Paul Giamatti ‘Never’ Thought He’d Be Cast in New Star Trek Series (Exclusive)

Paul Giamatti learned an unexpected lesson in manifesting what he wants.

In several interviews over the past years, he let it be known that he’d love to play a Klingon on Star Trek, the enduring sci-fi franchise he’d loved since his youth. Lo and behold, he got his wish.

Today’s he’s playing the half-Klingon pirate Nus Braka on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, a recurring adversary to Holly Hunter’s chancellor Nahla Ake and her unseasoned cadets. But no one was more surprised that he landed the role than the two-time Oscar nominee.

“I didn’t actually think I’d ever actually get a call!” Giamatti, 58, admits to PEOPLE exclusively. “I made no secret about the fact that I loved the show, but I never thought it would actually be something that would happen… It’s a top experience for me. I don’t know that much else can top this. I still kind of can’t believe that I got to do it.”

Although he has taken on numerous awards-caliber roles in films like Sideways, 12 Years a Slave and The Holdovers and prestige TV fare like Billions, John Adams, Downton Abbey and Black Mirror, Giamatti explains that he sees Star Trek on equal footing.

“I don’t see it as any sort of differentiation between higher or lower culture or anything like that — it’s all the same,” he says. “I think it’s great, Star Trek: it’s smart, it’s good stuff and it’s good writing and it’s good stories, and so that’s all that matters.”

Giamatti reveals that his lifelong Star Trek fandom is “more than casual, but I’m not encyclopedic.”

“I do love it a lot,” he adds.”

That love spans back to creator Gene Roddenberry’s original series starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. The actor’s father A. Bartlett Giamatti — who would later become president of Yale University and commissioner of Major League Baseball — had been a fan during the show’s original airing in the late ‘60s. Giamatti became hooked as a child when his dad shared syndicated rerun viewings with him in the 1970s.

“I was probably 7, maybe, and I think he identified me as the one of his three kids who would probably be really into this,” the actor says with a laugh. “He was really psyched that was on again, and so he kind of sat me down and I watched it with him, and that’s when it started… I was really taken with Spock, with Leonard Nimoy. I mean, everybody was great, but I really became kind of obsessed with Spock when I was a kid.”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Though his early obsession would suggest Giamatti might be more interested in tackling a dispassionate, logic-driven Vulcan role, he confesses that his oft-volcanic performance style made Klingons, the honor-bound, fiercely passionate warrior race portrayed over the years by actors including Michael Dorn, Christopher Lloyd and Christopher Plummer, more fertile territory.

“I think even as a child, there was probably some recognition I couldn’t pull off a Vulcan, that I was more temperamentally probably suited to Klingons than Vulcans,” he chuckles. “There was something I admired about the Vulcans, but as I got older, the Klingons became more interesting to me.”

Giamatti also relished the role’s adversarial qualities. “I haven’t played a whole lot of out-and-out bad guys — I’ve only played a few. I play sort of bad guys,” he explains. “I play complicated, unpleasant people. I don’t think I’ve played a whole lot of bad guys, capital B, capital G … it’s always fun to do that kind of thing. You’re really given a lot of license and to be kind of grand.”

As Star Trek evolved and expanded over the decades, Giamatti found himself more and more drawn to the franchise’s darkest and most complex entry, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which by coincidence he happened to be re-watching when the call for Starfleet Academy came. 

“I think I like it the most,” he proclaims. “The level of acting on that show is great, and I mean all of them. Everybody is fantastic on that show. Really great acting!” He noted he’s particularly taken by Armin Shimerman, who plays the endearing but untrustworthy Ferengi Quark.

“He’s encased in that [makeup] – he’s got a lot of stuff on and it is what he does, what comes through is amazing,” Giamatti marvels. 

Giamatti’s familiarity with Trek lore made him equally excited to explore Nuk Brasa’s additional heritage: he’s half-Klingon, helf-Tellarite, a pig-like alien race with roots in an episode from the original series, but only rarely glimpsed during the franchise’s six-decade history.

“When they were designing the makeup and they came back to me and they’d said, ‘The conclusion is you’re going to be sort of half-Klingon, half-Tellarite.’ And I was like ‘The pig guys?’ ” he recalls excitedly. “Because I remembered them from the original series. I think they’ve occurred rarely over the years in other things, but I really remembered them, actually, from when I was a kid being very struck by that one Tellarite, that very strange face and kind of disputatious pig person. And I was like, ‘This sounds kind of good. Yeah, I like that! That’s a funny idea!’ ”

“And I said, “Well, now you have two really aggressive races too, so I’m going to be super-aggressive,’” he laughs.

Giamatti says he’s shared his love of Star Trek with his own son, Samuel, with a bit less success than his father had.

“He’s almost 25 now and it’s like he appreciated it,” he recounts. “At the time he was a kid and growing up, Star Wars was in the ascendant, and so he got infected with the Star Wars thing more than the Star Trek thing. I could never quite hook him in the same way. He definitely enjoys it, but I think ultimately he became more of a Star Wars kid.”

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy airs every Thursday on Paramount+.