10 Star Trek Actors Who Suffered From Typecasting

"I'm a success story of a class clown," as Brent Spiner described himself in Brent Spiner: Data and Beyond, Part One (Star Trek: The Next Generation Motion Picture Collection [Blu-Ray] special features). Spiner is well known for his delightfully wicked sense of humour that often tends towards the self-deprecating. Of course, his comedic acting talent is ever evident in Data, who was, in spite of himself, surely the funniest character on Star Trek: The Next Generation, even before the emotion chip.

Though not unfamiliar with typecasting, Spiner has arguably not suffered the most from it. The actor appears on this list because he has taken the matter and, like Data hooked up to the computer in Disaster, humorously turned it on its head. In an interview for The Washington Post, Spiner commented,

I, frankly, like to think I've been typecast as the reason when I don't get jobs, because the alternative is that I'm just lousy. But all that being said […], if I had to have one character I had to be typecast as, it would be this character [Data].

Spiner has not been afraid to be cast to type as the exaggerated version of himself, post-Data, on several occasions. In his own web-series Fresh Hell, Spiner played Spiner, the actor struggling to revive his career after the "incident," heckled by those shouting the android's name. "At least I'm not Brent Spiner" is the running gag of Fresh Hell, even for former castmate LeVar Burton, who also played a heightened version of himself in episode two of the show's second season. Both appeared as themselves on the Big Bang Theory, and in the short film self-send-up Brentwood. Who needs an Emmy anyway!