Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Cast Celebrates 60 Years of Going Boldly at Italian Global Series Festival

Some television shows survive long enough to celebrate a tenth anniversary. A fortunate few reach 20. 

Star Trek is turning 60, which means the franchise has now spent six decades asking humanity to stop fearing everything it does not understand, work together for the common good, and explore what might be waiting beyond the next horizon.

We are still working on those first two, clearly, but at least Star Trek has never stopped believing we might eventually get there.

That sense of possibility followed the franchise to Riccione, Italy, where the Italian Global Series Festival devoted part of its inaugural celebration to Star Trek’s extraordinary history and the people carrying it forward. 

Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn, and Celia Rose Gooding represented Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, while Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Picard favorite Jeri Ryan and legendary filmmaker Nicholas Meyer joined them for a 60th anniversary panel honoring a universe that has grown far beyond anything Gene Roddenberry could have imagined in 1966.

The festival also hosted the Italian premiere of the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 opener, while Mount, Romijn, Gooding, Ryan, and Meyer received Maximo Celebration Prizes in recognition of their contributions to television and the franchise’s enduring legacy. 

It was an impressive collection of Trek history gathered beside the Adriatic Sea, and although beaming everyone there would have been far more efficient, apparently we are still expected to tolerate airplanes. Such is the technological future we once dreamed about. Hmpf.

The celebration, though, arrived at exactly the right moment. Strange New Worlds returns Thursday, July 23, on Paramount+, launching a ten-episode season that will unfold weekly through September 24, while San Diego Comic-Con begins its own Star Trek 60th anniversary festivities that same week.

But before Star Trek takes over San Diego, Riccione offered a more intimate opportunity to hear what the franchise means to the actors who now inhabit some of its most important characters.

For Mount and Romijn, joining Star Trek was not merely another job attached to a famous title. Both grew up watching The Original Series in syndication, and neither has lost the feeling that somehow, against all reasonable odds, they ended up aboard the Enterprise.

Mount said the experience remained surreal through the end of production, recalling the first time the cast walked onto the Enterprise bridge set.

“I remember walking up to both you and Ethan and saying, ‘I feel like I’m in Star Trek,’” he told Romijn.

Romijn understood exactly what he meant. The bridge was a complete 360-degree set, surrounded by the brighter colors and familiar visual language that had lived in their memories since childhood.

“It was like the biggest pinch-me moment,” she said. “It felt like we were in Star Trek.”

Gooding came to the franchise through a different generation. Her mother introduced her to the J.J. Abrams films, taking Gooding and her sister to late-night screenings even when school awaited them the following morning. 

The girls ran through the theater until the sight of the Enterprise moving across the enormous screen stopped them in their tracks.

“The only time that we were very still and quiet was watching the ship move, watching it fly through space,” Gooding recalled. “I was a very small child, so it felt larger than life.”

Those memories span decades and very different versions of Star Trek, but together they explain how the franchise has kept moving from one generation to another.

Parents shared it with their children, those children grew up and found their own way into its universe, and some eventually stepped onto the bridge themselves.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds understands that inheritance particularly well because its characters exist between the familiar and the unfinished. 

Audiences know who Captain Christopher Pike, Una Chin-Riley, and Nyota Uhura will become, but the series has room to explore the choices, doubts, relationships, and occasional spectacular mistakes that shape them along the way.

For Gooding, that makes Uhura’s internal journey every bit as meaningful as the Enterprise’s travels.

“We see her genesis, and we see her stepping stones to becoming the lieutenant that she eventually becomes in the original series,” she said, explaining that Strange New Worlds balances Star Trek’s traditional outward exploration with something more personal.

“We see how our characters’ inner worlds color their style of exploration.”

That balance has helped Strange New Worlds reconnect with the episodic adventure that defined earlier Trek shows while preserving ongoing emotional stories for its ensemble. 

Romijn described it as an embrace of The Original Series’ “mission of the week” structure, along with serialized throughlines that allow the characters to keep changing.

She also believes the series has reclaimed another crucial element of the original.

“There was a sexiness that the original series had that I think we’ve also tried to embrace,” Romijn said. “The Enterprise is kind of a groovy, sexy ship, you know?”

She is not wrong. The Enterprise has survived Klingons, temporal anomalies, hostile alien species, and several captains, and it still knows how to make an entrance.

Yet Strange New Worlds has never confined itself to one kind of storytelling.

The series has moved through horror, fantasy, comedy, romance, and a musical, sometimes with the gleeful energy of writers discovering that nobody has stopped them yet. 

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 continues its genre experimentation, with early episodes moving through film noir, horror, and a particularly uninhibited shore leave adventure.

Mount credits showrunners Henry Alonso Myers and Akiva Goldsman with encouraging the cast to bring them ideas and with possessing what he called a powerful “mischief muscle.”

Mount is particularly drawn to what he called the “oh shit” roles, the ones that arrive on the page and make an actor wonder how he is possibly going to pull them off. 

