As has been well-documented, Star Trek got its start in the form of the 1964 pilot episode “The Cage,” which, while taking place aboard the starship Enterprise, featured Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike rather than William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk (who would arrive in the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”
GENE RODDENBERRY (creator of Star Trek): When it came to the role of Captain Christopher Pike in “The Cage,” we considered a number of actors, including [Sea Hunt’s] Lloyd Bridges. I remember Lloyd was very much under consideration, except when I approached him with it, he said, “Gene, I like you, I’ve worked with you before in the past, but I’ve seen science fiction and I don’t want to be within a hundred miles of it.” I understood what he meant then, because science fiction was usually the monster of the week. I tried to convince him that I could do it differently, but at the time I wasn’t sure that I would treat it differently.
Among those being considered for the lead role at the time, then still named Captain Robert April, were Paul Mantee, Rod Taylor (The Time Machine), Robert Loggia, Sterling Hayden (The Killing), Warren Stevens (Forbidden Planet), Rhodes Reason, Leslie Nielsen, and Jack Lord (Dr. No), the latter of whom wanted too big a piece of the show in terms of profit participation to make him a viable candidate, but who would eventually go onto big success (and a lucrative financial cut) in Hawaii Five-0.
ROBERT BUTLER (director, “The Cage”): Whether Jeffrey Hunter was a compromise candidate or whether everyone believed in him at the time, I don’t know. When the eleventh hour approaches, you finally have to take your money and bet it. That’s always the case. Generally, he was an extremely pleasant, centered guy, and maybe decent and nice to a fault. A gentle guy. I did not know Jeff, except professionally from a distance, not personally at all. I thought he was a good, chiseled hero for that kind of part. I remember thinking, ”God, he’s handsome,” and this was, sadly, the opinion of him at the time. When one is trying to bring reality into an unreal situation, that usually isn’t a wise thing to do, to hire a somewhat perfect looking actor. You should find someone who seems to be more natural and more “real.” I don’t remember saying those things, but that continues to be my view.
JEFFREY HUNTER (speaking to the Los Angeles Citizen News at the time): The idea for Star Trek is that we run into prehistoric worlds, contemporary societies, and civilizations far more developed than our own. It’s a great format, because writers have a free hand; they can have us land on a monster-infested planet, or deal in human relations involving the large number of people who live in this gigantic ship. The things that intrigue me the most is that it is actually based on the Rand Corporation’s projection of things to come. Except for the fictional characters, it will be like getting a look into the future, and some of the predictions will surely come true in our lifetime. With all the weird surroundings of outer space, the basic underlying theme of the show is a philosophical approach to man’s relationship to woman. There are both sexes in the crew. In fact, the first officer is a woman.
MARGARET BONANNO (author, Star Trek: Burning Dreams): The idea for Burning Dreams came from Simon & Schuster editor Marco Palmieri, who called me out of the blue and made the offer for me to write the definitive novel about Christopher Pike. I took that to mean a biography, from beginning to end, and that was exactly what Marco wanted. We knocked some ideas around and at some point — whether during that initial conversation or after I’d submitted a first-draft outline — he suggested an environmental theme. Really what he said was Mosquito Coast, and it clicked, so that was the frame to hang Pike’s childhood on, as well as what becomes of him once he returns to Talos IV [in the episode “The Menagerie”]. In between, I tried to pick moments in Pike’s career as a young officer that would show why he became, at the time, the youngest starship captain in the fleet, and weave in a personal life that shaped him as a human being.
Watching “The Cage” and “Menagerie” [the Star Trek season one two-parter that incorporated footage from the former] over and over again, I realized how much of the character’s story was below the surface. I started digging. It seemed as if almost every line of dialogue could be a hook to something in his backstory. There was also something heady about taking a character that Gene Roddenberry had created more or less by the seat of his pants and probably never gave a second thought to once he had created Kirk, and whom other writers had used effectively in several novels and comics, but always in the action-adventure mold, and being able to really get inside his head and ask, “What makes this man what he is?”
What was really interesting was what I saw as Pike’s drive for perfection, as well as him distancing himself from his crew, unlike Kirk, who goes way beyond the bounds of any real-life commanding officer, which is part of his charm, but also a bit of weakness in terms of credibility. I had the same attitude toward Pike that I think a lot of original series fans have: interesting character, interesting performance by Jeffrey Hunter, but good or bad, he’s nothing like Kirk. There’s been a lot written about how Pike was an “intellectual,” as opposed to Kirk, who was a “man of action,” but it didn’t seem quite that simple. Yes, Pike is more apt to think things through than to charge headlong into a situation, but you don’t get to be a starship captain if you’re brooding like Hamlet all the time. There’s also a haunted quality to Pike, a suggestion of something in his past that the Talosians, like all good interrogators, would try to exploit in an attempt to control him initially. When the decision was made to do a second Star Trek pilot, Jeffrey Hunter decided he did not want to come back and play Pike again. I thought highly of him and he would have made a grand captain, except his family convinced him that science fiction was really beneath him.
OSCAR KATZ (Desilu Executive): When you make a pilot deal with an actor, you can’t tie him up forever. You usually have a hold on him for the following season, so we had no hold on Jeffrey Hunter. And either he or his wife didn’t like “The Cage” and he didn’t want to do the second pilot. I already had the set built. I think it was the largest set in the history of Hollywood, that planet in “The Cage” where we had the interior of the spaceship, the miniature of the outside of the spaceship, etc. We had everything and all we had to do was write a new script. But we didn’t have a leading man. Business affairs negotiated with Jeffrey Hunter, and we all thought it was the usual actor-network situation. They don’t want to do it for reason XYZ, and it’s a device for getting the price up. We kept increasing the price and he kept saying no. One day I said, “What’s with Jeffrey Hunter?” and I was told he just won’t do it at any price. Finally I said, “Tell Jeffrey Hunter to get lost. Tell him we’re going to do the pilot without him.” And that’s how William Shatner got into it, because Hunter wouldn’t do it.
