‘Strange New Worlds’ Star Carol Kane Discusses Her Character’s ‘Unique’ Accent and Why She’s Never Seen ‘Star Trek’

variety.com:

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer When Carol Kane was approached about joining “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” for its second season, the celebrated 70-year-old actor had to make a confession: She’d never watched a single minute of the venerated franchise. “The science fiction world has not really been attractive to me for some reason,” Kane says. “Now that I’m in it,” she adds with a laugh, “I’m very excited about it.

It just wasn’t on my path until now.” Clearly the producers were on to something. Kane’s role on the Paramount+ series fits neatly within her wheelhouse of sublime eccentrics, from her Emmy-winning role on “Taxi” to for-the-ages supporting turns in “The Muppet Movie,” “The Princess Bride,” “Scrooged” and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” Here, she plays Pelia, the new chief engineer of the Enterprise and a member of an alien species never before seen on “Star Trek”: Lanthanites, who are extremely long-lived and utterly resemble humans, save for a delightfully inexplicable accent invented out of whole cloth by Kane. “I wanted her to sound like you don’t know where exactly she comes from,” Kane says. “There is an elegance and a power to it.

It’s unique on the ship — nobody else has that accent or whatever it is.” Despite her enduring career — she made her professional debut onstage in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” in 1966, the same year “Star Trek” premiered on NBC — Kane says she still felt like “the new kid in school” when she joined a reading of the season-premiere script over Zoom.

That’s also when she asked to try out her take on Pelia’s loopy elocution for the first time. “You know, I’m not a very confident person, unlike Pelia,” she says. “I was terrified that at the end of it, they would say,