Sam Witwer taking over voice of Tenavik in Star Trek Online

The world of Star Trek will see the talents of one of science fiction’s best actors, Sam Witwer, come to Star Trek Online as he’ll take over vocal duties for the Klingon Tenavik. Tenavik was previously played by Kenneth Mitchell, who has since left the role due to the progression of his ALS.

Witwer has made his debut as the Klingon in the current update to Star Trek: Online, which is getting ready to see the update come to the PlayStation 4 and 5 versions of the game. It’s curious why Witwer was tapped to replace Mitchell, as Mitchell can still act despite his illness. The only logical conclusion is that the folks at ViacomCBS and the showrunners for the upcoming show Star Trek: Strange New Worlds intend on using Tenavik again in a live-action situation and need to cast a new actor to play him.

The reason for this hypothesis comes from the fact that every other character who was brought back for the game was brought back with their original actor. Mary Chieffo returned as L’Rell, J.G. Hertzler returned as Martok and even Robert O’Reilly returned as Gowron.

The very dead Gowron.

So it would make sense that Witwer would voice the role of Tenavik if Witwer will be providing a new version of the character.

It could also just be that Mitchell didn’t want to record the voices, or was unable due to other obligations. Let’s just go with the other theory, however. It’s more fun to think about.

While Mitchell can’t play Tenavik anymore, he’s still part of Star Trek and was just on Discovery’s third season as a new character named Aurellio.

For Witwer, he’s been a veteran of science fiction for some time. He was on Smallville for a short time and was a leading actor in the SyFy version of Being Human. He also had a pretty prominent role in Battle Star Galactica through the first few seasons and was the voice and face of the Star Wars video game character Star Killer in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.