Jonathan Frakes planned to take a year off after graduating from Bethlehem Liberty High School in 1970 and hitchhike around the country. His father, James Frakes ’48 Lib, an English literature and American studies professor at Lehigh University, thought it was a fantastic idea; his mother, Doris, wanted him to continue his education. So James, who had previously taught at Penn State, pulled some strings and got his son enrolled in summer classes at University Park as a psychology student. A couple of weeks later, Frakes signed up to be an usher at a play put on by a traveling professional company, simply so he could watch it for free. The director of the play spotted him in the hallway and said, “Hey, Tall Guy. How would you like to be in the show?”
“The play was called Indians, by Arthur Kopit,” Frakes recalls over Zoom. “I sat on the floor and I played the drums in this show, and I watched these people from all over the country rehearse from like 2 to 5 on a new play, and then got a break, then they went to the theater to perform at 7:30 for an 8 o’clock curtain, and then by 10 or 10:30, they were done and they were in the bar. I thought, ‘Wait, is this a real job? Is this a real potential lifestyle?’”
By that fall, instead of hitchhiking across the United States or sitting in a psychology classroom, Frakes was embarking on a theater education that would eventually take him to the deep reaches of outer space. “It certainly did grab me, and I was one of the lucky kids whose parents were encouraging,” Frakes says. “My father’s philosophy was, you’ve got to love what you do, and if you do love it, go for it.”
Best known for his role as Cmdr. William T. Riker on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Frakes ’74 A&A has acted and directed in television and movies since the 1970s. His passion for performing and his technical skills were honed at Penn State under the watchful eyes of dynamic instructors who led a professional-quality curriculum.
The director who had spotted the tall usher in the hallway was Richard Edelman, who became Frakes’ mentor. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Edelman had directed opera, acted and taught in Europe, and taught at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse and Juilliard. Fellow faculty member Archie Smith had acted in TV and film for more than 20 years and taught at the Actors Studio in New York. Manuel Duque was an actor at the Neighborhood Playhouse and would go on to receive the Milton S. Eisenhower Award for Distinguished Teaching. Together, they formed an embarrassment of teaching riches that developed one of the top graduate acting programs in the country. “It was kind of lightning in a bottle, I think,” says James Pickering ’92 MFA A&A, a classmate of Frakes in the 1970s. “As other faculty who have since passed on said, that was a really fervent time. They made huge demands on us, and we made huge demands on them.”
The instructors also taught undergraduate courses, which showed Frakes, Pickering, and their classmates the way professionals acted, directed, and rehearsed. “Every day, we had acting, movement, and voice from after lunch until about 5 o’clock,” Frakes says. “It was like going to a conservatory. It changed my life. It was fantastic.”
Pickering recalls Frakes being “a monster” in games of pickup softball and hanging out with him and classmates at the My Oh My and other State College bars. Gary Silow ’72 A&A, another student in the program, says Frakes “could party his head off” but noted that it wasn’t long before he was performing in productions with the graduate students in what was a competitive environment. “He was a serious guy about his acting,” Silow says. Tall, charming, and quick with a joke, Frakes gravitated toward leading roles but also pushed himself to play a variety of parts, such as a crazed painter in Cosca on Cosca or a gay soldier in The Three Sisters. “He was a very talented, very good-looking guy,” Pickering says. “Richard Edelman said at one point, ‘Ah shit. We’re going to lose him to TV or the movies.’”
Edelman would eventually be proven correct, but Frakes’ path to Los Angeles took him first to Cambridge, Mass., where he joined the Loeb Drama Center at Harvard University and performed with, among others, future Hollywood stars Christopher Reeve and Margo Martindale. After that, it was on to New York, where he took on odd jobs—a furniture mover, a waiter in a French restaurant—and acting jobs such as playing Captain America for Marvel to open 7-Elevens and a skinny Santa Claus at a Lord & Taylor department store. He did some commercial work before landing his first television role on The Doctors, a daytime soap opera, as Tom Carroll, a troubled Vietnam veteran.
