Dawnn Lewis is the voice of Captain Freeman on Star Trek: Lower Decks. Based on the episodes that have aired so far, it’s clear that Lewis is up to the challenge of commanding a starship. But it was a challenge that Lewis had no idea she was going to face. In a recent interview with the New York Daily News, Lewis shared her lifetime passion for the Star Trek franchise - and how she got to be a part of it.

As a child growing up in Brooklyn, Lewis would often stay up with her brothers to watch Star Trek on television. “I am a huge Star Trek fan,” Lewis said in the interview. “I have watched every incarnation of Star Trek, the TV series, movies, you name it, even the first animated series back in the day.”

Calling her captaincy of the U.S.S. Cerritos “a dream come true”, Lewis revealed a bit about the audition process for Lower Decks, which she thought was for another show entirely. “I had no idea what I was auditioning for,” Lewis told the Daily News. “The audition sides were just random lines they had given us, and we were random characters [...] I think my character was a bird, it was Captain Bird.” Not knowing the full details of the audition turned out to be a good thing. Had she known it was an audition for Star Trek, Lewis said that she “probably would have been really, really nervous”.

This spring, Lewis had completed much of her work on season one of Lower Decks and was back on Broadway in the musical “Tina” when COVID-19 began to spread, closing down theatres across the country. Like too many others, Lewis lost a number of loved ones due to the pandemic, calling the experience “emotionally traumatic”. As 2020 unfolded to reveal a surge in COVID-19 cases, economic struggles, and deep issues with societal racism, Lewis is choosing to hold her head high and look toward what we can accomplish - together.

“We got one Earth, this is it, this is all the Earth we’re gonna have,” Lewis said. “So we need to stop taking advantage of it, we need to stop destroying it, and destroying each other, and figure it out.”