Normally, when an actor says they’d love to return to an old role or series, I find it to be artificially inflated news. An actor wants work? In a high-profile production? Stop the presses! However, what makes this different is that Billingsley isn’t just being nostalgic. As he told TrekMovie, he met several of the “Strange New Worlds” cast/crew during the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes earlier in 2023:
“I was on the strike line and some of the ‘Strange New Worlds’ guys were coming up and saying ‘How long do you think Denobulans live?’ I said ‘Long. Long, long, long. Definitely long enough to be on your show if that’s what you’re getting at.’ So who knows? I mean, I would happily come back. And I figure, hell, even if I’m dead, my son Phlox Jr. is still around, and he is the spitting image of his old pop.”
Since the people working on “Strange New Worlds” know about his interest, Billingsley has an in to appear on the show. “If they brought me back in a dramatic way, I probably would be a little surprised, but I’d be fine,” he added.
As for Billingsley playing Phlox Jr., that has precedence in “Star Trek.” In “The Undiscovered Country,” Michael Dorn has a small role as Klingon lawyer Worf — implicitly a 23rd-century-era ancestor of the Worf from “The Next Generation,” also played by Dorn. Generally, “Star Trek” is also lax about recasting actors for multiple parts. Jeffrey Combs, for instance, has played three different recurring roles on “Trek” (Weyoun and Brunt on “Deep Space Nine,” and then Shran on “Enterprise”).
Since writing Phlox/Billingsley into “Strange New Worlds” for a cameo wouldn’t take much work, I say: make it so.