10 Star Trek Guest Stars Who Went On To Huge Careers

The "Star Trek" franchise isn't just known for its riveting sci-fi stories, it's also beloved for its strong ensemble casts. Rarely recruiting big stars, the franchise has a history of casting relative unknowns and talented up-and-comers and giving them a platform to show just how good they are. Over the six decades since it first arrived on television, "Star Trek" has turned many of its cast members into superstars, from William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy to Patrick Stewart and Kate Mulgrew. The biggest Starfleet heroes aren't the only ones to see a big boost from appearing in "Star Trek," though.

What you may not know is that there are a number of small-time guest stars who popped up in various "Trek" shows through the years who went on to huge careers years later. Some of them were young aspiring actors already on a clear path to greatness who used "Star Trek" as a stepping stone on their way to the top, while others were under-appreciated but highly talented veterans who found success later on. Some have been proud to call the franchise an early career highlight, and at least one wishes he'd never done it. You might be surprised by some of the famous faces who had early career guest-starring roles in "Star Trek."

Ashley Judd is known for her roles in films like "Kiss the Girls," "Double Jeopardy," and "Animal Attraction," though she made her debut in a 1992 episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." She played Ensign Robin Lefler, who actually popped up in a pair of "TNG" episodes, making Judd a rare recurring guest star who went on to bigger fame.

Lefler first shows up in the classic Season 5 installment "Darmok," one of the best episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." The episode has a gripping story that sees Picard (Patrick Stewart) trapped on a planet and forced to fight for survival alongside a fellow alien captain. Judd gets a small part to play back on the ship. Her appearance in "Darmok" is really a setup for a story a few episodes later: She shows up again in "The Game," where Ensign Wesley Crusher returns to the Enterprise from Starfleet Academy.

Lefler and Crusher have something of a fling in that episode, all amidst an alien conspiracy involving a device that brainwashes the Enterprise crew. Though a mere footnote in her career now, Judd's appearance in "The Game" is a noteworthy entry in her filmography for another big reason: She had her first on-screen kiss here, locking lips with Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley.

In "Star Trek: The Next Generation," we were introduced to a new kind of Federation starship: One with families aboard. This often led to stories involving troubled familial relationships and even children, and the Season 7 episode "Dark Page" has both. In this installment, Counselor Troi's mother arrives, and we learn a grim family secret: Deanna once had a sister who died when she was a baby, a sister that her mother never told her about. Guest starring in the episode is a very young Kirsten Dunst. She plays the aforementioned sister, Kestra, in flashbacks, as well as a visiting alien girl named Hedril who reminds Lwaxana Troi of her deceased daughter, triggering her trauma.

Dunst, of course, went on to stardom, appearing just a year later in "Interview with the Vampire" alongside Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Dunst's career was never the same after "Interview with the Vampire." That same year, she starred with Susan Sarandon, Christian Bale, and Winona Ryder in an adaptation of "Little Women," and in 1995, she starred opposite Robin Williams in the family adventure "Jumanji." Of course, she really hit the big time in the 2000s when she scored the role of Mary Jane Watson in Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" trilogy. But fans of "The Next Generation" were treated to her talents years before, where she demonstrated her abilities as a rare child actor to give a genuinely believable performance.

Not every relative unknown who guest starred in "Star Trek" who went on to a bigger career did so as an actor. Just like "Star Trek: The Next Generation" star Jonathan Frakes, at least one of them ditched acting in favor of work behind the camera. The biggest such actor, without a doubt, is Taylor Sheridan, the man who created the smash hit "Yellowstone" and who now spends his days writing, directing, and producing hit dramas like "Tulsa King" with Sylvester Stallone, "Landman" with Billy Bob Thornton, and "Lioness" with fellow "Trek" alum Zoe Saldana. 

Sheridan came to fame as an actor with his role as Deputy Chief David Hale in "Sons of Anarchy." Before that role, he had a small part in a 2004 episode of "Star Trek: Enterprise" titled "Chosen Realm." The Season 3 entry sees the NX-01 Enterprise coming across a group of religious fanatics. Sheridan plays Jareb, a member of an alien cult who attempts to commandeer the Enterprise for their own purposes. His character only has a small part to play, but it was probably a key part of his sizzle reel as he worked his way up, eventually scoring a recurring role on "Veronica Mars" before joining "Sons of Anarchy" on his way to Hollywood stardom.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan has made history in the sci-fi and superhero realms. On top of his long-running role as the villainous Negan on "The Walking Dead," he's played Batman's dad Thomas Wayne, the Comedian in "Watchmen," Joe Kessler in "The Boys," and he's the voice of Conquest in "Invincible." But, more than 20 years ago, Morgan had a role in an episode of "Star Trek: Enterprise."

