Jerry O’Connell and wife Rebecca Romijn are both part of the Star Trek universe, but who’s the bigger fan? ET’s Matt Cohen spoke with the 47-year-old actor at the Star Trek: Lower Decks season 2 premiere in Los Angeles on Wednesday, where he revealed the answer to that very question.
“My wife was the bigger fan. My wife,” O’Connell admitted. “I think coming from all the X-Men movies, my wife is a real, and I don’t mean this in a disparaging way, my wife is a real nerd. My wife gets real excited for fandom.”
Fans saw Romijn as Una in Star Trek: Discovery. She also appeared in a couple of Star Trek: Short Treks episodes. The actress is set to reprise her role in the upcoming new series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
As for O’Connell, he’s known as Commander Jack Ransom in the animated Paramount+ series.
When asked if their 12-year-old twin daughters Charlie and Dolly have gotten into the Star Trek fandom, O’Connell said, “My children love Lower Decks.”
“And we watch a lot of TOS, which is The Original Series, in our household as well. My kids are into it,” he said, before adding only when they aren’t on Tik Tok.
O’Connell, meanwhile, shared that before he joined the galactic series, he thought he was a big Star Trek fan, “until I went to my first Comic-Con two years ago when we announced that Lower Decks was gonna be a thing.”
“And I quickly realized that I know nothing about Star Trek,” he joked. “The fandom is amazing, really amazing, but they’re scary. You have to be on your game. Lower Decks is an animated show that is sort of like, I’d say on the most comical side of the Star Trek universe. And it was a little scary at first. A lot of the fans were like, they were for real, they were like you better not mess this up.”
As for what fans can expect from the upcoming season, O’Connell had a special message “for all you Starfleet fans out there.”
“There are a lot of hilarious, inside Starfleet jokes. And for all you people who are looking for adventure, the fun thing about an animated show, there is no special effects or budget constraints,” he said. “If you want to blow up a planet, I mean we will draw it. We will blow up a planet! You know, those live-action people need to be like, ‘Oh, how are we gonna blow up the planet? It’s gonna cost money. We’ve got to get the effects.’ We just blow it up!”
