10 Background Star Trek Actors More Important Than You Think
6. Bruce Hyde As Lieutenant Riley
Lieutenant Kevin Riley served aboard Kirk's Enterprise during The Original Series. The character first appeared in the episode The Naked Time as one of the first members of the crew to succumb to a ship-wide disease that caused people to act as if they were drunk. Somehow, in this state, he single-handedly managed to commandeer the engineering section and reroute all ship controls to his own terminal, putting the whole ship under his control all while proclaiming himself "Captain Kevin Thomas Riley" and singing loudly over the ship's speakers. However, his story gets even weirder.
He appears one more time in the episode The Conscience Of The King where we learn that his family was tragically killed by a Thanos-like villain named Kodos The Execuctioner who murdered half the population of Riley's home world to preserve food supplies. Kirk apparently also lived on this world at the time and the two share a strange, tragic bond because of it.
Bruce was originally given a different name in this episode but when the writers realized that it was him playing the role they changed the scripts to match his original character, giving an otherwise generic crewman a more profound history and a fellowship with Kirk.