The Star Trek franchise has welcomed hundreds of guest stars, perhaps even 1,000 or more, since The Original Series debuted in 1966. And some of those guest actors and actresses have had exotic names. Redshirts Always Die went in search of the single most interesting name of the past nearly 60 years of Star Trek television. We skipped the feature films (including Section 31), video games, online games, unofficial productions, Short Treks, etc., and focused on examining the cast lists of The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, and Prodigy.
Among the names that caught our eye: Thalmus Rasulala, Clement von Franckenstein, Brian Demonbreun, Maurishka, Bumper Robinson, Symba, Olia Kashevarova, Somkele Ilyamah-Idhalama, Calyx Passailaigue, Xavier X. Sotelo, Ito Aghayere, Jon Jon Briones (the father of Picard co-star Isa Briones), and Menik Gooneratne. Some of these actors hail (or hailed) from countries other than the United States, and their casting is a testament to Star Trek’s theme of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, or IDIC.
That said, the name that struck us as the single most interesting of all is… Googy Gress. We’re not quite sure if it’s the alliteration that makes us smile or if we just love the name Googy. Gress played The Overlooker in the six-season Voyager episode, “Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy,” which premiered on October 13, 1999. According to Memory Alpha, “The Overlooker was Phlox’s superior whom he reported to concerning his reconnaissance mission of the USS Voyager.” The Overlookers were bulbous humanoid aliens that resembled Baron Vladimir Harkonnen from Frank Herbert’s Dune saga.
Gress was born Francis Gress Jr. in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Connecticut, but his father referred to him as his “goo-goo baby,” and the name stuck. He made his acting debut in a Troma teen sex comedy called The First Turn-On!, which also introduced Vincent D’Onfrio. Since then, Gress has amassed more than 80 additional credits, including The Flamingo Kid, Apollo 13, Kingpin, Armageddon, Good vs Evil (on which he was a series regular), NYPD Blue, The Batman, Pushing Daisies (from Star Trek writer and producer Bryan Fuller), NCIS, Parenthood, and Goliath.
Gress continues to act. For example, last summer, he participated in a staged reading of Dan Noonan’s Reconciliation at the New Art City Theatre in Ventura County, California.