In the 2003 entry "Carpenter Street," Morgan shows up under a hefty amount of latex and makeup to play a Xindi reptilian villain who travels back in time to the present day. There, he embarks on a covert mission to steal the blood of various humans to help his people make a devastating biological weapon that can annihilate mankind. He recruits a Detroit blood bank employee called Loomis (Leland Orser) to help with his scheme, but is thwarted by Captain Archer (Scott Bakula) and Vulcan Science officer T'Pol (Jolene Blalock), who travel back in time to stop his diabolical plans.

Seeing as he's hidden beneath a mask and a colorful costume, you'd be forgiven for not realizing the villain was Jeffrey Dean Morgan if you didn't read his name in the credits. With all that makeup, too, Morgan has since talked about how much he hated his guest spot on "Star Trek," even admitting that he nearly walked away from acting altogether because of it.

One of the biggest stars in the realm of culinary reality TV, Padma Lakshmi came to fame as a judge on "Top Chef" beginning in 2006. Since then, not only has she become a stalwart in the food judging arena, but she's also had her own series, "Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi," and has become a powerful activist and philanthropist, representing numerous causes around the globe. Before all of that, though, she was a model and aspiring actress, and one of her first on-screen roles was in an episode of "Star Trek: Enterprise."

It was in 2002, during the second season of "Enterprise," that Lakshmi made her one and only "Star Trek" appearance, playing an alien princess named Kaitaama in the episode "Precious Cargo." In the story, Chief Engineer Trip Tucker (Connor Trinneer) comes upon an alien ship dealing with a malfunction and finds a woman aboard in cryo-stasis. Forced to awaken her when her stasis pod faces a critical failure, Tucker learns to his chagrin that the woman is a spoiled princess who doesn't seem to appreciate all he's doing to save her life.

Though it wasn't her first role (that came in the Italian TV series "Linda e il brigadiere"), Lakshmi's part on "Enterprise" became one of her most lasting performances and was certainly her most notable gig prior to her "Top Chef" fame. After that, she mostly put acting behind her, though she's popped up in shows like "30 Rock" and "Royal Pains" playing exaggerated versions of herself.

The "Star Trek: Enterprise" episode featuring Padma Lakshmi wasn't the first time that the franchise told a story about a beautiful alien woman who is awakened from stasis aboard an alien craft. In the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "The Perfect Mate," that alien — a Kriosian empathic metamorph from Krios Prime — is also played by a future superstar; in this case, Famke Janssen. 

"The Perfect Mate" is a Season 5 episode in which the Enterprise hosts a diplomatic delegation headed to a rival planet for peace talks. Little does Captain Picard know that the delegation is also carrying with it a young woman who the envoy intends to give as a "gift" to their new allies. Picard is perturbed by the idea of a person being property, but he soon learns that this is, unfortunately, their custom: The woman, Kamala (Janssen), is a rare mutant who can use a special kind of telepathy to bond with a potential mate and become everything their heart desires.

A few years after this episode aired, Janssen would be cast as a Bond girl in Pierce Brosnan's "GoldenEye." She climbed another rung on the Hollywood ladder in 2000 when she and Patrick Stewart reunited on the big screen in "X-Men," where Janssen once again played a mutant with telepathic powers: Jean Grey, aka Phoenix. More recently, talk has surfaced that she might return to the Marvel role for "Avengers: Doomsday" alongside an already-confirmed Patrick Stewart, though Janssen herself has thrown cold water on those rumors.

Throughout the 1990s, Pamela Adlon was best known for her voice acting roles, most notably playing the spunky Ashley Spinelli in "Recess" and Bobby Hill in "King of the Hill," a part she returned to for the 2025 revival. She also created and starred in her own hit dramedy series, FX's "Better Things." Before all of this, back in 1989, a much younger Adlon had a big part in the iconic "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "Who Watches the Watchers."

One of several "Star Trek" episodes where Starfleet captains violate the Prime Directive, "Who Watches the Watchers" reveals that the Federation has covert installations on worlds with pre-warp civilizations. During a mission to the planet Mintaka III to repair one such outpost, a malfunction leads to a local Mintakan getting injured. He gets sent to the Enterprise for treatment and then has his memory wiped, but the procedure doesn't work and he remembers what happened, leading him to mistakenly believe that Picard is God.

