AUGUST 25, 2023 – Star Trek fans know Akiva Goldsman for his writing, directing, and producing all over the current era of the television galaxy within the Trek universe, beginning when he came aboard with Star Trek: Discovery upon the departure of showrunner Bryan Fuller. But Goldsman has, of course, had his hand in numerous projects outside of Star Trek, such as writing the Oscar-winning screenplay for A Beautiful Mind.

Now he has taken another foray into the human psyche with The Crowded Room, a 10-part Apple TV+ series starring Tom Holland, which Goldsman created and was showrunner on. Goldsman is talking about the show but also about his own experiences of abuse growing up, which informed his approach to The Crowded Room’s story, inspired by the life of Billy Milligan and Daniel Keyes’s book, The Minds of Billy Milligan. Milligan was the first person to use dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) as a defense, against charges of aggravated rape and armed robbery.

In and honest and revealing interview with Deadline, Goldsman tells the story of a “grueling” production of the story of a young man with dissociative identity disorder and its root causes in child abuse. He says he wrote it “with the hope it would ignite painful conversation, but important conversation….” The conversation is important to Goldsman because he was sexually abused by a trusted person close to his family from the time he was eight years old until he was in his early 20s. “It’s not something that I hide, but it’s not something I typically talk about. But I wanted to talk about it in this show. I wanted to reach out to folks like me, trauma survivors, sexual abuse survivors.”

Goldsman took his inspiration from Keyes’s book about Milligan and made the story his own. “So the thing that I think I was afforded the opportunity to do, because it was no longer a hot book, was to deviate from it. I got to make up a story inside the construct, and this is what I like to do.... I like to smuggle my own experience into other stories. It’s a sort of collaboration on the page.”

It’s a story that Goldsman is clearly passionate about. “We have to talk about the hard things. We have to tell stories that touch on the hard things. So this show is confronting and triggering and profoundly uncool in its emotionality. That’s on purpose. It is made for people who understand and are able to sit with the kind of things people can do to children, and to explore how we can survive this, and still have hope.”

For much more from Akiva Goldsman on The Crowded Room and his own personal trauma, head over to Deadline.