Trinneer: Revisiting Star Trek: Enterprise
2 min read
Star Trek: Enterprise‘s Connor Trinneer is in London for this weekend’s Destination Star Trek London convention, and he took time out to talk about playing Trip Tucker on the show.
One of the things Trinneer liked best about working on Enterprise was the different challenges he faced as an actor in the show, and he preferred the later years of the show. “From an acting standpoint, I always think that the first and the fourth years, for me, were really satisfying,” he said. “I really loved doing all four years, though. The great thing about the show was that for me, for the actor, it threw out a bunch of different things that I was asked to do, and for the most part they were a lot of fun.”
One of those “different things” happened in the early days of the show. “…In the third episode of our show I got pregnant,” said Trinneer. “That wasn’t even on my radar for attempts I thought I’d be making at acting. That was probably the top of the list.
“But anytime you are thrown together with aliens, anything can happen. I did an episode [Dawn] where the other guy didn’t speak a word of English, he spoke an alien language – Gregg Henry, fantastic actor, played that part – so that was a fascinating acting challenge. It was great, but it was certainly unusual!”
Trinneer preferred the first and last year because of what came his way, story-wise. “Usually I say that those years were great because I personally got a lot of storylines out of those particular years – episodes such as Shuttlepod One and Unexpected, and Similitude and Cogenitor later on,” he said. “Near the end, in the fourth year, I didn’t know that it was going to end, but the character arc for Trip really seemed to play out there in front of people, so that was a lot of fun to do – you get to use your acting chops.”
About The Author
Tripp’s still my favorite Enteprise crew member. Just a regular joe that wore his heart on his sleeve, and Connor did a great job of portraying him as an everyman. Having recently watched some of the BTS footage on DS9’s DVD’s I’m struck by how consistently the engineers in Trek are portrayed as working-class shlubs just out to do their job, work a few technical miracles, and then kick back with a brew at the end of their shift. With the exception, of course, of B’ellana. You can imagine, though, Scotty, Tripp, and O’Brien kicking back at a bar, telling bawdy jokes, and generally getting plastered as they talk shop. The character of Tripp was, for me at least, one of the few characters on Enterprise I really enjoyed. (The others being Shran and, believe it or not, Phlox.)
As far as actors go, Connor is one of the best, and really good to his fans. He talked to me for like 2 hours one time just shooting the breeze, and he didn’t even know me!