David Gautreaux
David Gautreaux is an actor, born 1951.
David Gautreaux is best known for a job that never happened. He was cast as Xon, the young Vulcan science officer written for Star Trek: Phase II, the television series Paramount planned through the 1970s and then abandoned. When the project mutated into Star Trek: The Motion Picture, he was moved to the role of Commander Branch, and the series lead he had been hired for simply ceased to exist.
That is an odd thing to carry through a career, and Star Trek's own documentary industry keeps returning to it. He appears as himself in The Center Seat: 55 Years of Star Trek, talking through the show that was never made.
The working career after that ran along ordinary lines. He was Tom Sullivan in the 1980 haunted house picture The Hearse and DiBlasio in Troop Beverly Hills, and he turned up in Animal Instincts 2 during the direct to video years. Later television used him as a guest face: a police profiler in The Craigslist Killer, Dorian Webster in The Player, Edward Yanick in S.W.A.T., and, with a nice self aware wrinkle, an unnamed television director in Grosse Pointe, a sitcom about the making of a teen drama.
Movies (6)
TV (4)
Where to start with David Gautreaux
Everything routes through Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Watch it for the vast, slow, strange thing it is, then find Commander Branch in it and consider what he had originally been hired to play instead.
The Center Seat: 55 Years of Star Trek is the natural follow up, since it lets him tell the Phase II story in his own words.
Outside that the pickings are modest but honest. The Hearse is a slow 1980 haunted house film with better atmosphere than plot, Troop Beverly Hills is the bright comedy, and Grosse Pointe is the sharpest writing he has been anywhere near, a satire of television production made by people who plainly had scores to settle. S.W.A.T. and The Player are the recent guest work.