Hardin: TNG Mark Twain Led To Own Show
2 min readCharacter actor Jerry Hardin, best known to Star Trek: The Next Generation fans for his role as Mark Twain in the two-part Time’s Arrow episodes, found that his The Next Generation role led to his own show about Twain.
Hardin was aware of the original series, but never had a chance to audition for it. “Star Trek was all the talk; brand-new sci-fi and timely as well,” he said. “I hadn’t auditioned for any roles that I can recall. In those days there were often several auditions a day and the survival mode was to do the best job you could and move on until there was job offer.”
A conversation with Gene Roddenberry led to a call for an audition, where he played Radue on When The Bough Breaks. “Shooting the show was a pleasure and pretty straight forward;” said Hardin, “not a lot of sci-fi as I recall,”
Getting the part of Mark Twain in the fifth season’s Time’s Arrow was the result of an audition. Hardin did so well in the first episode, it was recommended to him that he do a Mark Twain show of his own. “…As we were shooting the first episode the line producer pulled me aside and said I should do a show of Mark Twain. … “Subsequently, Les (Landau), the director suggested the same thing to me. I was intrigued and between the two shoots I read a lot of Twain. And when we started to shoot the second show I announced that I was going put together a Twain evening. Les said he would direct it and we were off and running. We took it to Barter Theatre in Virginia to try it out. It started out with about two-thirds of a house and ended the week with lines outside the theater trying to get in. My show was and is called: Mark Twain: On Man and His World. I did the show off and on for about 15 years. Twain was always a pleasure to play.”
Hardin returned to Trek where he appeared in Star Trek: Voyager as Dr. Neria in the first season’s Emanations. Hardin is also well-known to fans of The X-Files, where he was the mysterious Deep Throat.
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