This forces Captain Picard into a difficult dilemma: Reveal the truth to the locals and risk further contamination of their culture, or act as the supreme being they believe him to be and hand down commandments to follow. Adlon stars as Oji, the young daughter of the man who witnessed the outpost and was sent to the Enterprise to have his wounds treated. It was a pretty meaty role for her — ultimately, it's Oji's impassioned pleas to her father that help end the dilemma.

Daniel Dae Kim had been working steadily on television in the 1990s and early 2000s before he finally found his breakout role. That part came in the form of Jin in the J.J. Abrams smash hit "Lost," which turned him into a prime-time star. Since then, he's led a revival of "Hawaii Five-0," and, more recently, began starring in the Amazon spy thriller "Butterfly," which he also produces. But, back in the '90s, Kim got his start as a guest actor, with roles in everything from "Seinfeld" to "NYPD Blue." He appeared in a major role in the "Star Trek: Voyager" Season 6 episode "Blink of an Eye" — the best "Voyager" episode ever according to IMDb.

In "Blink of an Eye," the starship Voyager stumbles across a planet where time is accelerated. Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) and her crew become trapped above the planet by an unknown force, and they watch helplessly as thousands of years pass on the planet below, unable to break orbit. Kim stars as Gotana-Retz, an astronaut who the people on the planet eventually send up into the sky to make contact with Voyager. It wouldn't be Kim's last "Star Trek" role.

A few years later, Kim joined the cast of "Star Trek: Enterprise" in its third season, during the Xindi War arc. He played Corporal Chang, an Earth military soldier assigned to the ship under the command of Major Hayes (Stephen Culp), in a total of three episodes. Not long after that, Kim was tapped by Abrams for his new sci-fi island survivor series, catapulting him to fame.

For many years, Titus Welliver was one of those journeyman actors who you'd see everywhere on TV and in movies and say, "Hey, that's the guy from that thing!" He managed to snag his first regular role in 1997 on the cop drama "Brooklyn South," but that show didn't last beyond its first season. It wouldn't be until 2004 that Welliver got a shot on a big hit, with his recurring part as Silas Adams on "Deadwood." It would still be another decade, however, before he secured his biggest role, playing the titular diehard detective in Amazon's "Bosch" and its sequel, "Bosch: Legacy." What you may not know is that he had a guest part in two episodes of "Star Trek: Voyager" back in 1999.

Welliver's first appearance was in "Equinox," the finale episode of "Voyager" Season 5. He played Maxwell Burke, the first officer of the USS Equinox, a wayward science vessel that got catapulted into the Delta Quadrant just like Captain Janeway and the USS Voyager. While initially greeted as friends, Burke and the Equinox crew eventually come to blows with Voyager when it's revealed that they've been slaughtering a race of alien life forms to power their ship and are willing to commit genocide to get back to the Alpha Quadrant.

Season 6 opened with "Equinox, Part II," with Welliver reprising his role. The two-part story finishes with the surviving crew of the Equinox — including Burke — joining the crew of Voyager, but, in the end, this proved to be one of several unresolved plotlines in "Star Trek: Voyager." In hindsight, knowing where Welliver's career went, it was a missed opportunity not to add him to the cast in a regular role.

In 2024, we lost one of Hollywood's most underrated actresses, Teri Garr, who earned accolades for her performances in classics like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Tootsie" (which garnered her an Academy Award nomination). Through her five decades on the screen, Garr was all over the television dial, too, appearing in 1970s favorites like "M*A*S*H" and "Barnaby Jones." Later, in the 1990s, she co-starred in the sitcoms "Good Advice" and "Woman of the House." But way back in the 1960s, she had a major role in a fan-favorite episode of the original "Star Trek" series titled "Assignment: Earth." 

An all-time classic, Season 2's "Assignment: Earth" reveals that aliens have been visiting Earth for centuries when Kirk and the Enterprise travel back in time to the 1960s. There, they discover an alien calling himself Gary Seven, who, along with his assistant, Roberta Lincoln (Garr), helps safeguard the planet against alien threats. It's an influential episode, originally planned as a backdoor pilot for a spin-off series.

The episode was also controversial because of the fact that Garr stormed off the set during filming, furious over a costuming demand. While the planned spin-off never made it to air, the concept was revisited in the subplot of a "Star Trek: Picard" Season 2 episode, with "The Next Generation" alum Wesley Crusher revealed to be a colleague of Gary Seven. Garr sadly didn't return to reprise her role as Roberta Lincoln.