Robert Duncan McNeill
Robert Duncan McNeill is a director, born 1964.
McNeill spent the run of a network science-fiction series as an actor and then walked round to the other side of the camera, where he has been ever since. As Lieutenant Tom Paris on Star Trek: Voyager he played the crew's designated screw-up, the roguish one in a cast of professionals, which on Star Trek mostly means being the person allowed to notice that a situation is absurd.
Before that he was doing the standard young-actor rounds: a segment of the 1980s The Twilight Zone revival, the drama series Homefront, and a supporting part in the live-action Masters of the Universe.
The second career is the substantial one. He became an executive producer and a regularly used director on Chuck, Resident Alien, The Gifted and Turner & Hooch, which is a working television director's resume rather than a celebrity's, and it has outlasted the acting by a wide margin. Directing an episode of network television well is an invisible skill, and the people who keep being rehired for it are the ones who bring it in on schedule without the result looking rushed.
He has not left Star Trek entirely alone. Star Trek: Lower Decks brought him in to voice Nick Locarno, reviving a name from the franchise's past, and he appears as himself in Star Trek Day and the retrospective To the Journey: Looking Back at Star Trek: Voyager.
Movies (2)
TV (5)
Where to start with Robert Duncan McNeill
Star Trek: Voyager is unavoidable and it should be. Tom Paris is the character the show uses to keep itself human, and McNeill is specifically good at being the only person in the room who finds the situation ridiculous. Skip the first season, which is stiff, and pick it up around the second or third.
Star Trek: Lower Decks is the smart follow-up, since it hands him a Trek character with a very different history and an animated format that gives him a different register to work in.
Outside Star Trek his acting credits are thin. Masters of the Universe is a curiosity and The Twilight Zone a decent early showcase. The real body of work is the directing, on Chuck and Resident Alien among others, and that is not among the credits listed here, so this page shows you roughly half of him. To the Journey: Looking Back at Star Trek: Voyager is for people who already love the show.