Who did Jeffrey Hunter play in ‘Star Trek’?

With Strange New Worlds’ second season making a splash among Star Trek fans, the adventures of Captain Christopher Pike (played by Anson Mount) are delighting viewers. But the character of Pike was first created many decades ago, before even James T. Kirk.

Christopher Pike first featured in the unaired Star Trek pilot “The Cage,” produced in 1964. Here, as the captain of the USS Enterprise, Pike led a mission to the planet of Talos IV, in which he was taken by psychic aliens and subjected to mind-bending experiments as his crew (led by his First Officer, “Number One” and also featuring Spock) raced to rescue him.

Pike was a more brooding and moody character than Kirk, showing dissatisfaction with Starfleet and clearly deeply stressed by the responsibilities of command. He was also more prone to angry outbursts than the usually cool-headed Kirk.

Jeffrey Hunter was the actor selected to portray Pike, making him the first-ever Star Trek captain. Hunter was a famous Hollywood actor who starred opposite John Wayne in The Searchers, appeared in war classics like The Longest Day and Hell to Eternity, and even played Jesus Christ in King of Kings. After “The Cage” was initially rejected by studio execs, Hunter declined to have anything more to do with Star Trek, instead choosing to focus on his motion picture career.

Jeffrey Hunter’s Star Trek legacy

Ultimately, the Enterprise would, of course, be captained by James Kirk (played definitively by William Shatner) when Star Trek finally launched as a series. And yet Pike’s story remained part of the Star Trek setting. In the Original Series two-part episode “The Menagerie,” Pike returns. We learn that Pike heroically risked his life to rescue cadets who were exposed to deadly delta radiation, and though he was able to drag many people away from certain death, he himself was horribly disfigured. Unable to move or speak, and with much of his face burned away, Pike is confined to a life-support unit. Spock risks everything to rescue his former captain by abducting him and whisking him back to Talos IV, where he hopes that the psychic aliens they met before will be able to use their powers to give Pike the illusion of health.

In actual fact, Pike’s disfigurement was a cunning move by the show’s producers. Jeffrey Hunter was unavailable to reprise the role of Pike, but producers noticed that a young actor named Sean Kenney bore a striking resemblance to Hunter. With his face disguised by heavy makeup, and the episode’s story giving a reason for the character not to speak, Kenney was able to convincingly portray a gravely injured Pike. As thanks for his willingness to deal with so much heavy makeup, Kenney was subsequently given a role on the show as Enterprise crewman DePaul.

Though Hunter’s own time on Star Trek was brief, his impact and that of the character he portrayed is such that Pike’s adventures continue to this day. Strange New Worlds essentially acts as both a sequel to “The Cage” and a prequel to The Original Series, reviving beloved characters such as Spock and Uhura while also fleshing out some characters from that original pilot, such as Number One. Mount plays a more upbeat Pike than Hunter did, albeit one who still retains the same level of emotion and gravity.

With Strange New Worlds already renewed for a third season, there are many more galactic adventures in store for the character that Jeffrey Hunter first brought to life nearly 60 years ago.