Ethan Peck plays Spock as a man holding himself still on purpose, and he is at his best when the camera lets him. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds too often will not, and the dignity he builds is spent on jokes.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Ethan Peck's Spock when nothing is being asked of him. On the bridge of the Enterprise in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022) he stands a little straighter than anyone around him, the head slightly tilted, and he lets a silence run a beat longer than a human would. That is where the performance lives. He has plainly studied Leonard Nimoy, the voice, the cadence, the eyebrow, and he uses the borrowings as a frame rather than an impression: a younger man who has decided what a Vulcan is supposed to look like and is holding the pose, not always easily.
The road to that bridge was long and mostly quiet. He began as a child in the late 1990s, in Passport to Paris (1999) and That '70s Show, spent the 2000s and 2010s in supporting parts, took a main role as Patrick Verona in the television version of 10 Things I Hate About You (2009), and turned up in In Time (2011). Then Star Trek: Discovery cast him as Spock for its second season in 2019, and the part has defined him since. He has called himself a custodian of the character rather than an owner, which is modest and also accurate: he inherited the rules, the voice and a protective audience.
What he does well is the argument underneath, the half-human, half-Vulcan quarrel Spock is always having with himself, and he plays it through the people around him rather than in speeches. His scenes with Anson Mount's Pike and Jess Bush's Chapel are where that quarrel gets an outside, and he is more interesting listening to them than when he is handed a line to land. Where the show lets him down is comedy. Strange New Worlds has decided that a Vulcan in an undignified situation is reliably funny, and it puts him in one every few episodes. Peck can play embarrassment, with the same stillness and a fraction of panic behind the eyes, but the repetition costs him. We found ourselves wincing on his behalf as the set-ups piled up, not because he was bad in them but because he was good and the writers did not seem to notice what they were spending.
The question is whether he gets a chance to be anything else. Most of what is known about him as an actor is known through one part, and it is a part with a ceiling built in: the more precisely he does it, the more he looks like someone else. We would like to see what that stillness does in a room without a viewscreen. Until then he is the best reason to watch the Enterprise when the plot slows down, and the first casualty when it speeds up.
Biography
Ethan Peck is an American actor. He is the grandson of actor Gregory Peck.
Peck was born in Los Angeles on 2 March 1986 and studied at New York University. He began acting as a child with appearances in That '70s Show (1998) and Gossip Girl (2007). He played Spock in Star Trek: Discovery (2019) and reprised the role as a series regular in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022–present).
His other credits include the films The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010), In Time (2011) and The Midnight Sky (2020), and the series Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (2020).
