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Anson Mount wasn’t due to be on set the day he first saw the bridge of the USS Discovery.

Cast as the dashing Captain Christopher Pike for the second season of Star Trek: Discovery, the actor had come in for a costume fitting. The art director decided to give him a tour, which included taking him onto the bridge.

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“I got to sit in the chair and thank God I got that out of the way on a day I wasn’t working,” says Mount in an interview with Postmedia. “Because I got surprisingly emotional when I sat in the Captain’s chair. There is this weird full 360 to realize that I was still playing make-believe and now I was doing it for a living and I was going to play the same game that I played when I was a child. It was wild.”

The original Star Trek was in syndication when Mount was a child growing up in Tennessee. His mother encouraged him to give it a try. He was reluctant when told it was about a bunch of guys flying around in a space ship visiting aliens on other planets. But it only took a few episodes before Star Trek became the make-believe game of choice for young Anson, taking over from cowboys and Indians.