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It’s hard to imagine anyone else playing the role of the Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager besides Robert Picardo. For one, the Doctor’s interest in singing and opera was born out of Picardo’s own skills as a vocalist. You can’t just get anyone teaching Seven of Nine the wonders of “You Are My Sunshine,” after all. 

But, at Florida Supercon 2025’s Star Trek: Voyager panel, Picardo revealed how he was almost cast as Neelix on the show. Picardo said, “They wanted me to read for this character called The Doctor, or the EMH, who was described as ‘colorless, humorless, and a computer program of a doctor.’ Now this didn’t sound like a bucket of fun. So I read the script, which I didn’t even have time to read, and thought the character of Neelix was interesting, so I turned down my audition for The Doctor, I read for Neelix, and they loved me. And I came this close to getting Neelix… Apparently, the producers wanted me for Neelix, and all of the studio heads from Paramount and the new network wanted the wonderful Ethan Phillips, who is an old friend of mine, but I didn’t know he was my competition. So I didn’t get it. I came so close to spending 7,000 hours of my life in a makeup chair.” 

Picardo revealed that through a stroke of luck, the producers of the show liked him so much from his Neelix audition that they cast him instead to play the Doctor, something that doesn’t happen often in Hollywood. “When you test for a television show, you’re like a used Kleenex, they don’t think of you anymore,” Picardo explained. Clearly, the producers of Voyager knew that they had struck gold with Picardo, and thankfully for all of us Trekkies, they were able to get him on the show.

If you’re a Popverse member, you can watch the entire Star Trek: Voyager panel from Florida Supercon 2025 here!

Space may be the final frontier, but there's no end to Popverse's love of the Star Trek universe. Hop aboard the starship Enterprise with our Star Trek watch order, explore strange new worlds with our upcoming Star Trek TV shows and movies list, seek out the new life of the franchise, and boldly go where no Star Trek film has ever gone before - with Quentin Tarantino?