Connor Trinneer engineers sci-fi success after Star Trek
By Mike Poteet
A haunted and horrifying post-Enterprise career for Connor
In 2016, Trinneer ventured into supernatural horror, playing a law enforcement officer named Gordon in Exorcist: House of Evil. You’ll find him in the trailer above cautioning other characters about the risks of spooky old houses at about the 1:05 mark.
As the trailer trumpets, this movie’s main claim to fame is its having been shot on location in the actual St. Louis, Missouri home of Roland Doe, whose 1949 exorcism inspired William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist and its celebrated 1973 film adaptation.
More recently, Trinneer appeared in The Purge, USA Network’s action horror drama.
Inspired by the film franchise of the same name, The Purge is set an alternate, dystopian America that ostensibly cleanses itself of hatred, fear, and violence by allowing citizens one night a year of boundless, bloody mayhem. Think the Beta III Festival from the originalStar Trek’s “The Return of the Archons,” jacked up on a gallon or two of cordrazine.
In the series’ second and last season (2019), Trinneer played Curtis, a supervisor at a New Founding Fathers of America Surveillance Center in New Orleans. Curtis monitors the NFFA employees who monitor the murderous free-for-all, ensuring what few rules remain aren’t broken.
You can see Trinneer as the bespectacled, bureaucratic banality of evil in this clip from the season’s first episode, starting at about three-and-a-half minutes in.
While The Purge is full of blood and gore, it’s also a chilling morality play packed with social commentary as piercing as the bullets that often fly through its scenes.
As Trinneer told StarTrek.com’s Chanda Prescod-Weinstein:
"I think that this show exists because of the time that we live in. I think that the best of storytelling and the best of TV holds a mirror up [to the real world] . . . You see people normalizing their realities into something that we think of as the worst of the worst."