Twenty years after the original Independence Day stormed the box office, a new sequel will blast its way into theaters. And while there’s been plenty of discussion over who among the original cast is returning (Jeff Goldblum! Bill Pullman! Judd Hirsch!) and who isn’t (Will Smith! Mae Whitman!), there’s one name in particular on the former list that stuck out—mostly because it seemed impossible that his character had lived to see another movie.

Most moviegoers assumed that Dr. Brakish Okun—played by Brent Spiner of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame—had died in the original film. In one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, the seemingly lifeless body of the gray-haired scientist is thrust up against the glass of an observation room; his vocal cords get played like a fiddle by *Independence Day’*s creepy aliens. Somehow, against all odds, Okun is back—albeit with a protective scarf around his damaged neck—in Independence Day: Resurgence.

But that’s only the beginning of the return of Brent Spiner. Vanity Fair chatted with the actor to learn how the new movie justifies his return—and why geek culture has become mainstream.

VF.com: Were you surprised to find out Dr. Okun was coming back?

Brent Spiner: No, I wasn’t. I knew I was going to get a call, because they had told me when we were working that I was not completely dead. I was only partially dead.

Why do you think most people grasped the wrong end of the stick there?

Well, I looked kind of dead, I think. I think they assumed that I had been choked to death, or that the tentacles of the alien had really punished me badly. But in fact the alien was very gentle. He was just basically trying to speak through me and communicate through me, and the result was that I was badly damaged. But as you will see in the new movie, I survived.

Twenty years later, how has the world of blockbuster filmmaking changed?

To hit the set, and find Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum and Judd Hirsch and Roland Emmerich and Vivica Fox and all the people I’d worked with 20 years before—it was like a family reunion. It was fantastic. But I think Independence Day started the ball rolling on that sort of return to the big disaster movie. I know Roland is now being referred to as the soulful master of disaster, and he is indeed. I think it all sprang from him and his imagination and his effects into those kinds of films. Now, it’s just bigger and bigger and bigger. This film is gigantic. I just saw it last night for the first time, and it’s overwhelming in its hugeness.

But there must have been huge leaps forward, technologically, since the original.

I mean, for me personally, it was not that big of leap to be working on green screen or blue screen because I spent so much time doing that when when I did Star Trek. We had a green screen in every episode; that was the view screen of the Enterprise. I was always talking to people who weren’t actually there. Fortunately, I don’t do that in my own life, but it made it really easy for me to have that experience. The biggest difference, really, was just there were huge, enormous banks of monitors where special-effects people were already working and setting up what the effects were so that we could take a peek and see what we were doing.

Speaking of your work on Star Trek: The Next Generation, how are you feeling about its big-budget franchise reboot and the glossy new CBS show? What’s the enduring appeal of this story?

You know, it’s the 50th anniversary of Star Trek. A lot of people are kind of divided. Some people find Star Trek really profound and amazing, and other people find it silly. In fact, I think it’s kind of a combination of both, and that’s what gives it its charm. I always said it was like when you used to tie a towel around your neck and fly around the house, except that you might be doing Shakespeare while you were doing that. That was sort of Star Trek.

I tell you what: now that it’s 50 years old, I think it has to be taken seriously. Anything that’s half a century and still going, you’ve got to kind of pay attention and say, “Well, what’s this all about?” I’m really pleased to be part of what I consider the great American epic. On it goes, and hopefully it’ll go forever.

You’ve made a big TV return this summer with your role on the Cinemax horror series Outcast, where you’re playing a demon of sorts. What’s it like to hop from sci-fi to horror?

Well, kind of. It’s certainly what I seem to be. I don’t want to reveal anything, but it’s way more complex than it appears in the first few episodes. It begins to reveal itself, what the show is about, what I’m about, as it gets into the middle of the season, and I think people are going to be in for a surprise now that it’s not the show they thought it was.

I also like being a part of it just because there’s a history of character actors, people I really respect as character actors, who later in their careers became part of a horror genre. People like Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre and Vincent Price. Yeah, I feel really good about being in a horror project.

I know you’ve been involved in the ongoing Star Trek conventions and Star Trek fan culture, which is one of the best parts of the whole franchise. Have you seen a change in that fan culture since the J.J. Abrams reboot? I would imagine that brought in a whole new wave of fans to Star Trek.

I'll tell you, it’s amazing what’s going on—because when we were on television, we were the only sci-fi there was at that time. Others came along just after us, but for a while there it was just us. There were conventions, there were Star Trek conventions and that sort of thing. But now every network has their genre show, whether it’s sci-fi or fantasy or horror. Those worlds kind of collide in these conventions. I was at a convention, for example, in Denver the other day, and they told me that 120,000 people passed through those doors on the weekend. Incidentally, that was one of four conventions that was going on that weekend. It’s huge now. It’s fun, it’s exciting, because I think what’s happened is the nerds and geeks have inherited the earth—and we’re the beneficiaries of it.

Why do you think geek and nerd culture has achieved that dominance? How did we get here?

I think technology is what happened. People have a concept of sci-fi fans of being “weird” in some way. In fact, what they are are very smart people. I think what’s happened is technology has just attracted more and more intelligent people and, as technology has grown, so has this subculture of nerds and geeks.

So Star Trek is ongoing and Independence Day is back. Do you see an end to this sci-fi dominance, or do you see it just going on and on and on?

I don’t know. Part of me thinks certainly it’s got to sort of wane eventually, because when you look at the cinema now, particularly motion pictures in particular, really they’re making these big, huge, tentpole movies with a lot of effects and so on. That’s really exciting, and it’s fun for people to go to the movies and have a real visual experience. But I think there’s going to come a time where we get back to, or at least get to, more personal stories and things that don’t usually happen in your local theater until around Thanksgiving, when people are looking for Oscars. I don’t know; maybe it will go on forever. I think there’s room for everything. Hopefully, it will go on forever.