Whether you know Anson Mount from Hell on Wheels or Star Trek: Strange New Worlds or one of his many other credits, getting to see him in person at Dragon Con is always a treat. This is his third consecutive Dragon Con, fourth overall, and he was kind enough to sit down with the Daily Dragon for an interview.

Daily Dragon (DD): What have you come to like about Dragon Con?

Anson Mount (AM): It’s, as I said earlier, it’s the Mardis Gras of cons. It’s the biggest party I think I’ve ever been to other than maybe Mardis Gras itself. It’s just, you’ve got to pace yourself because it’s just balls to the wall. And I love any excuse to come to the South. I just have a special affinity for this con, for whatever reason.

DD: We’re always happy to have you because you’re a fantastic guest and a fantastic storyteller, among other things. You and I are not that different in age, so our references are all the same. I think you said in an interview that it was your mom that introduced you to Star Trek: The Original Series. Mine did the same for me. What is it that you hope to get to introduce your child to?

AM: Definitely Star Trek. I’ve already introduced her to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. That’s a real point of enjoyment between the two of us. She took to movies quite early. We took her to see her first full-length feature animated film when she’d just turned two. And she sat through the whole thing and ate popcorn the entire time, and then we walked out into the lobby and she projectile vomited the entire contents of her stomach onto the lobby carpet. And I thought that was a great first movie experience for my daughter, to make no mention of the movie itself. It was fun.

DD: What have you learned about yourself now that you’re a father?

AM: Mm, that I have to police myself around technology. That I need to work on my presence in general. That I can be far more patient than I ever thought possible. And just you know, you rediscover the little things.

DD: I have the privilege now of getting to watch Hell on Wheels for the first time. When it first came out, it didn’t seem like it’d be my thing, but once I got to know you as Pike, I wanted to go back and watch it. One of the things I see you do is the getting the hair out of the face head shake. How annoying was the long hair?

AM: You know, I had long hair when I was three, or maybe two, just because I was too afraid to let my parents cut it because I thought it would hurt. And then I didn’t have the patience to grow the hair out past the dork stage until I had to. I didn’t mind it; I kind of dug it. It was a fun thing to do and then after about five or six years, I couldn’t wait to cut it. I was tired of having an adversarial relationship with my bath towel. So, I don’t know if I’ll ever have the patience to grow it back out again. I almost did during the pandemic, but still. I went to the first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds with my pandemic hair and beard. They scheduled the beginning of that episode at the beginning of the shoot so that I literally was shooting with my pandemic hair growth.

DD: I’ve been a fan of Star Trek since I was eight, nine years old. I immediately devoured everything I could about Star Trek and Gene Roddenberry and Leonard Nimoy, so the Wagon Train to the stars idea has always stuck with me. Captain Pike being sort of the first space cowboy and then you’ve got Cullen Bohannon as a cowboy/railroad man. Do you think there’s something that connects them? What is it about the two of them that is sort of similar?

AM: You already hit the nail on the head in terms of the show. I enlightened John Cleese last night over dinner to this fact. He was asking about why people are drawn to Star Trek, and I told him that Roddenberry wanted to do a show about the wagon trains moving westward. And to see the lightbulb go off in a guy as mature and experienced as John Cleese was just delightful. I do not see the characters as being in any way comparable. Two completely different characters.

DD: Cullen has a very different thing that’s driving him as opposed to what is driving Pike.

AM: Yeah, as a lead actor the trick is how to portray a character that is as specific as a supporting character or character character while still having the, I guess, the openness or the inner quietude it takes to take the audience on the trip with you. And so the way you end up discovering character, for me more often than not—an old acting teacher said this one time and I found it to be true when I was studying in my 20s. He said, each of you probably has like 10 or 11 different Ansons. By the time you’re in your 50s or 60s, hopefully there’ll be about 20. The trick for each role is to figure out which Anson is right for this role. And you probably have at least one friend that thinks you’re a laugh riot, and you know that every time you go to lunch with that person, that person is going to be in stitches because they think you’re the funniest person in the world. And then you have other friends that take you far too seriously. Family members who make you feel nervous or second-guessing yourself the entire time. And then you have different versions of yourself in different situations and in just your fantasy world. Cullen Bohannon is—I grew up in rural Tennessee in the 70s and 80s, and all of my friends’ fathers had fought in Vietnam infantry. And they all had PTSD. So that was kind of my way in to Cullen, literally just trying to walk across the road like my friend’s father, answer the door like my friend’s father, pour a glass of water like my friend’s father. Then eventually after about a year of doing that, you show up to work, you put on the boots, and you’re there. Pike, for whatever reason, is about as close to me, Anson, as any character I’ve ever played. There are definitely differences. But, because of what we wanted to do with the show—not necessarily the character—I wanted to come in with sort of the lighter side of Anson. The one that’s ready to have fun. And it seems to have worked out okay.

