Star Trek’s Robert Picardo Sings About Not Being Brent Spiner in New Music Video

Star Trek: Voyager star Robert Picardo has put together a little Independence Day holiday treat for Star Trek fans. With the help of director James Marlowe, Picardo put together a music video in which he sings a song about his life as an actor. “Spent My Life an Actor” includes several lines about Picardo’s time with the Star Trek franchise. There’s a repeated chorus where Picardo expresses regret over not being born Brent Spiner. Spiner starred in Star Trek: The Next Generation as Data. Picardo’s song notes the similarities between Data and his own Star Trek character, the Doctor. And yet, Spiner is the one who got to go on to make Star Trek movies, return in Star Trek: Picard, and now appears in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels. You can watch the full video above.

“A few weeks ago, my friend and colleague Brent Spiner tweeted a hilarious musical spoof of himself that inspired me to do something in my characteristically more sophisticated manner, as an homage,” Picardo says in a statement about his new video. “My good friend James Marlowe (The Marlowe-Pugnetti Company) directed a crack mini-crew. Legendary event planner and TV personality Edward Perotti does a great cameo.”

Picardo played the emergency medical hologram that came to be known as the Doctor through seven seasons of Star Trek: Voyager. He and his castmates didn’t get to make the transition to the big screen as Spiner and The Next Generation crew did, but he may have his chance to appear on Picard.

“I am pleased that they (CBS) have expressed interest in me,” Picardo in July 2019. “They have reached out to my agent about next season. So I’m looking forward to seeing what it is. As you know, I play two characters, primarily the Doctor but also Lewis Zimmerman. Lewis Zimmerman, the engineer who created the Doctor’s program, certainly would have aged. He’s in the same timeline as Patrick Stewart and all the [Star Trek: The Next Generation] folk. The Doctor, of course, like Data doesn’t age, but there are ways to address that, as we all know. I joked the other day that my daughter does visual effects. That’s exactly what she does is digitally correct actors, so I said, ‘If they hire the two of us, she could make me look 25 years younger. Anyway, it will be interesting to see when something happens, if something but, but I might have a chance to be onscreen with Jeri again. It would be an honor and a delight, obviously, to have scenes with Patrick Stewart, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed.”

Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Picard are both streaming now on CBS All Access.