Undercover Brits: 'Star Trek's Anglophile Spacefarers

Given the history of British explorers venturing into unknown waters and strange lands when they probably shouldn’t have, it’s no surprise that Brits are all over the Star Trek franchise – although the expanding franchise originally created by Gene Roddenberry often tried to correct the bad name that the Brits had given exploration for the entirety of their naval history. 

Over multiple spin-offs, sequels, and prequels, Star Trek has grappled with the perils of adventure and the ethics of diplomacy and empire in the vast, untapped corners of the galaxy, and British actors have been frequently beamed in to lend the stories both gravitas and a sense of chilling danger. As Strange New Worlds continues its five year mission with Season 3 currently airing on Paramount+, we fired up our long-range scanners to compile a list of the best British actors to have graced the starships and space stations of Star Trek.

(For the uninitiated, the chronology in release order is as follows: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy, Strange New Worlds, with 14 divisive movies in between.)

A note to Star Trek superfans: You may assume that the absence of Colm Meaney, who played the long-suffering chief of engineering on Deep Space Nine, from this list was accidental. As Colm is Irish, he did not qualify for this list. We still hope and pray for an all-Irish Starfleet crew to grace our screens one day.

What’s more sci-fi than a British-accented villain? English actor David Warner made his largest Star Trek impact in the TNG two-parter “Chain of Command”, having already appeared in the final two TOS films a couple of years earlier. Warner had already established a respectable resume as a character actor in two gritty Sam Peckinpah films and several historical miniseries, where he portrayed figures such as King Henry VI, Marco Polo, and the notorious Nazi Reinhard Heydrich. 

In “Chain of Command”, he plays the Cardassian torturer Gul Madred, who imprisons and terrorizes Picard with a nastiness that no other Star Trek villain has captured, even though Cardassians would dominate Star Trek villainy for the rest of the ‘90s.

There is no more British man on Star Trek – the bald, taciturn Englishman who first took the helm of the Enterprise-D in 1987 (or, 2364) felt like the ultimate ideal of unmissable Britishness to audiences accustomed to Kirk and Spock. Patrick Stewart was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and while his early episodes stressed the severity of the French-born Jean-Luc Picard (the Captain who best evoked Starfleet’s naval inspirations), soon the thespian’s capacity for sensible rationality and exasperated humor would define the beloved Captain’s tenure.

Enterprise charts the earliest days of Starfleet, and Englishman Dominic Keating continued the fine Trek tradition of terse, rigid security officers by playing Malcolm Reed, whose less-than-sunny deposition kept him at a remove from the more social members of Jonathan Archer’s (Scott Bakula) crew. Before Enterprise, Keating was a regular on the British workplace sitcom Desmond’s, which had a predominantly black British Guyanese cast. Since then, Keating has lent his voice to an impressive roster of video game series, including Destiny, World of Warcraft, and Diablo.

An English-American actress born to Greek Cypriot parents in North London, it’s a true joy hearing Marina Sirtis’ authentic cockney accent come through at fan conventions – a stark contrast to the striking composite accent she adopted as Enterprise-D’s Betazoid empath counsellor. Like several female characters on Star Trek, Troi’s character arc suffered from a lack of imagination on the writers’ part, often defined by her relationship with First Officer William T. Riker (Jonathan Frakes), but Sirtis is a warm presence in a cast of super-smart technicians. Troi’s finest hour is probably when she assumes command of the Enterprise, when she is the highest-ranked officer on the bridge after the ship hits a quantum filament. 

Star Trek: Discovery launched the new Paramount era of Star Trek (which is winding down with the announcement of Strange New Worlds ending after five seasons), and in its bumpy first season, the biggest names attached were Michelle Yeoh, Jason Isaacs, and if you were the type of person who cared about who played all the fantasy characters in Guillermo Del Toro’s films, Doug Jones. 