RICHARD ARNOLD (Star Trek Archivist and Historian): Gene would not have agreed with me here, but I thought that Jeffrey Hunter seemed a little wooden in the role, as though he couldn’t quite get a grip on the character. I’ve read things since that would seem to disprove that, but he just wasn’t captain material, in my opinion. His turning the series down was probably the best thing for Star Trek. No one could have known how well Bill and Leonard would work together, nor how De Kelley would fit into the picture, but it all turned out, even if by chance, to be just what the show needed.
JEFFREY HUNTER (to the Milwaukee Journal at the time): I was asked to do it, but had I accepted I would have been tied up much longer than I care to be. I have several things brewing now and they should be coming to a head. I love doing motion pictures and expect to be as busy as I want to be in them.
Ironically, it was only a few years later that Hunter and his agents were lobbying hard for him to play Mike Brady, the patriarch of the Brady clan in Paramount’s The Brady Bunch, a part that was instead offered to Gene Hackman (which he turned down), eventually going to Robert Reed, making him a television icon in a role that the actor absolutely loathed.
SCOTT MANTZ (film critic, Star Trek historian): When you go back and you watch “The Cage,” Pike and Kirk were so different. Let’s say you’re watching “The Cage” and you’re part of a focus group. Which captain would you follow? You watch the scene where your captain, your hero, is telling his doctor, “I don’t want to be the captain. I want to raise a horse or be a slave trader. I don’t want to be the captain anymore.” And then you see this captain joking around, charming, and you know he looks like he likes being the captain. I’d follow Kirk in a second. Pike was a stiff captain. He didn’t want to be the captain. He was more like Picard than Kirk. He had more of Picard’s traits than Kirk’s. They lucked out with Shatner. Shatner’s performance as Kirk is the reason I became a Trek fan.
IRA STEVEN BEHR (executive producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine): Jeffrey Hunter in “The Cage” was a terrific captain. I remember thinking that Bill was a little too actory as the captain. And I kind of liked the more stoic Jeffrey Hunter. The other thing I will say about Hunter, which was different than Shatner, was I had seen Hunter in The Searchers [with John Wayne], I’d seen him in Disney’s The Great Locomotive Chase with him chasing after Fess Parker, and he was in The Longest Day. So he was kind of like “the movie star” and he had a command to him.
MARGARET BONNANO: Like a lot of people, I asked myself how Star Trek would have been different if the series had focused on Pike rather than Kirk. Not an original thought, but as a less . . . precipitous leader than Kirk, Pike would have interacted differently with his crew, particularly Spock, and we might have ended with fewer fist fights and more clever dialogue; more or less what we got in the films starring the original series cast. Not necessarily a bad thing, but something, given sixties TV, that might have killed the show in fewer than three seasons.
The character of Captain Christopher Pike was resurrected for JJ Abrams’ first two films in the franchise, Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek: Into Darkness (2012), with actor Bruce Greenwood taking on the role.
BRUCE GREENWOOD (actor, “Captain Christopher Pike”): To find the character of Christopher Pike, I really had nothing to go on but Jeffrey Hunter’s portrayal of the character in the first Star Trek pilot, “The Cage.” The fundamental difference between the Hunter Pike and the Greenwood Pike is that our dilemmas are different, Hunter’s being that he was terribly ambivalent about his place in the Federation; he was torn by whether or not he wanted to go back and have a smaller life or that of a commander. My Pike doesn’t have an internal wrestling match the way the earlier one did, but he does have second thoughts and misgivings about the way Starfleet is training officers as by-the-book products that may not, at the end of the day, be what’s required for a great leader. So he keeps his eye out for that kind of special young man, and as it happens, Kirk seems to fill that bill.
In Star Trek: Into Darkness, because of Kirk’s actions, he ends up serving under Pike again. I think they were wise to examine this mentor relationship and what it means. In spite of someone being your mentor and handing over the reins because, at least for the moment, he’s unable to continue, doesn’t absolve the recipient of responsibility. If the responsibility is deemed to be unmet or called into question, then there’s issues. I was always hoping from the end of the first one that this mentor relationship between Pike and Kirk would continue and evolve, and it did.
The character of Captain Pike was reintroduced during the second season of Star Trek: Discovery, the audience instantly connecting with actor Anson Mount in the role to the point where he is in command of the pre-Kirk Enterprise in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. There, the character will be explored in ways it never has before.
ANSON MOUNT (via syfy.com): I don't know of another character from Star Trek canon that is so revered, but we know so little about. So there were a lot of different ways to go. The crutch I leaned on the hardest was what the writers were giving me, and making sure I was in direct and constant consultation with them, to understand the decision making behind every scene. In terms of the character, it wasn't just the lack of material. The original Pike was a younger, more self-involved Pike. Then the later Pike that we know about is sort of at his end. You have the first act Pike and the third act Pike, you didn't have the second act Pike, and those are different human beings. They say that literally every cell in our body regenerates every seven years. So I didn't really feel constrained at all by what had come before, I just trusted that the writers would lead me down the correct path.
The above is an edited excerpt from the two-volume The Fifty Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds begins streaming on Paramount+ May 5. The show also stars Ethan Peck as Spock, Rebecca Romijn as Number One, Christina Chong as La’an Noonien-Singh (related to Khan)and Babs Olusanmokun as Dr. M’Benga.