Trinneer: From Football To Acting
3 min readSome people know from their earliest days that they want to act, but for Connor Trinneer, it was more a matter of facing reality and then deciding what he wanted to do with his life.
As reported by Jonja.net, Trinneer made his choice after realizing that the NFL wasn’t in his future. “I wasn’t going to go pro,” he said, realizing that his years of football would end soon. “I needed to find something that frankly I wanted to do with myself. I didn’t have a major or anything. I was kind of treading water at that time.” Settling on acting, Trinneer soon realized that there were similarities between football and acting. “I do think there is a correlation between the two in the sense that athletes spend a lot of time doing their sport, sort of taking it to a next level,” he explained. “You’re still in an arena in front of people. You have to be comfortable enough to be able to do your stuff without really thinking about the size of it and I think that making a transition from that to acting or theater is probably a little easier than one might initially think but then you gotta throw in the always elusive element of ‘Are you any good?'”
Proving to be good enough, Trinneer landed several roles including his four-year-run on Star Trek: Enterprise, which ended just as the show seemed to be hitting its stride. Trinneer admitted that the show had ended too soon, but understood why. “Yeah I think we all felt that way [about the show ending] but you can pretty much be guaranteed that if your numbers aren’t good enough you’ve got two strikes against you,” said Trinneer. “Really when it comes down to it, if you don’t draw the people, you’re just running an uphill battle. [And] it seems there is a finite number of people who watch sci-fi shows and they kind of all watch all of them.”
Moving on to other work, Trinneer worked on other science-fiction shows such as on Stargate: Atlantis, where he played Michael Kenmore. “That part was a lot of fun,” he said. “That part was such a departure from anything I’ve done, in regard to its sort of inherent size of the character. What I mean by that is his sort of theatrical dramatics, nothing I had done comes anything close to that.”
Trinneer did not feel inhibited by working in heavy makeup as Michael Kenmore, feeling that it was liberating. “You don’t hide behind the makeup, so much as the makeup really frees you up to sort of explore a different element of you because you have to actually sort up “act up” in makeup,” he explained. “You can’t just go out there and give a contemporary take on that guy. He’s a monster. He looks like one. But I gotta to tell you, it was a heck of a treat to do that. Fortunately, most of the episodes I did, I had a good chunk to chew on during those. So yeah, that was one of the favorite parts I’ve ever played.”
To hear the interview, head to the article located here.
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