Golden Globe-winning actor Paul Giamatti always wanted to portray a Star Trek Klingon.
Giamatti did not just stumble into Star Trek villainy, though. He spent years quietly hoping for it, and Starfleet Academy gives him that chance as Nus Braka, a Klingon–Tellarite hybrid space pirate whose brutal swagger comes from two of Trek’s most argumentative and aggressive species. In the series, Braka even pointedly refers to himself as a “Klingarite,” a name that underlines how proud he is of being something new and dangerous in the franchise’s long history of aliens.
“I've always wanted to play a Klingon, but it was not something I actually thought was ever gonna come to pass,” Giamatti said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I can't think of anything else manifesting like that, that I've said and that it actually happened.”
For a lifelong fan, stepping into the armor, ridges, and tusks of a half-Klingon, half-Tellarite villain feels less like a gig and more like a wish the universe finally decided to grant.
Once he got to set, Giamatti made sure his long-awaited Klingon turn did not feel muted. “I had my pedal to the metal,” he says of his approach to Braka’s volatile, confrontational energy. That intensity fit a character who, by design, is constantly spoiling for a fight with Starfleet Academy’s cadets and with Holly Hunter’s Chancellor Nahla Ake.
“They really allowed me to be pretty big,” Giamatti recalls. “I said to them early on, ‘I'm playing this combination of two incredibly aggressive alien species. You okay if I really go for the aggression?’ And they said, ‘Absolutely.’” With a villain who is literally built from the DNA of two founding-world troublemakers, reining things in was never the assignment.
“Most of it felt in danger of going off the edge of a cliff, but I don't think I did.” That precarious balance between intensity and excess is exactly what makes Nus Braka stand out, and why finally playing a character who proudly calls himself a “Klingarite” in Starfleet Academy feels like Giamatti’s dream role made canon.
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