Star Trek: Prodigy's Jason Mantzoukas Talks About the Fun of Playing Jankom Pog
Jason Mantzoukas as Jankom Pog on STAR TREK: PRODIGY. Image: Paramount+.
NOVEMBER 29, 2022 - The crew of characters in Star Trek: Prodigy is singular in the Star Trek universe in that they’re mostly a bunch of kids.
Jason Mantzoukas’ character is a 16-year-old Tellarite, his race first seen on Star Trek: The Original Series. The Tellarites are known for their argumentative nature. For Mantzoukas, bringing Jankom Pog to life meant merging the teenage nature of the character with the argumentative way for which his species is known.
Being a Tellarite allows Jankom and me to play a contrarian personality, which I just find delightful. It is very fun to be able to play a character who is constantly contrarian to the way that everybody else is going. Even when it's patently clear that he's wrong, it's both very fun and also very funny, I think, that he's constantly coming at them with an opposite point of view when clearly they should all just be in agreement. The Tellarite in him is really fun to play.
Star Trek doesn't really have coming-of-age stories very much, and this is that on steroids. This is an entire crew that is coming of age. And so I think there's a lot of innocence and a lot of discovery inside of the storylines, especially [with] Jankom Pog learning what it is to be a Tellarite. And the Tellarite are initial members of Starfleet or the Federation, and he immediately perceives himself to be royalty.
Jankom’s crewmates include Dal R'El (Brett Gray), Gwyndala (Ella Purnell), Zero (Angus Imrie), Rok-Tahk (Rylee Alazraqui), and Murf (Dee Bradley Baker), and together they are coming of age as Prodigy’s bigger action and sci-fi arcs play out.
The unlikely crew of the Protostar is made up of kids who are searching for themselves. This is the first Star Trek targeted at a young audience and connects with them in a way that teenagers can relate to.
Jankom is very gruff and has a distinct attitude full of laughing and bravado, but it also seems to be his way of masking the fact that he doesn't know who he is, where he came from, and how he wound up where he now is..
To read more about Mantzoukas’ thoughts on his character and his knowledge of Star Trek in general, get the Protostar’s sun-based engine fired up and head over to IGN.com for this and much more.
Thaddeus Tuffentsamer is an internationally selling author. His books have been sold in the US, the UK, Sweden, Germany, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Italy, and France. He has a series of young reader novels, a satirical self-help book, (which, according to reviews, actually has some pretty solid counsel), and has joined the list of professional Sherlock Holmes authors.
He promises that his works will never contain profanity, gratuitous violence, or anything else that would prevent the entire family from enjoying them together.
He spends his days working in healthcare administration and in his evenings, in between plans for becoming “Lord Emperor of everything,” he types away at his keyboard letting his imagination out for the world to read.
He is fortunate to have a wonderful wife and two beautiful daughters. He currently lives in Goodyear Arizona with his wife.
