Jonathan Frakes Got A Taste Of His Own Medicine When He Directed His First Star Trek Episode
By the time Jonathan Frakes directed the recent surprise release crossover episode of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," the actor was no stranger to stepping behind the camera for the sci-fi franchise. In fact, the actor best known for playing William T. Riker on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" has been directing episodes of "Star Trek" ever since 1990, when he helmed a season three episode of TNG in which Data (Brent Spiner) creates an android "child" called Lal.
In a wide-ranging retrospective with Variety, Frakes looked back on those early directorial efforts, sharing some memories about key episodes of the franchise. When it comes to his directorial debut, though, he mostly remembers realizing just how rowdy he and his costars could be on set. "Our cast, as you probably know, is notoriously rambunctious," Frakes told Variety. "I was, for better or for worse, one of the leaders of that kind of behavior on the set. Some directors really didn't like coming to work with us because we were that bad."
The TNG cast was 'notoriously rambunctious'
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.
'The sound department gave me a bullhorn'
The actor-turned-director realized just how hard the cast was to manage when he directed the Data-centric episode "The Offspring." As Frakes recalled, "The sound department gave me a bullhorn." In a separate interview that Frakes did with StarTrek.com, he revealed that "all the actors took the piss out of me on the set." Being put in charge was an eye-opening experience for the filmmaker, to say the least. "I had a lot of support, including from my acting company," he told Variety, "But I realized what these other directors had gone through and what a**holes we were. And I had not a leg to stand on in terms of asking them to behave."
Though Frakes has only great things to say about the cast of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," it sounds like that set can be pretty energetic too. The "Those Old Scientists" director called Anson Mount "really sneaky funny," and noted that Rebecca Romijn is "a singer as well as a comedian," while Ethan Peck "has a delightful sense of humor." Directing his first "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode may have felt a bit like herding cats, but "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" was a different kind of playful. "I secretly knew that this was going to be a playground," Frakes told Variety.
That vibe came through in the episode, a raucous, funny hour that sees Ensigns Mariner (Tawny Newsome) and Boimler (Jack Quaid) time travel back to the Enterprise days and very nearly muck up the future in the process. By now, Frakes is an excellent Trek director who's given us not just great episodes of the show, but films like "First Contact" and "Insurrection." He's clearly learned to manage his casts with a spirit of leadership Will Riker himself would be proud of.