Dickson County's Anson Mount announces he will play Capt. Pike in 'Star Trek: Discovery'

White Bluff native Anson Mount will play the role of Capt. Christopher Pike in the second season of Star Trek Discovery, the Dickson County High School alum announced on Twitter Monday morning.

Variety reported that Mount will be the fourth actor to play the role of Pike, who preceded Capt. James T. Kirk as captain of the USS Enterprise.

Jeffrey Hunter played the role in the original, unused “Star Trek: The Original Series” pilot, with footage from that episode later being repurposed in the two-part episode “The Menagerie.” Also in “The Menagerie,” Sean Kenney played an older–and the most iconic–version of Pike, confined to a brainwave-operated wheelchair and unable to communicate save for a blinking light. Finally, Bruce Greenwood played the character in the 2009 “Star Trek” reboot film and its sequel, “Star Trek Into Darkness.”

Mount has previously had the lead role of Black Bolt in the Marvel’s Inhumans television series. He gained increased recognition in recent years as star of the five-season AMC series “Hell on Wheels.”

Mount told the Tennessean in a 2017 interview  that he felt strongly as a teen in White Bluff that his fate would be as an actor.

His father, Anson Mount II, a longtime Playboy magazine executive and sports editor, and his mother, professional golfer Nancy Smith, both supported his acting in school — though Mount’s father died when he was 13. Mount had just started at Dickson County High School where he was in theater, but, more importantly, he was on the Cougar wrestling team.

“I often say the two most useful things from my pre-college education were typing class and wrestling,” Mount said. “I never would have imagined that wrestling would have come in so handy in fight choreography. But it really has. Really the muscle memory of knowing where my body is at any given time, I credit five years of wrestling to that specifically.”