Robert Picardo reprises his Star Trek: Voyager role as The Doctor in the new live-action Starfleet Academy series
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The new series is set 1,000 years after the actor was last part of the franchise
Picardo tells PEOPLE that returning to the Star Trek universe was "very unexpected"
Robert Picardo admits that, 25 years after he last played the holographic Doctor onStar Trek: Voyager, he was stunned when he got the call to return to the beloved sci-fi franchise for the new series,Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.
"I would say [it was] very unexpected — I thought it was a mistake!" Picardo tells PEOPLE exclusively.
The 72-year-old reveals that after he reprised his role as The Doctor — in voice only — for a 2024 episode of the animated, kid-skewing seriesStar Trek: Prodigy, his animation agent got word that a different set of producers in the franchise wanted to meet with him. Picardo assumed it was for another voice role or cameo until he learned more about the gig in a follow-up call.
"They called back and said, 'No, it's live-action,'" he recalls. "And then I wasreallyconfused! And then my agent, my theatrical agent, [said], 'Yeah, they want to talk to you about being in the newStar Trekseries.' "
"Those first three or four weeks waiting for that meeting were really the strangest, that part of knowing they're interested but not knowing what it was," he says. "And then they laid out the idea they had for the character and how he would fit in and what he would be doing in the future: teaching cadets at a newly reopened Starfleet Academy."
Picardo had originally played the fan-favorite character — an increasingly self-aware, independent and somewhat egotistical Emergency Medical Hologram who provided a fresh lens on both humanity and technology while snarkily treating the crew of the starshipVoyager— for seven seasons between 1995 and 2001. However, with the new role, he wouldn't just be picking up The Doctor a quarter-century later; he was also thrown an unexpected acting challenge as the 2026 series was set nearly 1,000 years in the future.
"It's mind-blowing," he confesses. "I said to them, 'Wait a minute, you mean I have 800 years of digital memory — perfect clarity — so that an event that happened 792 years and 112 days and this many hours and minutes, that moment was not only recorded in here, but it was as clear as something that happened yesterday?' [They said], 'Yep, that's what it means.' I said, 'Alright, I'll start trying to wrap my mind around that now!' "
What struck him most about taking a quantum leap forward in time was how it would affect The Doctor's worldview. "Working side by side with 32 generations of organic colleagues growing old and dying around you, how does that influence your desire to form personal relationships?" he questions.
"I thought that on the surface, he would seem the same, at the same pace, the same attitude, the same snarkiness when he didn't feel he was being respected, the same 'I like feeling that I'm the smartest intelligence in the room,' all of those things," Picardo tells PEOPLE. "But that, when push came to shove, he wasn't very interested in going deeper with any individual. I wasn't excited to be your pal, you know what I mean? Because what's the end game for me?"
"So there was this kind of push-pull between being like The Doctor once he had grown more human-like, but with the sort of careful delineation of how far he wanted to go beyond cordiality in his relationships," he adds.
That emotional distance has been challenged on the new Paramount+ series by young SAM (Kerrice Brooks), another photonic being enrolled in Starfleet Academy, who longs for mentorship from The Doctor, who finally lowers his defenses.
"The Doctor, I think, likes feeling unique, but also a protege who is giving him more attention and interest that he clearly wants to return," Picardo explains. "He's both intrigued and annoyed by her."
AsStarfleet Academyhas been streaming new episodes each week, Picardo has been enjoying watching the always-passionate fanbase debate the various merits of the show — a phenomenon he's been long accustomed to.
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"It takes every newStar Trekshow two years or so to kind of hit its stride," he says. "And until then, people complain about what kind of female Captain Janeway should be. 'Do we really need a female captain in the mid-90s?' I mean, we were 25 years ahead ofDoctor Who,having the first female doctor! 25 years! And of course, Kate [Mulgrew] really won over all of the initial critics to the idea of taking this traditionally male role. And since then, of course, we've had Captain Michael Burnham, we've had Michelle Yeoh's character, [Captain Georgiou] and now Holly Hunter."
"I've been really lucky to be in shows that are led by women —China Beach,even before that, the Vietnam drama I was in where the point of view character was an Army nurse played by Dana Delaney," he adds. "So I feel like I've had this special luck to be on shows where women, female characters, really carried the show or were the dynamos behind the show."
Playing the holographic character has also given Picardo a unique perspective on a current, much-buzzed-about topic: AI.
"Obviously, we were ahead of the game onStar Trekwhen we did all of those episodes about core fears of artificial intelligence, when The Doctor's program was hijacked by another entity and his core programming of serving and being a healer was taken over so that he could now be threatening and even lethal," he says. "All of those things that have been very much in the public imagination the last three years, we were dealing with 30 years ago."
Picardo recalls once receiving a call from someone getting a PhD at Harvard, specializing in researching medical applications for AI, wanting to interview him for a book. "I said, 'You know, I'm only an actor,'" he recalls.
But the physician explained that, as a young viewer ofVoyager, he was captivated by the concept of an Emergency Medical Hologram programmed with the entirety of medical knowledge.
"But then he said, 'Watching your journey on the show, I came to realize that the knowledge is not enough. You need the human interface, you need the bedside manner. You need to mediate the information to a patient in order to have that bond and give them, so they have trust in you,'" Picardo says. "It is interesting for me as a bystander, as an actor who played this artificial intelligence physician, to now see so many of these concerns play out now and feel like, if only because of my role, I've been thinking about them for decades."
He's also been keenly aware of the rate at which technology advances. "Star Trekhas always been in the game of dreaming up something and then science tries to catch up with that dream because of all the young minds that were watching it at the time and because it just seemed impossibly cool if we could do that," he says. "I remember my little computer on my desk in Sickbay when we premiered seemed so impossibly small. And then, within a year and a half of our premiere, it was too big! PowerBooks came out and suddenly it was like, 'No, this looks like a joke.' "
"Star Trekis a great predictor, I think, of technologies, and it also encourages us to want to develop the science and engineering to accomplish them," he says.
As a result, inspired by the originalTrekseries' actress Nichelle Nichols' recruitment of women and minorities into the space program in the '70s and '80s, Picardo has "tried to take on that mantle with my relationship with the Planetary Society for more than 25 years," supporting funding for NASA's space science budget and sitting on its executive board.
It's just one aspect of the way being a part ofStar Trekhas impacted him, he says. "It changes your life in so many other ways through the people you meet who likeStar Trekor have been inspired byStar Trekas young people and grown into these amazing people that you meet and they giveyousome credit!" he tells PEOPLE.
"I mean, to sit on stage with five men who walked on the moon, just to be up there with them because, at least to the audience, we were connected somehow," he marvels. "So that connection between imagining what our future in space is and actually encouraging the work to be done now in order to get there is something that I have treasured in my life."
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