10 Star Trek Actors Who Suffered From Typecasting

Now a prolific director, Jonathan Frakes hasn't had the time to be typecast. That so many Star Trek alum of the 'Berman era' have gone on to successful careers behind the camera — Roxann Dawson, LeVar Burton, and Robert Duncan McNeill, for example — owes in large part to the semi-to-unofficial 'Star Trek Directors' School' whereby cast members at the time could learn the new (directorial) job on the job.

That said, in a 2018 interview for StarTrek.com, Frakes reflected on some of the other factors that motivated him to direct:

I don't know if I knew subconsciously or consciously that there'd be this typecasting. As Leonard Nimoy famously said, 'It's better to be typecast than not to be cast at all.' But there was a certain thing that happened after the show that you can see evidence of from The Original Series, from our series, Voyager, DS9, Enterprise. […] I don't know what you'd call that in your world, but there certainly is… It was a double-edged sword.

In the same breath, and typecasting or no, Frakes was also extremely modest about his acting talent. We all know he has that in abundance, proven most positively by his reprisal of Riker in the third season of Star Trek: Picard. The Saturn Award nomination was most well-deserved!