Holly Hunter Says She Loved Being Barefoot in New “Star Trek” Role: ‘I Thought That Was Really Fantastic’ (Exclusive) 

While Holly Hunter’s character in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy shares many qualities with Captains Kirk, Picard, Janeway and other commanding officers from the sci-fi franchise’s 60-year history, she also tends take a cozier approach, like curling up catlike in the captain’s chair and strolling barefoot around her starship.

When Hunter saw the role of Nahla Ake, chancellor of the freshly relaunched Starfleet Academy and captain of the school’s field exercise starship the Athena, was written to enjoy kicking off her shoes while on duty, “I thought was really fantastic,” the Oscar-winner actress tells PEOPLE exclusively. 

“That’s fun, because it’s the antithesis of what you should do – people are wearing protective footwear – boots, maybe with steel toes,” she laughs. “And there I am completely unprotected and trotting around, loping around, lazing around. Yeah, I like the opposition of it.”

“Because I’m the Starfleet chancellor as well as the captain, I wanted to avoid rigidity. I wanted to avoid formality and kind of a more militaristic posture,” Hunter, 67, says. “I wanted to be adaptable and leaning into them and curious and playful. And I wanted to be approachable. I wanted to lead with some humor.”

Hunter saw the logic in Ake’s casualness, which as the head of a learning institution projects a warmth and informality that brings her down to earth for her unseasoned cadets. And it reflects the character’s unusually long lifespan – a half-Lathanite, Ake is four centuries old – and the sense of fun she’s seeking alongside her accumulated wisdom.

“I was really drawn to the character as soon as I read her, and I think it’s captivating to think about playing somebody who’s over 400 years old,” Hunter says. “Things shift in your mind. I can only imagine that your point of view and the world would be radically different after that much time has passed. I mean, things would fall away. Priorities would really announce themselves to you in a way that maybe they hadn’t when you were 30 or 40. And I think a priority for Nala is play, to play, to actually have fun and to experience life viscerally and sensorially.”

“Then I was doing a little research: what does her name mean?” Hunter says. “And her name means ‘water in the desert.’ And I thought that was kind of a cool little clue about who she is, because if you’re water in the desert, that means you could be nurturing to other people, too – but it’s also the actual element of water. I thought, maybe I could be that: maybe I could be fluid. Maybe I could take up space in a different way. And so the playfulness, the fluidity, and then there was something almost feline or animal or catlike about the character in my imagination. So I just kind of combined all of these ideas and played with them.”

Of course, Ake also has the same sort of steely backbone and strategic decisiveness viewers have seen in other Starfleet leaders, as she demonstrates when she matches with the show’s recurring villain, the half-Klingon pirate Nus Braka, played by Paul Giamatti. A longtime fan of the franchise, Giamatti says he was knocked out by Hunter’s unexpected decisions when Ake lowers her guard.

“The first time I saw her curl up in her chair on the bridge, I just thought, ‘That’s genius!” Giamatti tells PEOPLE. “It says so much about the character and about the world and what it’s going to be like. I just thought what a brilliant choice she was for the captain, and then everything she was doing was so great.”

Hunter says that, like Ake, she’s also enjoyed seeing her workplace through the fresh eyes of the young actors playing the cadets under her command, many of whom are in their first significant onscreen roles.

“Those kids, they always are having fun,” she says. “And that is a great reminder to stay loose. It’s always been a bit of a mantra of mine to stay loose, and they remind me of that and I love that. And I love the casualness with which they approached the language, the words. It was just so current and off-the-cuff and fresh, new. They’ve got so much vitality. They’re so vivacious as a group that I wanted to be swimming in that water too.”

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She admits that even after her own long and varied career, acting in a Star Trek series affords her all sorts of fresh challenges, including embracing the show’s longstanding ability to comment on the conditions of the present day through the metaphorical lens of the future.

“From the beginning, when I watched William Shatner and Leonard Nemoy with my father when the show first began in the ’60s and I was so impressionable, the show gave people a tremendous amount of comfort — there’s something comforting about the moral universe of Star Trek,” she says. “And I have never been attracted to movies or plays that sent me out a big message or claimed a moral correctness, a moral righteousness in the world. I’ve never really liked projects that delivered that kind of message. But I love the moral universe of Star Trek.”

“Now that I’m the age that I am, I find it very comforting, and I think that I’m not alone,” she adds. “People love the optimism about the future that Star Trek has, and has always had from Shatner on. It’s an optimistic story that goes on and on and on, and never loses its optimism.”

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy airs Thursdays on Paramount+.