Star Trek: Lower Decks star Tawny Newsome is currently making Star Trek history for the second time during her tenure in the franchise.
Her first was when the character she voices on the Paramount+ animated series, Beckett Mariner, crossed over into live-action along with Lower Decks costar Jack Quaid's Ensign Boimler in the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode "These Old Scientists." Now, she is the first Star Trek actor to go from being on an animated show set in the Final Frontier to being in the writer's room of a live-action series, Alex Kurtzman’s upcoming Starfleet Academy.
It's in the Academy's writer's room where Newsome's super fandom for the franchise (especially Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) has made her a go-to resource for all things canon. Well, one of them, at least.
"Coming into the Academy [writer's] room," Newsome tells the Television Academy, "I found myself being almost the third or fourth person down on a list of 'canon heads' in the room, which to me was crazy because I'm like, 'You guys have all been writing Trek forever.'"
One of Newsome's fellow canon heads is author and writer Kirsten Beyer, who wrote several Trek novels before co-creating the high-profile Star Trek: Picard series. According to Newsome, Beyer may rival the Enterprise computer in terms of knowing everything there is to know about the franchise.
"Beyer is the godmother. She's the queen. There's a couple of other people who really know their stuff, too, but — every now and then, when it comes to [needing to know] some shit about Deep Space Nine especially, [the writers] are like, ‘Tawney, can you give us a refresher on this?”
Newsome believes her Trekker bona fides is what led Lower Decks creator and showrunner Mike McMahan to cast her as Mariner, the plucky, sarcastic and very capable junior officer aboard one of Starfleet's seemingly least-important ships, the U.S.S. Cerritos.
"I came into Lower Decks as a big fan," she explains. "I think part of why Mike hired me is because he asked me in the audition to just riff about Star Trek, and I just went on a run about [Star Trek: The Next Generation’s] Deanna Troi's various ball gowns that they decided were uniform-compliant."
But even for someone with such a deep bench of Trek knowledge, Newsome admits there were still a few things she had to learn: "While I came in with a healthy amount of fandom, it was by no means exhaustive. Getting Lower Decks meant that every reference, every Easter egg — if I didn't know what it was or meant, I was like, ‘Oh, I need to know exactly what this is.' So whether I was calling Mike at all hours of the day or night, or just doing my own research and looking it up, it really deepened my fandom, because looking up the reference wasn't enough."
Newsome's passion for canon is only matched by her fidelity to Lower Decks, which signed off in December 2024. She, like the rest of the creative staff, strove to ensure the show’s series finale checked all the boxes it needed to for fans. Especially when it came to recording (and re-recording) one of the episode's final scenes where Mariner monologues, "Captain’s Log"-style, about some of the show's thematic tentpoles while riding in a turbolift with her colleagues before the semi-serious speech gives way to some classic (and hilarious) Mariner quips and observations.
"I remember having to come back to do that monologue," Newsome says. "That wasn’t there in the first few iterations of the script."
Newsome, like McMahan and the rest of the Lower Decks writers, knew that something was missing from the finale when it came to wrapping up Mariner's story. "Everybody really felt like, 'Okay, we need to put more of a button on the end of this chapter of Lower Decks.' It may not be the end forever, who knows? But it is definitely like a pause, and we need to give it a little more finality. So [Mike] wrote that beautiful speech."
The recording session for that scene proved to be more challenging to pull off than usual.
"I came back in [to record], and we recorded it a little differently than we normally do. Normally, I say lines a few times over and over again. But because this was such a big, chunky speech, we just read it straight through. We did that a few times; it felt more like I needed to perform the scene in its entirety."
The monologue wasn't the only change made to the finale before air.
"We did not end the show in the [Cerritos’] bar in the very first script that I saw," Newsome remembers. "I didn't know if we were officially [ending] or not, but I had a feeling. I remember telling one of our producers, 'If this is the series finale, and we don't end it in the bar, that's crazy.' And I think Mike came to that same realization, because the next draft I saw — suddenly, we all were all in the bar at the end."
With Lower Decks wrapped, Newsome is really satisfied with how the series concludes and how it shaped her as both a fan of Trek and as someone telling its stories. When looking back on her experience acting on not one but two Star Trek series airing at the same time, a highpoint of her career occurred on the set of Strange New Worlds, when both her fandom and profession reached a very emotional zenith.
"I think it was our first day of filming ['These Old Scientists'], and we were shooting the final scene in engineering. We were very quiet, standing on our marks. They were just about to call 'action,' and Jack and I were not mic'd up. And Jack could sense I was feeling a way about it all, and he just squeezed my hand. He was like, "Hey, just take a second. I know this is a really big deal for you, especially since you've been a lifelong fan. I hope you're taking this in.' And I was like — just absolute waterworks. That was a good day."
Star Trek: Lower Decks is now streaming on Paramount+.
