Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Captain Pike

In The Cage (and in the reused footage in The Menagerie) Captain Pike was portrayed by Jeffery Hunter. After the series was rejected, Hunter moved on to other projects and, by the time the writers decided to bring Pike back, his asking price was too high, so Sean Kenney was brought in to portray the disfigured and retired Pike. Kenney already looked strikingly similar to Hunter, and his heavy makeup was used to cover any noticeable differences.

Decades later, we got to see an alternate version of Pike in the rebooted 'Kelvin timeline', portrayed by Bruce Greenwood. This version was able to avoid his fate from the prime timeline, but ended up dying way sooner at the hands of Khan, as we discussed earlier.

Lastly, Anson Mount joined the cast of Discovery's second season as the prime Captain Pike in between the episodes The Cage and The Menagerie. Mount turned Pike into one of Starfleet's kindest and most compassionate officers, a welcome change from Captain Lorca from season one. Immediately after taking command of Discovery, Pike made it clear that he was a different kind of leader by cracking jokes with the senior staff and learning all of their names. The fans' loved Mount's Pike (and the other returning characters from The Cage) was actually one of the main reasons why Strange New Worlds was greenlit.