At the same time, he was performing in off-Broadway and eventually Broadway plays, including The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill, and Shenandoah, during which he says he mostly stood in the wings and watched John Cullum, who would later be the inspiration for Riker’s walk, play the lead. After his character on The Doctors was killed off, Frakes headed to Hollywood, landing one-episode guest spots on shows such as Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Hill Street Blues. He had an extended arc on the primetime soap opera Falcon Crest and a role as Stanley Hazard, the dastardly brother of protagonist George Hazard, in the Civil War miniseries North and South. It was there that he began to spend more time with actress Genie Francis, whom he had met a few years earlier on the soap opera Bare Essence. They celebrated their 37th wedding anniversary in May.
In 1987, Frakes auditioned six times over seven weeks for the role of William Riker, the no-nonsense, reliable first officer to Patrick Stewart’s Capt. Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He landed the gig despite not having seen the original Star Trek series. Francis, who had a poster of William Shatner’s Capt. James Kirk on her wall as she grew up, took him to Blockbuster Video for some tapes of the series to help prepare him for the part. “I got the gist of it, and I got the tone of it, and the script was really good,” he says. Star Trek: TNG took some time to gain traction. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the original Star Trek series, was leery of the bad experience he’d had working with NBC and didn’t want to do the new series on a network. He was eventually persuaded to do it for independent channels, including UPN and WGN. “It was on 237 separate channels in the United States,” Frakes says. “We had a contract to do the pilot. We were picked up for the first 13 episodes. And if that went well, you got picked up and you were going to have a contract for, whatever, three or four years if the show stayed on the air. So they were hedging their bets from the very, very beginning.”
There were initial challenges, including creative differences between Roddenberry and some of the show’s writers, and the immense shadow of the original Star Trek. “The audience for our show was tepid at best, and reluctant, and somewhat hostile towards a bald English captain with a French name and a Klingon on the bridge, and a blind pilot,” Frakes says. “They liked their Bones and Kirk and Spock. It took years for us to win them over, which fortunately we have.” Still, the show’s premiere was nominated for a Hugo Award, three episodes won Emmys, and another became the only Star Trek episode to win a Peabody Award. The show ran for seven seasons and 178 episodes (Frakes appeared in 176 of them), peaking at close to 12 million viewers an episode during its fifth season and 30 million for the series finale in 1994.
Initially, Roddenberry and the producers asked Frakes to play Riker as stoic and unsmiling, which wasn’t always easy for a gregarious actor who loved to joke with his castmates. As the seasons progressed, the writers allowed more of Frakes’ personality to shine through. “He grew and learned, and they learned who he was and allowed Riker to loosen up and be more like Jonathan,” says co-star Brent Spiner. The result was an unforgettable character who saw a recent revival on the third season of Star Trek: Picard, which stars Stewart and includes special guest spots from several of the other original TNG characters—including Spiner’s Data, LeVar Burton’s Geordi La Forge, and Michael Dorn’s Worf. Frakes relished the chance to step back into the shoes of Riker and reunite with his castmates, though he has kept in close contact with them over the years anyway—and not just at conventions. “We’re very, very, very close, because all of our lives changed together,” says Frakes, who won a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Television Series in 2024 for his role in Picard. “We’ve all stood up at each other’s weddings and been godparents to each other’s kids.”
That strong bond with his castmates also helped Frakes transition from actor to director early in his TNG career. “I had directed a little bit in college, and it just appealed to me, both sides of the camera,” he says. “And I knew a little bit about staging and a little bit about the camera, and I certainly knew how to talk ‘actor,’ and I’m pretty good at understanding the story.” Initially, Frakes didn’t have any experience with many of the technical aspects of directing, so he sought out Rick Berman, the executive producer of the show, who gave him access to the editing room, then preproduction meetings, then visual effects meetings, then casting meetings. “For almost three years, I shadowed at what we now laughingly refer to as ‘Paramount University,’” he says.
