“I felt I had some leverage”: Brent Spiner Defended Making 2 Greedy Demands If They Wanted Data in the First Star Trek: TNG Movie

The world of science fiction has been determined to make a leap in the right direction ever since the days of Star Trek and Star Wars. Without the aid of these films, the audience was left to witness the very same sets of Hollywood romance, historical drama, or happy musicals. The interstellar adventures opened up a whole new dimension for the viewers who were saturated with boredom.

Meanwhile, the audience began to open their minds up to the increasingly vast and seemingly never-ending lore, mythology, history, culture, and moralities of people living in galaxies far, far away, and of worlds that valued logic more than emotion. Such impossible settings proved that if one can imagine it, science fiction mixed with a dash of epic fantasy could make it all come true.

In an evolving Hollywood such as this, actor Brent Spiner suddenly found himself in a very convenient and fruitful position.

Star Trek Actor Brent Spiner Secures His Hollywood Future

For most actors and actresses, whether stepping foot for the first time in Hollywood or coming on board a prestigious platform, the opportunity to star in sci-fi projects was the stuff of dreams. For Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Brent Spiner, the dream became a very profitable reality after he cleverly held his cards close and cleverly played his hand rather than throw down the game entirely.

Provided with no assurance of the franchise’s future or his involvement in it, Spiner – who was suddenly promoted from an episodic television star to a full-fledged movie actor – used his unexpendable status as the core cast of The Next Generation to secure his place in Hollywood. By using his role as leverage, Spiner used the Star Trek project to allow himself access to a well of creative options at the parent studio of Paramount Pictures.

The first Star Trek: The Next Generation movie spawned a fruitful franchise that included Brent Spiner as Data in a total of four films. And even though Spiner’s contractual condition for his involvement in Paramount projects only came halfway true, the actor did manage to cop out with an inherently large payday in the end.

Brent Spiner Finds a “Leverage” Against Star Trek

During an interview with Michael Rosenbaum in his Inside of You podcast, Star Trek: The Next Generation star, Brent Spiner admitted to the legendary contractual negotiation he pulled off that landed him a reputation. His demands may have appeared to have somewhat greedy overtones, but Spiner’s stipulations were born out of the kind of clever thinking that helped one survive in the cut-throat world of the entertainment business.

While speaking to Rosenbaum, Spiner admitted:

In the first movie, I felt I had some leverage, which actors rarely have, particularly actors of my stature rarely have. But they had a contract, they had it all worked out… and I knew we had to start shooting immediately because the script was already written. We finished the series and two weeks later started the movie. So the negotiations got really intense, really fast.

Basically, I said, look I’m not doing it unless I make x amount of money, and more importantly, I get another role. I only did that once – that there has to be something that’s not Star Trek that Paramount Pictures is doing right now… There was a clause in it that if they didn’t find another movie for me to do, they had to pay me off some nice figure.

The negotiation worked out swimmingly for Brent Spiner because, in the end, Star Trek: The Next Generation was followed up with sequels, leaving Paramount with no chance to employ him in projects outside the universe of Star Trek: “As it turned out, they did not find another movie for me to do or want to find another movie for me to do. So they just paid me.”

Star Trek: The Next Generation series which ran from 1987 to 1994 and was followed by 4 movies starring actors from the core cast is now available for streaming on Paramount+