During his time on the first season, Isaacs got a heck of a deal – Lorca was the replacement captain on the USS Discovery after Yeoh was killed off in the premiere. However, he also turned out to be a “mirror universe” fugitive (which is how the show also brings Yeoh back), who had infiltrated the Prime universe, transforming him into a scenery-chewing villain who was only missing a goatee with a mustache to twirl.

Our sympathies for everyone who had to lead the first season of Star Trek: Picard – the first Star Trek series set chronologically after Voyager made some major changes to its legacy characters and the broader Federation society, and as a consequence, the game cast were saddled with a pretty unappealing season of television. Harry Treadaway (Penny Dreadful, Mr. Mercedes) played Romulan spy Narek in the first eight episodes, a covert member of a Tal Shiar cabal known as Zhat Vash.

When Dr. Julian Bashir boarded Deep Space Nine in the pilot episode “Emissary”, the incredibly smart doctor was a wannabe loverboy and a frontrunner for the most irritating main cast member introduced on Star Trek. Over the course of seven seasons, he evolved into a thoughtful, funny, and sensitive man, thanks in no small part to his friendships with chief engineer Miles O’Brien (Meaney) and the enigmatic Cardassian exile Garak (Andrew Robinson). 

A Sudanese-born Brit, Siddig is one of the sharpest actors in the Deep Space Nine arsenal, and would go on to appear in treasured genre series like Game of Thrones, Primeval, and Gotham. 

Before becoming a leading cast member on Strange New Worlds, Christina Chong had already proven her acting nerd credentials: she appeared in Doctor Who’s game-changing Season 6 episode “A Good Man Goes to War”, an early Black Mirror episode, and the 2014 web series Halo: Nightfall. 

Chong plays La'an Noonien-Singh (a descendant of Khan, the augmented tyrant portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in the TOS remake films, which starred Chris Pine, aka The Best Chris), who begins her Star Trek journey as the lone survivor of a Gorn attack (Gorn custom dictated that her life was spared). Later, she became the security chief on Captain Pike’s Enterprise.

The third season of Star Trek: Picard reunited the entire TNG crew and cannily pitched itself as a serialized fifth and final TNG movie. When 12 Monkeys showrunner Terry Matalas was upgraded to sole showrunner, the third season was a far more dramatic and satisfying adventure than the limp Picard seasons that preceded it. 

(Ed Note: When I got to ask Patrick Stewart about the third season turning into the TNG reunion he denied Picard would ever become, he looked me dead in the eye and said, "I was wrong.")

A new addition for the final Picard outing was the irritable Jack Crusher, the son of Beverley Crusher and Jean-Luc, played by Ed Speleers (footman Jimmy Kent in Downton Abbey). The dynamic never felt completely original, but it did sell the big emotions of renewal and reconciliation that affected the entire cast.

When JJ Abrams recast Star Trek’s iconic original crew, he had the chance to do something that Gene Roddenberry had neglected forty years prior: cast a Scotsman as Scotty, the Enterprise’s chief of engineering. Canadian James Doohan gave the accent a good go, but to anyone intimately familiar with the Scottish dialect, he definitely missed the mark. 

Simon Pegg is English, but a fine mimicker of accents and a lively, entertaining standout in the new cast (the best performance is still Karl Urban as Dr. “Bones” McCoy). However, it took until Strange New Worlds’ Martin Quinn to make history by being the first actual Scottish person to play Scotty.

Nearly all of the Star Trek franchise series, with the sole exception of the animated children's show Star Trek: Prodigy, are available to stream on Paramount+ in the U.S. (Prodigy was canceled and then rescued by Netflix; both seasons are streaming there.) 

The third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds debuts on Thursday, July 17, 2025, with two episodes, followed by one episode per week on Thursdays through August. STW is one of two remaining Star Trek series from the Paramount+ era that are still releasing new episodes; it is officially renewed through Season 5, which will be the show's final season. The teenage-aimed Star Trek: Academy is the other remaining series that is still officially not canceled; its inaugural season is expected to debut in late 2025 or early 2026.