DD: Did the lighter side of Anson start to show up when you turned 50?

AM: Yeah, I think he keeps showing up the older I get and the more I don’t give a sh—… There’s so much extraneous stuff we worry about when we’re younger that gets in the way of things.

DD: I’m going to change tacks a little bit and talk about your pottery. You got started because of The Great Pottery Throwdown, right, during the pandemic. Which is something I also watched during the pandemic. What is it about the clay and the glazing process that lights you up?

AM: Well first of all it’s a thing, similar to the podcast, it’s a thing I have complete control over. I can just walk into my studio and five hours will go by and I don’t even know it. I’m just one of those people that I have to be creating all the time, so if I’m between jobs, that’s fine. I need to be editing my podcast or making my pottery. To be happy, to feel stable, to feel normal I have to be creating to some degree all the time. So there’s that. It’s also, I love that it involves the four elements. It’s earth, it’s air, it’s water, it’s fire, and I’m a big believer—and this is why shooting in a sound stage is not my favorite thing—that the creative process must include a healthy dose of chaos. It’s why I liked shooting Hell on Wheels, all days exterior and that crazy weather, is that it forces you to get creative. And there is a healthy amount of chaos in the kiln. There’s a point at which you’ve got to turn it over to the fates. I love that. And you end up with results that you could never have planned.

DD: One of the things I love, and why I watch your kiln openings [on Instagram], is your surprise. You’re constantly surprised at what this glaze did, at what this flow did, how these colors combined, and does the sort of ephemeral quality of that appeal to you? Like, you know you can’t ever duplicate that on purpose.

AM: Not completely, yeah. You can try, and you learn. You learn certain tricks that will get you in the neighborhood of what you want. But I don’t ever want to get exactly what I expect. What’s the point? David Bowie and Brian Eno wrote a program back in the 80s that its whole purpose was to take the things they would write and input in the program and it would rearrange the words in random order just to scramble their heads about their idea. And I love that.

DD: When you are doing Star Trek, is it still something that you can’t quite believe it’s you in the chair?

AM: Oh, completely. Every day. It’s the longest a job has remained surreal to me. Without a doubt. I like that. I like being reminded of how lucky I am every time I look around, I can’t believe that I’m on Star Trek, much less the captain of the Enterprise.

DD: One of the things that I’ve noticed, binge-watching Hell on Wheels and repeatedly watching Star Trek, is that there’s a way that you communicate with your eyes that I don’t see a lot of television actors do. Is that something that comes from the stage or is that something that has kind of grown with your experience doing film and television?

AM: It is not something I am actively doing from your point of view, communicating with my eyes. It’s more what I have learned how to do in terms of the depth of my ability to listen in the moment. Does that make sense? So, the older I get, and again, the more I give less of a sh–, the more I can be in that space, in that moment, with that person as long as I have done my homework. And my homework is to specify what it is that I want to accomplish as the character, what the situation is, and my connection to it. So, all of that is simply a way of honing my ability to be one of these people who is paid, quite well, to sit in a room and be recorded doing this right here that you and I are doing so that other people can beam that to a satellite and back down to the rest of the planet because that is considered such a rarified thing. It blows my mind that it is valued to that extent when it is so simple. But it wasn’t always simple.

DD: Last question, you’ve said before you played D&D as a kid, watched Star Trek as a kid, are you a geek or are you a nerd?

AM (laughing): I’ve never—I’ve always used those terms interchangeably. What’s the difference?

DD: Well, it depends on who you ask, and it has to do with your level of hyper-fixation and knowledge about the thing. If you’re a nerd, you know everything about everything about every little bit of it, and if you’re a geek it’s more about being super enthusiastic about all of the things.

AM: Then, I’m probably both, I guess.

DD: Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

You can find Anson Mount on Instagram and Threads; The Well, his podcast with Branan Edgens, at thewellpod.com; on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds on Paramount+; and in various panels and events at Dragon Con.