Midway through the third season of the show, Berman gave Frakes an episode—“The Offspring”—to direct. He would direct seven more episodes of the series, plus three episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, before taking the helm on a pair of films featuring the TNG cast: Star Trek: First Contact (1996) (for which he earned a Saturn Award nomination for best director) and Star Trek: Insurrection (1998). “I think in the case of both, the first television episode, and the first film he directed, there was a sense among everybody of, ‘Let’s do our best work. Let’s really dig in for Jonathan.’ Because we all adored him and we wanted to see him succeed,” Spiner says. Much of Frakes’ directorial work over the next three decades has been in television, including several installments of the fantasy movie series The Librarians and its subsequent TV series, and episodes of series such as Castle, Leverage, Falling Skies and the Star Trek franchises Picard, Strange New Worlds, and Discovery.
Frakes still has the same zest for directing, though—particularly in the science fiction realm—it is a much different game with new technologies including the ARwall, which projects a virtual location onto the set using extended reality technology instead of having actors perform in front of a green screen. His recent credits include Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and the upcoming Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. “I’m much better at it than I ever was as an actor, and I’m now able to do it here in the fall of my career,” he says of directing. “It’s the best gig, really, because you wrap your head around it and you’re in it all day long. And if you have good people in the key positions, they just continue to make you look good.”
Over the years, he has supplemented his acting and directing roles with voice work, most notably in the 1990s animated series Gargoyles as the billionaire villain David Xanatos. But his most famous role outside of Riker is his spot as the host of Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction?, a sci-fi anthology series that ran from 1997 to 2002 and gave viewers the challenge of determining which paranormal stories were true and which were not. The lines Frakes used to deliver the verdicts (“Never happened.” “Not this time.” “Pure fiction.” “We made it up.”) were eventually spliced together and became popular and multipurposed internet memes and YouTube clips. The show was recently resurrected under the title X-Factor in Germany to celebrate its 20th anniversary, and Frakes recorded more than a dozen episodes in English that were dubbed in German. “The memes, I think, kept that alive,” he says.
The one-time high school band trombone player—who played the instrument as Riker in several episodes of TNG—is also immortalized on a Phish album. Frakes used to live next door to Paul Fox, a producer for the band. The members of Phish, who were big Star Trek fans, invited Frakes over to the studio one day to play, though he quickly discovered the charts were beyond his expertise. “After about 15 or 20 minutes, it was clear that I was not the trombone player that they wanted me to be,” he says. The band members told him not to worry about it and brought in another trombonist to record the track. When the album, Hoist, was released, though, Fox sent Frakes a framed gold record; Phish had used some of his outtakes in a separate, 29-second piece called “Riker’s Mailbox”—a nod to his cow-shaped mailbox that was infamously dented by numerous cars on his narrow street. His playing had made it onto the album after all.
For many years, Frakes and Francis—who also played a couple on an episode of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman—split their time between Los Angeles and Belfast, Maine, where he taught directing and filmmaking classes at Rockport College and she opened a home furnishings store. They still maintain a home in Belfast, but they spend most of their time at their home in Glendale, Calif., helping each other run lines of dialogue and sharing industry-specific encouragement and advice. Francis, who won a Daytime Emmy for her role of Laura Spencer on General Hospital, recently signed a new contract for the long-running soap. “It’s sort of like, well, I guess we’ll keep doing it as long as they’re going to have us,” Frakes says. The couple’s son, Jameson, is a hydrologist and ecologist who co-founded the nonprofit Salmonfly Project, which works to conserve aquatic insect communities in Montana. Their daughter, Elizabeth, is a playwright who is working toward an MFA at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas.
Between the connections he has made within the ever-developing Star Trek universe and his television directing gigs, Frakes plans to keep exploring strange new worlds from behind the camera and continuing the journey he started when he switched from usher to extra at the University Park playhouse. “I wouldn’t imagine doing anything else, and I can’t imagine what I’d do if I would retire,” Frakes says. “Our life is pretty good.”
