Wil Wheaton on Wesley Crusher’s Impostor Syndrome: ‘He Had This Revelation’

Wil Wheaton seems to be loving life these days. While the author, actor and host is well known for his career as a child performer in titles such as Stand by Me and, of course, Star Trek: The Next Generation, as an adult he has put a lot of distance between himself and that earlier version of Wil Wheaton.

While he has continued to act, including in a range of voice roles, Wheaton has also cultivated a persona as a professional geek. As the host of The Ready Room, the Paramount+ Star Trek after show, Wheaton holds court with everyone who’s anyone in the current Star Trek sphere. He’s also an author and an advocate for mental health awareness. I spoke to him about the arc of his career and how he and his Star Trek character, Wesley Crusher, actually have a lot in common.

Wil Wheaton with his Star Trek: The Next Generation castmates.The Most Significant Thing Star Trek Has Given Wil WheatonWheaton has been vocal about the difficulties he faced as a child. While from the outside it may have seemed as though he had the perfect Hollywood life, he says it was far from it. But landing the role of Wesley Crusher on Star Trek changed him in a way he could not have anticipated.

“Probably the most meaningful and significant thing that Star Trek has given me, and what will be the longest lasting thing, is that [it] gave me a family,” he says. “I’m a survivor of child abuse and exploitation. I lived in a house with four other people, but I was not part of a family. My parents worked real hard to be mom and dad to my brother and sister. My dad was a bully to me, and my mom was an incompetent manager who I couldn’t fire. I was super-alienated, super-alone, super-lonely. And when I was at work, I was with people who saw me and loved me, and just by treating me the way I guess decent people treat other people, something I was not experiencing at home, I felt loved and I felt safe, and I felt seen.”

The cast of The Next Generation didn’t know what was going on at home with Wheaton, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t help ease his struggles – even if they didn’t realize it at the time. Jonathan Frakes in particular was an important presence for the young actor.

When I was at work… I felt loved and I felt safe, and I felt seen.

“Frakes was just… he showed up for me and was more of a dad to me than my dad ever was, when he didn’t even know that that’s what he was doing, when he didn’t even know that he was filling that role for me,” says Wheaton. “And I’ll cherish it always. … I could go to anyone in my cast with any questions about anything that was important to me and know that they were going to tell me the truth, even if it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. And that was really, really valuable to me.”

Wesley Crusher’s Impostor SyndromeDuring his time on The Next Generation, Wheaton often felt that he had to “prove everything to everybody” – essentially that he wasn’t good enough to be on the show. He also feared that eventually he would be “found out” and that the producers and his castmates and everyone else would realize he wasn’t worthy.

Wesley at the helm of the USS Enterprise.Of course, this is classic impostor syndrome, though he didn’t know that at the time. But over the years, as he saw other child actors like The Phantom Menace’s Jake Lloyd also go through the abuse that much of fandom had heaped on Wesley/Wheaton, he eventually formed the idea that perhaps Wesley also felt the same way. And so he wrote about it.

“I started thinking about Wesley having this revelation that Starfleet was not the thing that was meant for him, and that everyone expected him to do that because it was in his family,” recalls Wheaton. “His mom was real supportive of him doing that because it’s what she knew. He thought that if he was eventually the captain of a ship someday, he could live up to the memory of his father and make Picard proud of him. I didn’t really put together that I was experiencing a lot of those same things myself in my life and in my career.”

The throughline between Wesley and Wheaton also comes into play with the idea of everybody “staring” at them, as the actor puts it. Both were celebrities of sorts, one a boy genius and the other a TV actor, and with the staring also comes the judging.

I didn’t really put together that I was experiencing a lot of those same things myself in my life and in my career.

“He doesn’t know anybody, but everybody knows him,” he continues. “I really felt that. … We were the only kid around a bunch of adults, and there were a lot of adults in the world who were like, why you? And the answer was, I don’t know. I don’t know. And I’m trying my best. And having to constantly explain and having to constantly justify, it is exhausting. And when I realized that Wesley probably had that same thing, I realized that this is something that gifted kids have. This is a thing that the really, really smart, weird kids – I was one of them – that we all have. The kids that are asked by adults to do things, and then when we do them, somehow we’re criticized for doing them. … So I wrote that thing because I know that a lot of kids related to Wesley Crusher, a lot of kids saw themselves in him and they identified with him being on the starship they wanted to be on. And I know this because at this point I have heard this 60 or 70,000 times across the decades.”

The Family CrusherOf course, Wesley is just one member of the Crusher family. His mom, Gates McFadden’s Doctor Beverly Crusher, was seen recently in a cameo in Star Trek: Prodigy Season 2, but she also returned with most of the cast of The Next Generation on Picard Season 3 last year, where we learned that Wesley now has a brother – Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers)!

Wheaton reprised his role as Wesley on Prodigy too, but he’s also keen to see a full Crusher family team-up in some future iteration of Trek, be it in the proposed Picard spin-off Star Trek: Legacy or somewhere else.

Wesley on Star Trek: Prodigy.“I hope that it can happen,” he says. “It would just be so interesting to see what happens when you take… So Wesley Crusher doesn’t exist anymore. He’s The Traveler now. And until someone who is being paid by Paramount to tell a different story tells a different story, his story is as a Traveler you don’t exist in the same linear, real time as everyone else. Wesley, the creature you used to know as Wesley Crusher, has lived a hundred thousand lifetimes and has been everywhere in all of space and time. He’s essentially… like The Travelers and The Time Lords [from Doctor Who] are very similar. And I know that is actually canonically accurate. I got sign off on that.”

Wheaton fully acknowledges that this is just his idea for how things could play out, but he thinks that Wesley, despite his vast powers, still loves his family and would miss his mom and want to visit them. We already saw him do as much in Prodigy, but Jack was just a baby at that point.

“So what happens when you’re essentially this time-traveling, quasi-immortal being?” he laughs. “By the way, here’s your mom and your little brother. … Your mom hasn’t seen you in 30 years. But for you, it’s been like 40,000 years or whatever it’s been. I just wonder how that would work. It would take a really, really good writer. But I would love it.”

This interview was conducted on the Star Trek cruise – a.k.a. Star Trek: The Cruise VII. For more chats from the ship, check out my interviews with Walter Koenig and Denise Crosby.

Talk to Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!

Top image by Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images