Jonathan Frakes Got A Taste Of His Own Medicine When He Directed His First Star Trek Episode – /Film

While reports of the cast’s rambunctiousness surely exist, the people involved in the show mostly seem to look back fondly on the experience decades later. One lifelong “Star Trek” fan, Ron Diamond, wrote on Medium that when he visited the set one day in 1992, he saw Worf actor Michael Dorn pop up on set between breaks, jokingly choking Patrick Stewart, to which the actor played dead. Stewart also once shared that Spiner made a sign for Stewart’s trailer door featuring a moniker given to him in an early Trek casting announcement: “unknown British Shakespearean actor.” On the scale from playful to nightmarish, the cast of TNG seems to have been firmly on the benign side, but even so, they apparently had a knack for slowing down production.

“We would be yakking right up until action,” Frakes told Variety, noting that this was in part because Stewart “had set his high bar from the moment he showed up” that inspired the rest of the cast to always show up super prepared. They didn’t need to spend downtime rehearsing, so they apparently spent it chatting. “The smart ADs actually built time into days that were all on the Enterprise bridge, knowing that we’d all have to catch up because we hadn’t seen each other,” Frakes noted.