'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' cast talks losing sleep, living up to their character's legacy, and learning to ride a horse for season 4 (interview)

Filming a high-profile episodic TV series like " Star Trek: Strange New Worlds " is often a Herculean task for any professional cast and crew, but toss in massive spaceship sets, a colorful constellation of costume changes, tone and stylistic shifts, hand-to-hand combat, horseback riding, and puppets, and you’ve got a mad sci-fi circus.

We connected with Ethan Peck (Spock), Christina Chong (La’an Noonien-Singh) and Paul Wesley (James T.

Kirk) for Paramount+’s "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds'" penultimate season to hear more about the rigors of shooting, genre-hopping, and character evolution.

"Every season feels kind of manic," Peck tells Space.

"Grind has such a negative connotation, but it really is a marathon.

We lose so much sleep, we have crazy hours, we say crazy things, we even look crazy.

"But I’d say we really found our groove in season four because we’ve had all this experience with these characters.

And the writers have had all this experience writing for these actors playing these characters.

So we grow over time and become more comfortable.

I think that's what allows us to pull off these crazy swings in season four and five, perhaps." Christina Chong plays La'an in "Strange New Worlds" season 4 (Image credit: Paramount+) Chong echoes those thoughts and felt like leaping from one genre to the other was far more intense this time around than previous seasons.

"I was also taking horse riding lessons throughout, I was doing fight rehearsals, and then getting to see the digital mockups of our puppets," she shares.

"Then we were thinking about how to approach the puppet episode and then obviously the horror of it all.

It was a lot of jumping around because of the big genre swings.

"Every season has been incredible so far, and I think this was really upping the stakes.