Dominic Keating plays some sinister roles in post-Enterprise sci-fi

After Star Trek Enterprise, Dominic Keating played several sci-fi heavies.

By his own admission, Dominic Keating “didn’t have much to do” as Lt. Malcolm Reed on Star Trek Enterprise “other than come rescue the captain the whole time” (Altman & Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years, page 705).

Before Enterprise premiered, rumors said Reed would be the franchise’s first openly gay character, but the show’s writers never moved in that direction. And the series’ cancellation meant Reed’s connections to Section 31, revealed in the fourth season, would end up playing out mostly in later, licensed novels. So the NX-01’s chief armory officer never got to grow much beyond the “talking head Brit on an American spaceship” Keating feared the character would be (Altman & Gross, page 663).

Nevertheless, Dominic Keating and the character he played remain favorites among fans. In an interview with PopEntertainment’s Brad Balfour, Keating says he was “first out the gate on [the Enterprise] cast to go do the conventions,” and he regards his Enterprise years as “the cherry on the bloody cake” of his career.

That career hasn’t seen Dominic Keating return to onscreen science fiction or fantasy too often. Here’s a rapid run-through of this talented actor’s turns in speculative genres after his tour of duty on Enterprise ended.

Dominic Keating plays sinister scientists, a sorcerer, and a “psychotic”

Surprisingly, given Malcolm Reed’s geniality, a quick tour of Dominic Keating’s credits in genre productions after Enterprise show him taking on largely, though not exclusively, sinister roles.

In 2007, Keating appeared in three genre projects. He landed a recurring role in the sophomore season of NBC’s superhero drama, Heroes. Keating played an Irish gangster named Will who, with his associates in crime, causes trouble for series protagonist Peter Petrelli.

Filming his “first-ever rain scene” for Heroes seems a particularly vivid memory for Keating:

"I fought tooth and nail for my character to wear these crocodile-skin pointy shoes, and my God, I regretted it. It was freezing cold in the California desert and we were being soaked . . . . It was just torrential and we were drenched for eight hours. I must have changed my socks six times and, of course, you never saw my feet or the shoes once."

That same year, Keating also co-starred in Species: The Awakening—the fourth (and, as of now final) entry in the sexy sci-fi thriller franchise, but the first without Natasha Henstridge. He played Forbes McGuire, a sleazy scientist who creates a lovely but lethal alien-human hybrid named Miranda.

And in 2007, Keating had a small role in Beowulf, director Robert Zemeckis’ ambitious but unattractive motion-capture take on the Old English epic poem your high school English teacher forced you to read (though, as the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Heroes and Demons” proves, it’s an awfully fun story). Looking as waxen and glassy-eyed as the rest of the CGI-” enhanced” cast, Keating plays Cain—not the biblical murderer from whom the poem says the monster Grendel descends, but one of Beowulf’s loyal warriors.

In 2010, Keating co-starred in a steampunk riff on the Sherlock Holmes stories. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was a direct-to-DVD “mockbuster” designed to ride the coattails of the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie starring Robert Downey, Jr. In this version, Keating plays the great detective’s estranged brother—not Mycroft, as Sherlockians might expect, but the new character of Thorpe Holmes, inventor of mechanical monsters that terrorize London.

In 2011, Keating took on an iconic fantasy role, a version of whom Sir Patrick Stewart has also played: the sorcerer Merlin. Keating cuts a fine figure like the archetypal enchanter in The Dragon Warrior (also known as The One Warrior), wielding a magic staff with the best of wizards.

Most recently, Keating was one of the more than 40 franchise alumni appearing in Snoop Dogg’s Star Trek parody Unbelievable!

While Keating’s post-Enterprise TV and film credits are light on sci-fi and fantasy, he has contributed his voice to a fair number of video games in the genres. Gamers can hear his vocal talents in Dragon Age: Origins as well as entries in the Epic Mickey, Diablo, and World of Warcraft series.

As of this writing, Keating’s most recent credit is a TV series called Phoenix (a name with noble resonance for Trek fans), which IMDB tags as a sci-fi action drama. It’s hard to glean too much about the show at this point, but Keating plays “the psychotic Billy Blue.”

Hopefully, Phoenix will be the first of many more post-Enterprise forays into science fiction and fantasy for Dominic Keating!