Michael Dorn Knows How Gene Roddenberry Would Feel About Worf’s Star Trek Arc

A fun detail about all the characters on “Star Trek: The Next Generation”: They’re all nerds. Sure, they’re intelligent and cultured, and many of them are socially graceful — even humorous and charming — but they all possess intellectual and cultural obsessions that skew heavily into nerdy territory. Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart), for instance, is a literature nerd and an archaeology nerd. Geordi (LeVar Burton) is clearly an engineering nerd. And, yes, the taciturn, humorless Worf (Michael Dorn) is a nerd.

Worf lost his biological parents as a child, and he was raised on Earth by human parents. Perhaps longing for cultural meaning, Worf began to study the customs and attitudes of Klingons, and he became careful to follow them down to the letter. He became a nerd for his own culture. Indeed, he became so obsessed with honor, it made him awkward in social situations. Worf yelled at people that he didn’t like to laugh and rarely joked along with his friends and co-workers. He didn’t often smile.

As it turns out, Michael Dorn brought all of that to the table.

Back on the original 1986 “Next Generation” casting notices, Worf wasn’t even a character yet. Show creator Gene Roddenberry wanted his new series to feature all-new aliens, and he didn’t want any familiar species from the original “Star Trek,” and he hemmed and hawed about Worf’s inclusion. Roddenberry finally included Worf after being convinced that his presence would be a sign that Klingons and the Federation were now at peace.

But it wasn’t until Worf was cast, and Dorn began playing the part in earnestthat his actual personality traits began to emerge. Dorn recalls Roddenberry giving him a great deal of actorly leeway with the role, which he credits for Worf’s amazing growth. He talked about the part in a recent interview with TrekMovieexpressing his love for being given such freedom.

Dorn recalls that Roddenberry wasn’t a tartar or a dictator about the “Next Generation” characters. At least not with him. It seems Roddenberry liked actors with freedom. Dorn created character quirks, and then he was elated that Gene and the show’s writers picked up on what he was doing, eventually folding his acting choices into future scripts, developing Worf even further. As Dorn put it:

“(…) Gene hired us. He was ‘the guy’ for the first two years of the show, and was very clear that he wanted me to make the character my own. And the great thing about writers (and good writers and good directors) is that once you give them something — like I gave them Worf’s stoicism and his anger and his nationalism and his egotistical nature — they ran with it. And the writers are the ones that really created it and made him who he was.”

Worf became an invaluable member of the crew, and he served as both a go-to tough-guy (he would fight the most aliens) and a comic relief character (he doesn’t understand jokes). Roddenberry passed away in 1991, but Dorn continued to play Worf through the end of “Next Generation” in 1994, and then he reprised the role again for four additional seasons of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” from 1996 to 2000. He most recently appeared in the third season of “Star Trek: Picard” in 2023.

What would Roddenberry have thought of Worf’s development? Dorn believes he’d be pleased:

“I think he’d be happy about it, because it definitely is his creation, and he was an incredibly smart guy. He was incredibly smart about television. And he was smart enough to give me the freedom to say, ‘Just do it yourself.’ Because he knew that if an actor created something, it’s more personal to the actor, and he’s more invested.”

Dorn, not incidentally, holds the record for appearing on camera in the greatest number of “Star Trek” episodes.