By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Star Trek: The Next Generation helped to transform Jonathan Frakes into something of a sex symbol. After all, his Riker always cast a commanding figure, and his beard gave him some bad boy charm after a babyfaced Season 1. While fans certainly loved to stare at Riker’s handsome face, the actor didn’t realize how easy he had it until he had to put on a different face altogether. The Season 3 episode “Who Watches the Watchers” put Jonathan Frakes in some alien makeup, and he later admitted that this made him appreciate what Michael Dorn (who played the Klingon Worf) went through each day.
Jonathan Frakes Gets The Michael Dorn Treatment
If you’re wondering why Jonathan Frakes would suddenly admire Michael Dorn after this, you merely need to look at the latter’s elaborate makeup in each episode. Dorn looks suitably alien as a Klingon warrior, but to achieve that look, he had to spend many long hours in the makeup chair each morning. Comparatively speaking, Frakes and the other human actors had to spend far less time getting ready because they merely needed to worry about hair and makeup and not… giant forehead ridges.
According to Jonathan Frakes, “My experience with being a Mintakan gave me great appreciation for what [Michael] Dorn goes through every morning.” In “Who Watches the Watchers,” malfunctioning Starfleet tech and a memory wipe gone bad resulted in a primitive alien telling his people that Picard was a god. At one point, Riker is altered to look like one of these natives and beamed down to the surface in order to gather intel, and making the actor look suitably alien resulted in him getting a taste of what his costar regularly endured.
Jonathan Frakes later estimated that “the makeup took something like two-and-a-half-hours,” which still falls short of what Michael Dorn regularly went through (more on this soon). But part of why the Riker actor hated this so much wasn’t the time itself but the fact that he doesn’t sit still “very well” and gets “very fidgety” while in the seat. This makes sense, really…Frakes, like the character he plays, is used to taking action rather than sitting still and waiting for something to happen.
But just how much does Jonathan Frakes’ two-and-a-half hours putting on alien makeup compare to what Michael Dorn went through? Originally, it took Dorn seven hours a day to get his Klingon game face on, a process that was later shortened to about three hours, which was just a bit more time than it took to make Frakes look like an alien. Later, the Star Trek makeup artists got to a point where they could put everything on Dorn in about an hour, which made his Deep Space Nine shooting days much easier than they otherwise would be.
Star Trek episodes often end with our favorite characters learning lessons, and with “Who Watches the Watchers,” Frakes himself learned something behind the scenes. After praising how good the makeup team made him look like a resident of Mintaka III, he concluded “I’ll do the occasional Mintakan, but I’m very thankful I have my own face.” Considering that Frakes has remained a sex icon for fans after all these decades, it’s fair to say they are just as grateful for his face as he is