INTERVIEW: Chase Masterson on her ‘Unbelievable’ new film and anti-bullying nonprofit

Photo: Chase Masterson stars in the new sci-fi parody Unbelievable!!!!! Photo courtesy of the artist / Provided with permission.

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Chase Masterson is on a mission — actually several missions. She continues to craft an impressive TV and film career, including two roles in the new sci-fi parody Unbelievable!!!!!, and she regularly promotes and supports the nonprofit she started a few years ago, the Pop Culture Hero Coalition, which develops and distributes anti-bullying programs at comic conventions and in schools and communities.

The actor is still beloved my her legions of fans who remember her days on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, where she played Leeta, the Bajoran Dabo girl who fell for Rom, a Ferengi played by Max Grodénchik. She portrayed a popular character on perhaps the most popular of Star Trek’s many shows, and to keep the energy from that sci-fi experience alive, she routinely appears at comic conventions — in person in previous years and this year virtually.

For Unbelievable, from producer Angelique Fawcette and writer/director Steven L. Fawcette, Masterson joined with a voluminous cast that includes a number of other Star Trek actors — Garrett Wang, Nichelle Nichols, Marina Sirtis, Michael Dorn, Robert Picardo and Nana Visitor, to name a few. Then there are the many non-Trek actors in the ensemble, including Snoop Dogg, Robert Davi and Michael Madsen.

“I got asked by a casting director,” Masterson said in a recent phone interview. “He called and said, ‘Hey, they’re doing this movie with a lot of Trek actors.’ To be honest, when that kind of thing goes around, you think, let’s just see if they find the funding. But he said, ‘No, this is real,’ so I went and had lunch with Angelique Fawcette and Steven Fawcette, the producer and writer-director. And they are just absolutely lovely people.”

Originally Masterson was cast in the role of Natasha, a Russian pilot, and her contribution called for a day of shooting alongside Picardo, best known for his role on Star Trek: Voyager. Several weeks later, she received a call that one of the female leads had dropped out of the picture and would she be interested in taking on another role — Connie, the actress who plays an astronaut. For this second character, she had the chance to act with Tim Russ and Wang, both of Star Trek: Voyager fame.

“Tim and Garrett, they’ve got their own chemistry,” she said. “They’re up to speed with each other and the rest of that cast because Voyager is always a very jokey cast. Deep Space Nine wasn’t as jokey a cast, but I love working with all of them, all of the Voyager cast and really everybody from all the casts. So it was great to reunite. Garrett is a laugh a minute, and Tim is more on the quiet side but has a very dry sense of humor. So, yes, we had a lot of fun.”

Unbelievable, which recently premiered and is now available on Amazon HD, is a love letter to Star Trek and another opportunity for Masterson that can be traced back to her days playing Leeta on DS9. “I never would have dreamed that we would have this much fun for this long,” she said. “I did know that Star Trek fans are very loyal, and that they are supportive of both our continuing work and our charities, which is one reason why I really wanted to do the show. … Star Trek is the one show that I really targeted myself to be on. I did a casting director showcase and met Ron Surma, very much on purpose, very mindfully because I knew Star Trek was a powerful show in terms of its storytelling and its popularity with the current fanbase, but also that it would be a legacy as an actress. And I’m grateful for every second.”

Masterson was knowledgable of the Star Trek franchise because she used to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation with a boyfriend. Well, actually, it was a little different than simply her tuning in each week. She told Hollywood Soapbox that she was only allowed to call her boyfriend during commercial breaks of the Trek series. So they would both separately watch the show, him because he was a Trekkie, her because she was waiting for the commercial breaks.

“Who’s sorry now,” Masterson said. “But it struck me as a very powerful show and the stories [Gene] Roddenberry told from the very beginning were so transcendent. If only for the storytelling, this is a show that is quite a remarkable thing to be on. I think that’s why it’s lasted 54 years. The fans recognize the transcendence of the stories, the characters. The show speaks of risk — as Kirk said, ‘risk is our business.’ It speaks of bravery, and of loss, and of deep friendship, and doing the right thing even when it’s tough, and family, and peace, and war, and the costs of war, and all of those social issues. Deep Space Nine delved into homelessness and poverty. There are so many real-world issues that Star Trek so brilliantly showcases. That is why the show is still so popular.”

When Masterson visits fan conventions — like she plans to do virtually at GalaxyCon and in person at the Official Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas — she often meets devotees of Star Trek who have been greatly impacted by Deep Space Nine and Leeta specifically. They are fans, many of them girls and young women, who find the Leeta role so inspiring.

