Anson Mount plays men in charge who would rather not have to say so. His Captain Pike listens more than he talks, and the whole of Strange New Worlds rests on that; we are still waiting for a film to give him as much room.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Anson Mount when someone else is speaking. In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022) his Captain Pike spends much of every episode listening, letting a junior officer finish, and the speeches the writers keep handing him he delivers like a man who would rather be doing almost anything else. It is a small choice and it holds the series together. The bridge of that Enterprise feels like a place people want to work because the man in the chair behaves as if he wants to hear them.
He arrived slowly. Stage work and small television parts from 1999, including Sex and the City, then a lead in Crossroads (2002) opposite Britney Spears, which did him no favours and which he has outlasted. The independent Cook County (2009), which he also produced, got him noticed, and Hell on Wheels (2011–2016) gave him Cullen Bohannon and five years to build a character rather than a scene. "I’ve been playing cowboys and Indians since I was six years old," he said when it started, and the Western gave his stillness something to do. Then came Black Bolt in Inhumans (2017), a series few people liked, and Pike in Star Trek: Discovery (2019), a part he made large enough that it led to a series of his own.
What works is the ease. Pike’s scenes with Rebecca Romijn’s Una Chin-Riley sound like two colleagues of twenty years, and that tone spreads across the cast, to Celia Rose Gooding’s uncertain young Uhura and Bruce Horak’s sardonic Hemmer. We did not expect a show this comfortable to get at us, and it did: Mount watches Gooding’s Uhura as if he has already decided she will do, and more than once the lump in the throat arrived even though we could see exactly how the scene had been built to produce it. That is his particular gift. He can play a decent man without making decency dull, which is harder than it looks.
The limits are the limits of the parts. Alex Kurtzman, Akiva Goldsman and Jenny Lumet write Pike a good deal of lecturing, and Mount makes it bearable rather than good. He has been cast as the man in charge in nearly everything since 2011, and the cinema has so far used him mostly for a mask, in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022). We would like to see him play someone nobody is obliged to obey. Until then the captain’s chair suits him, and he seems to know it.
Biography
Anson Mount is an American actor. He was born on 25 February 1973 in Mount Prospect, Illinois, and grew up in Tennessee. He holds a BA from the University of the South and an MFA in acting from Columbia University.
Mount is known for his television roles as Cullen Bohannon in the AMC series Hell on Wheels (2011–2016) and as Captain Christopher Pike in Star Trek: Discovery (2017–2019) and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022–present). He played Black Bolt in the ABC series Inhumans (2017) and reprised the role in the film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022). His other film credits include Crossroads (2002) and Non-Stop (2014).
