Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Horrible Star Trek Experience Almost Made Him Quit Acting

The third season of “Star Trek: Enterprise” featured a massive story arc wherein a mysterious, unknown spheroid weapon appears above Earth and obliterates the state of Florida, killing millions. The sphere was send by an equally mysterious, unknown species called the Xindi, a species Earth had never heard of before. The Enterprise takes on a new retinue of weapons-toting Marines and treks out into the stars seeking the culprit … and revenge. Captain Archer (Scott Bakula) goes from a wide-eyed adventurer to a bloodthirsty weirdo pretty quickly. The season aired in 2003, so it’s reasonable to assume the “Enterprise” writers were trying to stage a salient 9/11 metaphor.

The Xindi, it turns out, are actually five intelligent separate species that evolved simultaneously on the same planet. There are Primates, like humans, but also lemur-like Arborials, grasshopper-like Insectoids, the underwater Aquatics, and the cruel and violent Reptilians. Archer also discovers that the Xindi were told by a shadowy cabal of time travelers that Earthlings would eventually come to their planet and kill them all. As a preemptive strike, the Xindi commissioned their spheroid weapon and attacked Earth first, before the Xindi and humans ever met. The shadowy time-travelers, of course, are using the Xindi as pawns in an extensive temporal war that is difficult to understand.

In the episode “Carpenter Street” (November 26, 2003), a more benevolent time traveler (Matt Winston) appears to Archer and tells him there are unsavory goings-on back on Earth … in the 20th century. Archer and T’Pol (Jolene Blalock) thereafter journey back in time to the year 2004 to fight Damron, a time-traveling Reptilian Xindi soldier who intends to release a specially engineered virus into modern-day Detroit.

Damron was played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, the future star of “Gray’s Anatomy,” Zack Snyder’s “Watchmen,” and “The Walking Dead,” although he is unrecognizable in his alien makeup. In a 2021 episode of “Hot Ones,” Morgan admitted that he hated working on “Star Trek,” largely because his Reptilian makeup was so unpleasant. Indeed, it was so overwhelmingly terrible that Morgan briefly considered quitting acting altogether.

Host Sean Evans confronted Morgan with a quote wherein he said that playing a Xindi Reptilian made him want to quit acting, which Morgan confirmed was accurate. He then, while blinking away the tears brought on by the hot sauces, elucidated on his “Star Trek” experience, saying:

“That quote was on the nose. That job was on the nose. In a bad way. It turns out I’m claustrophobic. I had a really hard time doing the makeup process, and I had straws in my nose. I’ve never been on a set where I went home at night and just thought, ‘What am I doing? This is — I’ve made the worst f***ing decision of my life. I don’t ever want to be an actor again.’ Like, I was sure that this was just wrong, and it almost made me quit. It was, it was horrible.”

Many extensive makeup jobs begin with making a mold of an actor’s head, coating their entire face with plaster while they breathe through tubes in their nostrils. It can take a long time for the mold to set, so it takes a certain kind of stamina to merely wait with one’s face covered and their ability to see and speak taken away. Then, once the makeup is sculpted and applied, an actor can feel bound in, having to act through the makeup, as it were. It likely didn’t help Morgan that Xindi soldiers also had yellow eyes and unusual, tube-encrusted uniforms, forcing him to wear contact lenses and an impractical costume.

Morgan, mind you, has been acting professionally since 1991, having already appeared in multiple TV shows and movies in supporting roles prior to “Enterprise.” This was the first time, however, he ever had to wear monster makeup. Morgan seems to have learned a lesson: only take a gig if one’s face is visible. Other actors with more facial stamina will simply have to play Xindi soldiers from now on.