Strange New Worlds has given him several of those challenges already, including the musical episode, despite the inconvenient fact that he does not consider himself a singer, and Season 4 apparently has another waiting for him later in the run. 

“There’s one episode later in the season that, for me particularly, you know, there’s sometimes I really like ‘oh shit’ roles or ‘oh shit’ jobs,” he said. “You read the script, and you go, ‘Oh shit, how am I going to do that one?’” 

Gooding knew exactly which episode he meant and assured the room that it came out beautifully, which is encouraging for viewers and probably less comforting for Mount when that script first landed in his hands.

“As Akiva puts it, Star Trek can be a lot of things. Star Trek can be anything,” Mount said.

“It’s almost its own genre at this point, so it has the strength, it has the foundation where you can do a musical, or you can do puppets and really challenge the form because it will always come back to its baseline.”

That baseline matters. 

Star Trek can send its crew into a musical reality or let them awaken from a disastrous night without remembering exactly what they did.

But beneath the experimentation remains a belief in curiosity, compassion, cooperation, and the possibility that encountering something different does not automatically require shooting it.

Romijn described the central philosophy as “greeting the unknown with curiosity and not fear or violence,” and she sees that principle as one reason parents continue introducing Star Trek to their children.

“It fosters themes of curiosity and exploration and all these traits that you want your children to have,” she said. “Our mothers introduced us to the original series. Those were the conversations we had when I was a kid that I have with my daughters as well.”

Mount believes the franchise reaches even deeper into something fundamental about humanity. As a child, he was not only interested in how each episode ended. He wanted to know where the Enterprise would begin.

“There is something in us that is driven to see what and who is over the next horizon,” he said.

That desire has always powered Star Trek, but so has the hope that humanity will be emotionally prepared for whatever it finds. 

Gooding noted that Season 4 continues the franchise’s tradition of filtering contemporary issues through science fiction, touching on occupation, consequence, and how a seemingly small moment can alter the future of an entire species.

“Star Trek has always had a way of taking real-world conversations and putting a spin on it so that everyone can have a bird’s-eye view of the world we’re all existing in,” she said.

When a franchise reaches 60, the word “legacy” becomes unavoidable, especially when its current stars are playing characters whose origins stretch back to the beginning. 

During the Riccione roundtable, I pointed out that the United States has just marked its 250th anniversary, meaning Star Trek has existed for nearly a quarter of the nation’s history.

The calculation stopped the room for a moment.

“That’s insane,” Mount said.

“That’s crazy,” Romijn agreed.

When asked what it meant to carry that history while attending an international television festival, Romijn’s answer was beautifully simple.

“For me personally, it’s just an honor to be a part of a franchise that has made the world a better place,” she said. “How many people get to say that?”

Mount pointed toward the real-world ways Star Trek’s imagination has influenced technology and culture, including the unmistakably Trek-inspired insignia of the United States Space Force. Romijn, meanwhile, remained focused on one of humanity’s most embarrassing failures.

“I still want a beamer,” she said.

So do we all. Sixty years of innovation, and nobody can transport us past airport security. What have scientists been doing all this time?

The technology may be (sadly) taking its time, but Star Trek’s ideals have traveled remarkably well. 

What began as an American science-fiction series, inspired in part by Westerns, became an international language of hope.

It has drawn generations of viewers toward the same questions about who we are, what we might become, and whether we can learn to meet the unknown without immediately treating it as an enemy.

That international reach made Riccione a fitting place to begin the anniversary celebration. 

Strange New Worlds may be rooted in characters introduced during Star Trek’s earliest days, but it is not preserved behind glass.

It is playful, emotionally curious, willing to take ridiculous chances, and confident enough in the franchise’s foundation to stretch it without losing sight of what made it matter.

Gooding has seen that approach unite families who did not always connect with Star Trek in the same way. 

She recalled hearing from fans who doubted the musical episode, only to discover it became their favorite, or from those who finally found common ground with children more interested in theater than in science fiction.

“I love how our show specifically is bringing generations of Trek fans together,” she said. “The things that people were so nervous and trepidatious about, to see it work so well and to be celebrated so openly, it’s incredibly rewarding.”

There may be no better tribute to Star Trek at 60 than that.

The franchise has endured because it respects its past without living entirely inside it, and because every new generation has been invited to find its own doorway onto the Enterprise. 

Sometimes that doorway is a philosophical science-fiction story. Sometimes it is Captain Pike confronting the future he already knows awaits him. Sometimes it is a musical, a horror story, a romance, or an entire crew discovering what kind of drunk they become on shore leave.

And sometimes it is a little girl staring up at a starship on a movie screen, suddenly too awed to keep running through the theater.

Star Trek has spent 60 years looking toward the horizon. Strange New Worlds is making sure the journey there remains one hell of a ride.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds returns to Paramount+ on July 23.

Stay tuned to TV Fanatic, as we’ll have more from the Italian Global Series on the way, including conversations with Jeri Ryan and Nicholas Meyer, among many other talented people who traveled to coastal Italy to celebrate the medium.