Gates McFadden is best known as Dr. Beverly Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation and its four movie spin-offs, but her career goes well beyond Star Trek not just as an actress but also as a choreographer… and now as a podcast host.

McFadden and NacelleCast Studios recently launched the Gates McFadden Investigates: Who Do You Think You Are? podcast, which features her connecting with her co-stars and fellow Trek actors for conversations that cover their time in Gene Roddenberry’s universe, their personal lives, larger careers, and much more. It’s sort of the anti-Star Trek podcast in that it’s not really about Star Trek, but it also features all of your favorite Star Trek people! (So far she’s had on most of her TNG co-stars as well as Deep Space Nine actress Nana Visitor.)

I chatted with McFadden about the show, where she’s been finding new ways to talk to the friends she’s known for decades, and of course we also discussed her time on Star Trek and what she would like to see Dr. Crusher get up to if she ever comes back to play her again on Star Trek: Picard.

The idea of hosting a podcast couldn’t have been further from McFadden’s mind when she received a call from The Nacelle Company producer Brian Volk-Weiss (The Toys That Made Us).

“He said, ‘I really want you to do a podcast, and I’d like to produce it,’” McFadden laughs. “I was flattered and my first question was, ‘Well, gosh, thanks for calling, but why me?!’”

Volk-Weiss is more than just a producer, however; he’s also a fan of the franchise. After a lot of questions from McFadden and much back and forth, he finally convinced her to give it a try.

“He first wanted me to talk about Star Trek I think, and I shut him down immediately because not one of my cast members would come onto a podcast with one of ourselves and talk about Star Trek,” she says. “We could certainly talk about things, but nothing that we would want recorded, probably! So anyway, I said no, and he called me back a couple of times. And by the third time I really thought, ‘What am I doing? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. It’s the pandemic. I’ve lost a bunch of jobs. Why don’t you just learn to say yes and try something new?’”

And so Gates McFadden Investigates was born. McFadden decided to also teach herself the technical side of podcasting along the way, including sound editing and more.

Read the full interview/article in our press library.