“I’m so grateful every time I hear that,” she said. “It makes such a distance. Leeta and Rom had a powerful storyline in that Leeta loved the guy who was the little runt brother who was the outcast, who was only pretty on the inside, and so often each of us feel that way. And, to be sure, actors we all feel that way. Human beings tend to get in a space where we feel like we’re not enough and that we’ll never compete or have those things that we want and dream, and Leeta saw Rom for who he was, not for who everyone else said he was. She saw him as a beautiful, brave, good-hearted soul and fell in love, and I think that’s why the Leeta-Rom storyline is so popular, in addition to it’s fun to be a glamorous Dabo girl.”

When Masterson helped create the role of Leeta, there wasn’t much mythology known about Bajor, her home world, or what it meant to be a Dabo girl, so she had a blank slate and worked with the writers on fleshing out the part.

“There wasn’t a lot to go on,” Masterson said. “I surmised that Leeta was a Bajoran war orphan that got a job on this station in order to flee Bajor and had bigger dreams for herself than wanting to be just a lady of the evening, as most Dabo girls were. She didn’t play those games. She didn’t that ‘outside work.’ She had a lot of integrity, and she stood up for herself. She stood up during the Bar Association for the union and had a lot of solid ideals when you look closely at her. Another thing about Leeta, even at the very beginning episode, ‘The Explorer,’ when I was flirting with Dr. Bashir, I didn’t come on to him. I did a coy little thing suggesting that I might need to see him for a doctor’s visit, so the writers give you those little clues as to who a person is or who a character could grow to be.”

The casts of each Star Trek show have different collective personalities. The TNG crew is almost always seen as best friends and only a few seconds away from a joke. The Voyager crew is also known for their good humor, whereas Masterson’s show, DS9, is the serious one in the franchise.

“It was definitely more serious than either TNG or Voyager,” she said. “I don’t know the energy on the other shows, but the shows that bookended Deep Space Nine, those casts were just looser. That definitely could fit the subject matter of Deep Space Nine. DS9 was a darker show. It didn’t have everything wrapped up in a bow on a regular basis. There was a lot of pain.”

Nowadays, when Masterson signs on the dotted line for a new film or TV show, she is searching for something different. She wants to stretch her acting capabilities (and sometimes her musical capabilities, as she did in Yesterday Was a Lie). “I often get asked would I do Star Trek again, and I say, ‘Sure, it would be great, but the kind of role that I really crave is something darker and richer and meatier than the role of Leeta and also in a different way than those I’ve played,’” Masterson said. “A lot of people don’t realize I have played a bereaved mother on E.R. I played a mother getting a divorce on another show called Live Shot, which I was recurring on. I played a doctor who had lost her son in a movie several years back. There have been very solid roles, and yet I’m still known for Leeta. So I think in a sense I need to keep on breaking out of that and get deeper.”

One way she changes things up is by heading her own nonprofit. The Pop Culture Hero Coalition, founded in 2013, was an idea that Masterson had because she saw a need for people to become allies and speak out against injustice in all its forms. That initial idea has blossomed into a successful organization that regularly provides anti-bullying programs to the world of pop culture and beyond.

“Bullying is the same, whether it’s in kindergarten on the playground, or in high school, or the workplace,” she said. “It’s all the same dynamic. It’s oppression that doesn’t belong in human lives, and it’s because of a power imbalance. I wanted to step out and, first of all, address that and help people learn empathy so we can have a kinder, more inclusive world of justice. I also wanted to bring inclusion in the same way that Star Trek does. … Let’s make this a world where we can all live long and prosper.”

Masterson spoke of the coalition providing crowd-sourced empathy. Along those lines, they have worked with the United Nations, Amnesty International, the ACLU, the Trevor Project and many other organizations. Ultimately she sees the nonprofit as creating an intersection between pop culture and social justice.

“I think what people need to realize is that being kind and being inclusive and becoming allies for other people is fun,” she said. “We make the point that we can all be heroes. We can all do things that are more powerful than we can possibly imagine, and like any superhero, we all have flaws. We all have weak spots that we overcome, like Superman and his Kryptonite, any superhero you can think of. We are all flawed individuals who all also have incredible capability, and that’s our message.”

During these COVID-19 days, the Pop Culture Hero Coalition has created many remote lessons and programs on a variety of topics, including developing one’s emotional coping skills, resiliency, how social distancing can become social isolation, managing family conflict and identity. These programs — geared toward children, teenagers and adults — are provided free of charge thanks to a grant from Perfect World Entertainment and Star Trek Online.

“You don’t have to feel like you’re Wonder Woman in order to actually be Wonder Woman,” Masterson said. “You just have to keep going and keep speaking out.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Chase Masterson stars in Unbelievable!!!!!, a new sci-fi satire available on Amazon HD, and she also founded Pop Culture Hero Coalition. Click here for more information on the movie. Click here for more information on the nonprofit.