Trek guest actors in maybe surprising roles

Susan Oliver, Byron Morrow, Barry Russo, Garth Pillsbury in The Ivy Curtain, an episode of The Invaders!
JB

 

It's amazing the number of people who contributed to that short-lived series.

 

Not really. The Invaders was contemporaneous with Star Trek, so naturally they both drew from the same pool of established actors and thus had a lot of overlap. Casting directors like to go with proven talents, so shows that are on at the same time will tend to use a lot of the same people.

 

Those same actors probably did the rounds on all the top shows from that era and then films too!
JB

 

Like Space 1999? I wonder if we find most of them there too.

 

That was made in England, so there weren't many American actors in it aside from the leads. Also it's a 1970s production.

 

Joan Collins and Karl Held are the only two actors from Trek that appeared in Space 1999 that I can think of!
JB

 

Saw John Hoyt (Dr. Boyce in 'The Cage') as the bad guy on an episode of Laramie airing on the digital subchannel Grit yesterday.

 

And this episode became the basis for an episode of Mad Men years later, footage from it being used in the episode.

 

I'm pretty sure that Ian Wolfe appeared in some of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies in the nineteen forties! Sherlock Holmes And The Secret Code (1946) The Pearl of Death (1944) Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943) and even The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944) even though these films were only twenty odd years earlier than Star Trek, they seemed somehow older and visually from a much different age!
JB

 

Of course they recast the character Joseph Gordon. Steve McQueen would have been rather stiff at this late date.

Sorry.

 

Boston Legal used footage from Studio One ("The Defender," the two-part episode that was essentially a pilot for The Defenders).

Mad Men used footage from The Defenders ("The Benefactor," a first season episode that tackles abortion).

 

I've always been impressed with Walter Koenigs role on Babylon 5; I got the impression that Alfred Bester had a bit of russian heritage, but he was just fantastic.
I enjoyed seeing Dr. Kelso (from Scrubs) on Babylon 5, and on a rewatch realizing he'd guest starred as a Federation scientist in that TNG episode about the nanites. God, that angry old geezer used to be young!

Late last year, after scratching my head for the first two installments, I realized that the Vulcan chancellor? prime minister? from the Enterprise 3-parter in Season 4 was played by Robert Foxworth, who also portrayed Admiral Leyton in DS9 Homefront/Paradise Lost; and if I ever see him guest starring in another show I will automatically assume he's at the top of some nefarious conspiracy. Interestingly enough, at the time that Homefront went into production, he had to decline an invitation to reprise his role as General Hague in Babylon 5 due to scheduling conflicts, and B5 killed him off-screen. Must be a conspiracy.

 

Well, Walter Koenig actually is ethnically Russian. Chekov's accent was based on Koenig's parents' accent, which was influenced by the time they spent living in Lithuania before coming to the US.

I'll always think of Foxworth as the hero of the Gene Roddenberry-Gene Coon pilot movie The Questor Tapes. I got so used to thinking of him as a good guy that it was surprising to see him as a villain on DS9 and later ENT.

 

So here's James Gregory as a sheriff leading a posse of men across the Southwestern desert in an obscure TV Western series called The Outcasts.

 

I think I saw at least one episode of that series.

 

It's a shame that Ed Asner never played a TNG-era Klingon. Although his character of Hudson on Gargoyles looked a bit like one.