live-action for the long-hyped crossover episode, directed by William Riker himself, Jonathan Frakes. According to Quaid, Newsome inadvertently broke some stuff.

"Tawny broke a lot of buttons and knobs and little things on the ship because she just couldn't stop touching things," the actor tells EW in an interview conducted prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike. "I would see her just fiddling around. She's been a Star Trek fan since she was a kid, so that was insane for her to actually be on the Enterprise." Newsome feigns shock when she hears Quaid shared that story. "Here I am just saying glowing things about my friends and he's over here blowing up my spot, talking about how I broke s---," she jokes. "He's right, though. I did. I broke so many things. Literally on my first day, we're in deep background, not even in the foreground of the shot, and I leaned on a panel and put my elbow through it. Immediately a props person had to come up and fix it. I think that the Enterprise is a real place, and I thought that every button was there for me to push."

Meanwhile, Quaid, in true Boimler fashion, couldn't help but geek out over working with folks like Frakes and current Spock actor Ethan Peck. "There were definitely moments of fanboying, but I have the same feeling too," Peck says. "I can't believe that I get to be booping these buttons on the bridge of the Enterprise."

Boimler and Mariner bring a similar energy when they arrive in the orbit of Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and his crew. Newsome uses the phrase "chaos bomb" to describe the dynamic. Quaid concurs: "Our characters are complete agents of chaos on that show."

In the seventh episode of Strange New Worlds season 2, "Those Old Scientists," written by Kathryn Lyn and Bill Wolkoff, the animated Boimler is inadvertently thrown back in time and finds himself at the doorstep of the U.S.S. Enterprise, now in live-action form. "Then just as we've milked all the fish-out-of-water elements, in comes Mariner and the stakes get higher because she brings a brand-new energy to the room," Frakes explains.

Boimler naturally fawns over one of his idols, Spock, a vibe that extends offscreen. Quaid and Peck met years earlier at a Dragon Con convention in Atlanta, and quickly bonded as two Los Angeles-born-and-raised actors who come from Hollywood families. (Quaid is the son of Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, while Peck is the son of Stephen Peck and grandson of Gregory Peck.) They soon earned the nickname "Spoimler" on set. "When I heard that he was coming on, I was so excited," Peck remarks of Quaid. "He and I got along famously."

According to Newsome, the plan in the early stages of the Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds crossover was "primarily just a Boimler episode with very little Mariner." But as the story developed, with input from Lower Decks creator Mike McMahan and Star Trek producers Alex Kurtzman, Akiva Goldsman, and Henry Alonso Myers, Mariner became a more prominent element.

While Quaid and Peck had Spoimler, Newsome ended up with a "Marhura" relationship with Celia Rose Gooding's Uhura. "When we were chatting early on with Henry and Akiva, they asked me, 'Who would you be excited to see Mariner with?'" Newsome recalls. "And I said, 'I think we gotta have her talk to Uhura.' I think we need to see where these two very different characters might find some common ground. I was thinking of it from a comedic standpoint. Uhura, when she's that young, is so buttoned up and worried about following the rules correctly and where she fits versus where Mariner is, which is delightful chaos, a tornado of breaking [the rules] and asserting her own personality."

Newsome credits Frakes for giving her and Quaid "so much permission." Peck describes shooting seasons 1 and 2 of Strange New Worlds nearly back-to-back during the COVID-19 pandemic as "so intense and grueling." He adds, "The pace to me is so breakneck." Then comes the Lower Decks stars, who are used to ad-libbing and improvising alternate takes in the voiceover booth. "They bring a really boisterous and fun energy to set," Peck says. "I can be so focused on my work and serious and intense because that's the character I play most of the time. So, it was really great to have that levity."

As Quaid says of the ad-libbing, "I was really just asking for forgiveness, not permission on that set."

Quaid rewatched episodes of Lower Decks to find specific mannerisms of the animated Boimler to bring into live-action. "I'm pretty sure I do the Section 31 speed walk," he says, referring to a scene from season 1, episode 2. (Boimler claims all the folks from Section 31 walk a certain hurried way to conserve energy, but Mariner is quick to point out it doesn't make him faster.) "He made sure to get that in there," Newsome confirms, though she had a different approach to live-action Mariner. "I was kind of like, 'Mariner's me, she's just more animated, literally and figuratively.' So, I just thought, 'I know what to do, I know how to make these lines funny,'" she says.

They both, however, were hands on with the physical looks of their characters. Newsome had many conversations with makeup artist Scotia Boyd about giving Mariner a "winged liner." She also workshopped her hair style. Newsome was determined to have curls. "In my head, I'm like, 'I feel like she's got a full head of curly hair,'" she says.

When it came to Boimler's purple hair, Quaid notes, "The wig process was interesting." He originally planned to dye his hair, but he figured that would tip fans off to what they were planning. "This was all really top secret, and I was in Toronto getting recognized walking down the street with Tawny," he explains. Then, of course, there were his other commitments to consider. One was The Boys season 4. The other was Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. "I was shooting Oppenheimer right up until I went to shoot Strange New Worlds," he says. "Dying your hair just takes a while, and you have to do it a few times, and you have to make sure it's right. I just didn't really quite have the time."

The crew tested a few different wigs on Quaid. "The level of purple in Boimler's hair, believe me, was a subject on the set," Frakes admits. "We tried a few different colors of wigs," Quaid adds. "There was one that was a little more cartoonishly purple and we screen-tested a bunch. That one just didn't quite work because I looked like an anime character. We settled on this slightly more subdued, more realistic purple."

Then came the Starfleet uniforms themselves. "The costume fittings felt like a bunch of fans geeking out," Newsome says of working with costume designer Bernadette Croft. The actress remembers Croft making their live-action suits a darker red than they appear in Lower Decks so they wouldn't clash with the Strange New Worlds costumes. She also remembers Frakes coming in for the final fitting to offer his own two cents, having worn his fair amount of Starfleet uniforms as a Star Trek actor. "[He] talked about the point of the top," Newsome remembers. "He was like, 'If the top points at too sharp of an angle, the end is gonna flip up' — and you can tell this man is speaking from lived experience and trauma."

On a more serious note, Newsome recognizes that animation doesn't always get the respect it deserves in the industry. So, getting to actually wear the uniform on one of the major live-action Star Trek shows, she says, "It made me feel like I'm really in Starfleet."

"Something about Tawny and I both being in Toronto and trying on those uniforms for the first time and seeing each other as the characters, it was all very surreal, but so much fun," Quaid notes. "That whole experience was just living out a nerd fantasy."

All interviews for this story were conducted prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike.

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