Anson Mount is the perfect example of a longtime movie-industry paradox: a character actor trapped in a leading man’s body.
The Dickson County native’s career has mostly split the difference. Mount has led television series like Western drama Hell on Wheels and Marvel’s Inhumans while building a character-actor filmography in movies like cult horror favorite All the Boys Love Mandy Lane and Liam Neeson action vehicle Non-Stop.
“There is some truth to the idea that leading roles are different than character roles in the sense that — I don’t even know if you can name it or train for it — but there are actors who are capable of giving the audience the piggyback ride of their experience through an arc,” Mount tells the Scene during a recent video call. “And it has nothing to do with looks. I would say that the less-talented eyes in Hollywood think that it has to do with looks. … I fought it for a long time because I wanted to play all the character roles.”
Mount’s latest starring role is as Capt. Christopher Pike in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the third season of which premieres on Paramount+ this week. This isn’t Mount’s first time being handed the keys to the spaceship — he played Pike on a couple of series before this one — but having grown up a Star Trek fan about 30 miles west of Nashville in White Bluff, he still finds it hard to fathom starring in a series set in the long-running franchise’s universe.
“It is the longest a job has remained surreal to me, because I probably watched every episode of [Star Trek: The Original Series] three times, at least,” says Mount. “It was our make-believe game in my neighborhood, so it’s very strange to find myself still doing that.”
The deck of the USS Enterprise feels about as far away from White Bluff as you can get. But Mount says he wouldn’t be captaining the iconic ship without the support of his family and local folks who encouraged him along the way — including Randy and Glenda Sullivan, his theater teacher and forensics coach, respectively, at Dickson County High School.
“You don’t grow up in a place like White Bluff and think, ‘Oh, I’m gonna go be in the movies,’” he says. “It just doesn’t seem like an option that’s on the table.”
After studying theater at Sewanee (in the drama program to which Tennessee Williams left the bulk of his estate), and the obligatory summer spent at Centennial performing with the Nashville Shakespeare Festival, Mount made the move to New York City, where he pursued acting at Columbia University. Thirty years and an impressive CV later, Mount is back in Middle Tennessee. He and his wife Darah Trang — whom Mount met in Calgary while filming Hell on Wheels — recently bought a house in the West Meade area. Mount gave Trang “the royal treatment” during a visit to Nashville in hopes of convincing her to move here; they even stayed with Brad Paisley and Kimberly Williams-Paisley during their sojourn.
“Once we had a daughter, it quickly became clear that we needed more than farmland, and it was also time to be closer to my mom,” Mount says. “I’d always felt that Nashville was a great place to raise kids.”
Like many industry veterans who live in the area, Mount thinks the state’s film incentive program needs a major overhaul. He says he’s even been discussing the matter with members of the state legislature.
“The current incentives package that we have functions essentially as a pipe dream in comparison to peer states,” Mount says. “The people on the entertainment commission, along with [Department of Economic and Community Development Commissioner Stuart] McWhorter, are working very hard with limited resources, attempting to increase these manufacturing jobs. The things we manufacture may be television shows and movies, but they are as much a product as a car or a modem. And if we can do it for Oracle, we can do it for this.”
Mount believes the state needs to retain local talent from film programs at universities like Belmont, while also ensuring that film incentives apply to filming locations in the entire Middle Tennessee area.
“We lose over 50 percent of our film grads to places like Los Angeles and Atlanta and New York,” he says. “That’s the lifeblood of any entertainment business. What you’re looking for in film production is a place that you can go and find the majority of your workforce already there.
“We have the talent, so that immediately puts us at the forefront of the states that could be vying for this kind of work. … The trick is, how do we make this beneficial for not just Davidson and Williamson counties? How do we make this beneficial for places that need more economic development?”
If his passionate interest in the economic complexities of the local film industry weren’t enough to secure his Nashville bona fides, Mount — whose father was a sports writer for Playboy — also has something to say about promising Tennessee Titans rookie quarterback Cam Ward.
“I think he’s got all the tools both on the field and, apparently, off the field, which is probably what we needed more than anything. … We could see this thing turn around, while continuing to shore up our defense.”
Cautious optimism about an upcoming Titans season? I know a true local when I see one.
