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Ethan Peck talks Spock and his many sides in 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds'
Actor Ethan Peck discusses Spock's convoluted journey in the new episode, "Spock Amok."
Star Trek is all about body going where no one has gone before, and actor Ethan Peck takes Spock goes to new places in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, especially in the show’s latest episode, “Spock Amok.” SYFY WIRE had the chance to talk with Peck about Spock’s journey, so to speak, in the Paramount+ show's fifth episode.
Warning: Major spoilers for the Strange New Worlds Episode 5, “Spock Amok,” lie ahead.
In “Spock Amok,” there are two moments when Peck has to portray a version of Spock we haven’t seen before. The first is in a dream sequence where Spock must fight a human version of himself after the dream version of his fiancée, T’Pring, called kal-if-fee — a Vulcan ritual that can be called during a marriage ceremony where two adversaries potentially fight to the death. In this scene, we see Peck as Spock in both human and Vulcan forms.
“That was really difficult for me, because up until that point, I had been playing a more Vulcan Spock or, you know, just Vulcan. Period,” Peck told SYFY WIRE. “And so to let go of all of those inhibitions that I carry around as that character and that performance felt very counterintuitive.
“I think it was more about becoming aware of them, and letting them go," he continued. "Sometimes, the acting process can be so difficult to articulate because it's just something intuitive. It's something you feel and furthermore, I wondered how much is Ethan, in this human? Perhaps all of it, right? And I'm still getting to know myself. So it's a very, like, weird, strange, self-centered process.”
Peck playing human Spock wasn’t the only weird process he had to go through in “Spock Amok.” Later on in the episode, Spock and T’Pring (Gia Sandhu) undergo a Vulcan ritual that unintentionally causes their minds to swap bodies.
To get ready for this Freaky Friday scenario, Peck shared that he and Sandhu prepared together. “We spent a lot of time together reading each other's lines for each other, and just paying very close attention to our mannerisms and the way we use our voices,” he explained. “Because at some point, I'm Ethan, playing Spock, in the spirit of T’Pring, pretending to be Spock. And so it got very complicated and convoluted at certain points. And it's just something I did with as much care as possible and as much focus as possible.”
You can see Peck play these convoluted versions of Spock in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' latest episode on Paramount+. New episodes of the series hit the streaming platform each Thursday.
Looking for more sci-fi? The entire run of SYFY’s Battlestar Galactica is streaming now on Peacock, along with the second season of Resident Alien, which returns to SYFY this fall with new episodes.
