Star Trek is known for its usual crop of returning actors but has played 12 different characters.
Once a creator with Star Trek likes an actor, they tend to find various ways to get them into different roles. Robert Picardo and Brent Spiner famously played multiple characters when they were with the franchise. Others, like Richard Cromwell, would go on to play a minor character on a show, and then appear as a different character with a major role in a film.
There are even some, like Majel Barrett, who was on multiple shows as different and familiar characters.
But of all the Star Trek actors, only one has appeared as 12 different characters in the franchise’s history; Vaughn Armstrong. Armstrong may be best known as Vice Admiral Maxwell Forrest on Star Trek: Enterprise. A role he would portray for 14 episodes, across all four seasons of the show. He may also be the only actor who appeared on-screen for all four television shows during the Rick Berman and Brannon Braga era of the franchise.
For those unfamiliar, that starts with The Next Generation, runs through Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and then finishes up with Enterprise.
What roles did Vaughn Armstrong play across Star Trek?
Armstrong would not do a lot of work early on, playing the Klingon Captain Korris in two episodes of The Next Generation. He wouldn’t do any more work for that show, but he’d land the chance to play two different Cardassians across three episodes of Deep Space Nine; Gul Dunar in one episode and ten Seskal in two more.
He would do a bulk of his work in Voyager, playing a Romulan Doctor, Telek R’Mor, a former Borg drone in Two of Nine (aka Lansor), a Virginian captain, the Alpha Hirogen, and the Klingon hologram Korath.
On Enterprise, he was best known for his role as Forrest, but he’d also play a Klingon Captain, the Kreetassan Captain in two different episodes, and then Captain Maximilian Forrest in the mirror episode; In a Mirror, Darkly