Star Trek: Lower Decks Star Jack Quaid Talks Strange New Worlds Crossover

Jack Quaid has been voicing Brad Boimler on Star Trek: Lower Decks, which recently began its third season, for years, but will finally get to play him live-action. Quaid and co-star Tawny Newsome, who voices Ens. Beckett Mariner, announced that they would appear in a season 2 episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Quaid opened up about the experience in an interview with Variety.

“Let me just clarify. So Tawny Newsome and I are playing live-action versions of Mariner and Boimler. We’re coming on to Strange New Worlds. We’re coming aboard the Enterprise. I won’t get into the plot details of how exactly that happens. But we got to be on the physical set. We got to actually be in the bridge and the transporter bay and the hallways. We got to go all over the ship and interact with that amazing cast.”

Quaid went on to say that while the Strange New Worlds episode would have some animated elements, there wouldn’t be anything like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a film that won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing, Best Sound Effects Editing, and Best Visual Effects for how well it mixed live-action with animation. Quaid will appear in the flesh and with Boimler’s distinctly purple hair.

“That was such an interesting challenge as an actor to take something that I usually just do with my voice but then inhabit every bit of him. I studied the way the animators and artists rendered Boimler and his movements and certain little gestures he would do. I tried to bring as much of that into the episode as possible, but trying to do things [that] were a little too big, a little too animated in a live-action setting, but still keep it within the Boimler range of movement. That was such a cool challenge.”

Something that Quaid thought was a real blessing was how Jonathan Frakes was going to be the episode’s director. “He’s just a legend, and he just absolutely nailed it.” Frakes is known within the franchise for starring as William Rikers in Star Trek: The Next Generation, who famously grew a beard during the show’s second season. Frakes directed multiple episodes for Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Discovery, and Picard.

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The Boys Also Features Jack Quaid

Quaid’s breakout role was as Hughie Campbell on The Boys, which was a factor in getting the Star Trek crossover to happen. David Reed, a writer who worked on The Boys and Strange New Worlds, came up to him, expressed his love for Lower Decks, and asked him if he would be interested in doing a live-action Star Trek show. Quaid said that “I would do it in a heartbeat. There’s no resistance for me.” Of course, that means that two Trek timelines are about to merge.

“You’ll see how that all works out on the Strange New World episode. But it’s cool because, from Boimler and Mariner’s perspective, they know about Captain Pike and Spock and Uhura. They think that they’re all awesome. So it was a fun way for them to meet their heroes, in a way. I’m just excited I get to actually talk about it because I had to keep it secret for so long. That crew over there on Strange New Worlds is awesome. Ethan Peck and I had an epic bromance — I just want to say that right now.”

When speaking about Boimler’s journey on his native show, Lower Decks, Quaid said that this season would see him become a lot more confident, maybe to the point of going overboard. Quaid said he was proud of how far he’s come since season one. However, he’s still Boimler, a proud beta male, which was also quite the contrast to when people first saw him in The Hunger Games as Marvel, a formidable and threatening Career Tributes.

“I never thought that my first role in movie would be a vicious child murderer in a dystopian future. I never thought that would be where my career went. I feel like Hughie and Boimler are way closer to who I am as a person than Marvel is. But I just like playing different types of characters. You know, I had the opportunity to play a very different type of a character in Scream recently. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to experience a lot of different types of characters.”

Quaid was in Toronto for the Strange New Worlds shooting just as the Gen V cast was starting production. Gen V will be a college-based spin-off of The Boys involving a parody of the X-Men. And since he and the cast were in town together, Quaid took them out to brunch one day and got to know a bunch of them. According to Quaid, they were awesome, talented, and cool. “I wish them all the best. They’re gonna knock it out of the park.”