Brent Spiner Found One Star Trek Co-Star Especially Challenging

The cast of a TV show doesn’t always have to get along to make it a hit. After all, there are plenty of TV friends who couldn’t stand each other in real life, but their shows still managed to be popular or even beloved. Case in point, actor Brent Spiner, who played the android commander Data in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” for seven seasons, confirmed that there’s at least one member of the show’s cast who was especially difficult to film with. They were causing problems, even refusing to take direction to the point where a single scene might take all day to film. Of course, Spiner is referring to the animal actor that played Data’s pet cat, Spot, who appeared in some of Data’s best episodes.

Data’s cat Spot makes her first appearance in the Season 4 episode “Data’s Day.” Spot turns up again in several other stories, including an installment where she’s turned into an iguana thanks to a genetically modified retrovirus. Speaking to attendees at Phila Comic Con in 2010, Spiner discussed his frustrations acting alongside Spot in their many scenes together. “That cat, I have to say, was the stupidest actor, seriously,” he said. “I know there are a lot of cat lovers, and I have nothing against cats, but that cat never took a piece of direction. One time they wrote in ‘Spot eats tuna out of a can’ and he did it on the first take. Otherwise, we were there all day with that cat. Bless his soul.”

Spot may not have been popular with Brent Spiner, but that doesn’t mean the poor tabby was always at fault. As Spiner himself noted in a 2023 interview with TrekMovie, some of the blame could be laid at the feet of two of the show’s biggest writers. “Ron Moore and Brannon Braga used to write the scenes with Spot, and they always wrote things just to irritate me,” Spiner said. “They would write things for this cat to do that it couldn’t possibly do.”

Whether that meant jumping into Spiner’s lap on command, leaping down from a console, or being docile when handled in a scene, the cat just wouldn’t do as he was told. And that often meant long hours just to film short scenes, with sometimes even entire days wasted, according to Spiner. All because, as Spiner puts it, “the cat was not a very good actor.” 

Given Spiner’s everlasting annoyance, it must have felt like a cruel joke when he read the script for “Star Trek: Generations.” At the climax of the film, Spot is rescued alive and well from the wreckage of the USS Enterprise-D, which has crash-landed on Veridian III. Indeed, Spiner wasn’t happy about that ending. He criticized the scene in the DVD commentary, asking bluntly, “Does he have to find the cat? Can’t he find, like, Geordi or something?”

Brent Spiner had a recurring role in “Star Trek: Picard” Season 1 via flashbacks, visions, and computer simulations, with the rest of the cast of “The Next Generation” joining the party in Season 3. But Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Marina Sirtis, Gates McFadden, and Brent Spiner weren’t the only ones who returned. In addition to guest stars Michelle Forbes and Daniel Davis — who showed up as Ro Laren and Professor Moriarty, respectively – the episode “Surrender” saw Data’s cat Spot make his triumphant return in a scene set inside the mind of the android Data.

Filmed more than 20 years after Spot was last seen in “Star Trek: Nemesis,” the episode sadly couldn’t bring back the feline thespian that worked on the original show. But the new animal actor, according to Brent Spiner, was a much better performer. As Spiner put it in his interview with TrekMovie in 2023, the experience on set with Spot “went really well because this cat loved me.”

With a more affectionate and docile co-star, Spiner’s scenes with Spot were far less challenging than those on “The Next Generation.” He said: “This cat was a brilliant actor. I would say this cat is considered the Daniel Day-Lewis of cats. It wasn’t really required to do anything other than snuggle with me, which it did brilliantly. So I was fine doing that scene.”