The former-prince-now-king of Jordan had a walk-on role with Star Trek: Voyager and The Delta Flyer’s Garrett Wang has shared a surprising connection with him.
On the latest edition of the Delta Flyer’s podcast, Garrett Wang and fellow host Robert Duncan McNeill talked about how the series had brought on the then-prince of Jordan Abdullah bin al-Hussien as a walk-on extra role. The then-prince was a big fan of Star Trek and had a minor role at the start of the season two episode of Voyager called “Investigations”. In the episode, Tom Paris leaves the ship and Neelix begins looking into why.
At the start of the episode though, Wang’s Harry Kim can be seen talking to then crown-prince bin al-Hussien. Wang went into detail about how the scene went and revealed the prince was very nervous before making his televised Star Trek debut, despite years of military service to Jordan and appearing regularly on regional television.
Sometime long after the episode was shot, Wang went back to Taiwan, where his family is from for a get-together, and his cousins revealed that Wang’s uncle had actually met the prince before the taping of the episode. Apparently, Wang’s uncle was the youngest general in Taiwanese history and went over to Jordan for ceremonial purposes and was given a Jordanian ceremonial dagger by the then-crown prince Hussien.
The surprise connection between the Wangs’ and Hussien’s was a missed talking point Wang admits, saying that had he know about this during their scene, this would’ve been something to bring up to the then-prince.
The prince-turned-king of Jordan didn’t have any lines in the episode, due to SAG regulations but the royal family member was so excited and gracious for being allowed to walk-on, that he threw the cast a party and later invited Robert Picardo (The Doctor) and Ethan Phillips (Neelix) to come to visit him in Jordan when they got the chance.
It’s rather surprising to hear about two seemingly random people having such a unique and interwoven moment in their shared history somewhere. Only goes to show you how just how connected we really are as a species.