‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Star Anson Mount Is a Major Hollywood Player—but He Can’t Bear To Actually Live There

“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” star Anson Mount has enjoyed the kind of prolonged Hollywood success that few actors manage to achieve—and he’s done it despite turning his back on the L.A. lifestyle entirely.

Mount, 53, began his acting career in the late 1990s, but shot to global fame in 2002, when he starred alongside Britney Spears, Zoe Saldana, and Taryn Manning in the movie “Crossroads.”

Since then, the actor—who was born and raised in Tennessee—has appeared in dozens of other projects, including the AMC series “Hell on Wheels” and, most recently, Paramount’s latest “Star Trek” spinoff.

Mount has been on a whirlwind media tour to promote the fourth season of the show, spending several days in New York City for interviews, including a now-viral appearance on “The View,” during which host Joy Behar planted a very passionate kiss on his mouth.

The actor later joked that he’d immediately flagged the interaction to his wife, Darah Trang, telling TV Insider: “I asked my wife to promise me that she wouldn’t divorce me. She thought it was hilarious.”

Needless to say, Mount appears very comfortable in the spotlight.

Yet, behind the scenes, he has gone out of his way to avoid the stereotypical lifestyle of a Hollywood actor—eschewing Los Angeles in favor of returning to his home state of Tennessee, where he and his spouse own a home in the West Meade area of Nashville.

Having grown up 30 miles outside of Nashville in an area called White Bluff, Mount began his acting career with a local program at Sewanee University. However, he recently admitted to Nashville Scene that he never imagined he would one day become a fully fledged movie star.

“You don’t grow up in a place like White Bluff and think, ‘Oh, I’m gonna go be in the movies,'” he said. “It just doesn’t seem like an option that’s on the table.”

Still, Mount didn’t let that stop him from pursuing his dream—which ultimately saw him relocating to New York City so he could study acting at Columbia University, where he earned an MFA in theatre in 1998.

The following year, he earned his first credited role, appearing in an episode of the hit show “Ally McBeal,” which was quickly followed by a small part in “Sex and the City.”

Like so many actors, however, Mount felt drawn to Los Angeles, where he secured the role of Ben in “Crossroads,” along with a number of other, smaller parts. But even as his career was taking off, the on-screen star struggled with the L.A. lifestyle, revealing to The Bend Bulletin in 2011 that he managed to stick it out only a few years before heading back to the Big Apple.

“I found myself being 36 years old and found myself dyeing my hair and trying to be the best-looking guy in the room. I just couldn’t live with it,” he said. “I wanted to be back in New York and grow my hair out and start pursuing the roles I wanted to pursue.”

Still, he admitted that life in New York—where he ended up buying an apartment in Brooklyn—was by no means easy. He joked that he had essentially gone from one extreme to the other, leaving L.A. where he was “bored” and taking up residence in a city that can feel very “hard.”

“It was so easy to just roll out of my bed and go for a jog on the beach and go to an audition and go to the beach. It was a lovely lifestyle. But I wasn’t struggling against anything,” he shared.

“I moved back to New York City from Los Angeles a few years ago. … To move back to New York from a place that’s so comfortable, that’s hard. It was time to get back to where I had a community, and it was time to stop competing for work I was not interested in. I just felt bored.”

Mount ended up spending more than a decade in the New York area, although he later moved out of the city and into a home in Connecticut, which property records show he purchased for $1.6 million in 2018, the same year that he and Trang tied the knot.

The couple lived in the home for several years, welcoming their first daughter, Clover, there. After becoming a parent, the actor said he realized that he wanted to be closer to his family—and raise his kids somewhere with more space and a better support system.

“Once we had a daughter, it quickly became clear that we needed more than farmland, and it was also time to be closer to my mom,” he explained to Nashville Scene.

“I’d always felt that Nashville was a great place to raise kids.”

His wife wasn’t immediately convinced about the move, prompting Mount to take her on a tour of Nashville, during which he joked that he ensured she received the “royal treatment” in a bid to help her fall in love with the city in the same way that he had.

That tactic certainly appears to have paid off—and the couple listed their Connecticut home for $2.2 million in July 2024. They sold it for the full asking price a few months later, before relocating to Nashville full time.

They welcomed their second daughter, Violet, in July 2025.

After the move, Mount spent time commuting between their home in Nashville and the “Star Trek” set in Canada—paying tribute to his wife in a September 2025 Instagram post, in which he praised her for caring for their two children alone, while also settling their family into their new home without him.

“Just got to my hotel room,” he wrote, while sharing a photo of himself lying on his bed. “I’m commuting for the rest of the year to shoot Season 5 of ‘Star Trek Strange New Worlds.’ A bit tired but nothing compared to my amazing wife who’s managing both kids and settling a new house in my absence.

“I’m still happy I chose to be an actor but there are realities that come with any career choice. And travel is definitely the big reality of this business. I’m just lucky to have a family that supports me and bosses who try to help me make it all fit.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Mount is eager to boost the entertainment industry in his own state, something he says can be done only if Tennessee improves incentives for TV and film productions.

“The current incentives package that we have functions essentially as a pipe dream in comparison to peer state,” he told Nashville Scene.

“We lose over 50% of our film grads to places like Los Angeles and Atlanta and New York,” he added. “That’s the lifeblood of any entertainment business. What you’re looking for in film production is a place that you can go and find the majority of your workforce already there.”

When he isn’t busy filming, parenting, or campaigning for the Nashville movie scene, the actor throws himself into another, rather unique hobby, something he started while he and his spouse were still living in Connecticut: pottery.

The actor regularly shares Instagram videos of himself opening up his kiln to reveal the fruits of his labor, with a recent clip revealing that he’s set up the apparatus in a special pottery shed at his Nashville home.