Michael Mack

As a budding writer, one of his dreams was to write for Star Trek: The Next Generation, in part, because they were the most writer friendly series to work for. He was fortunate enough to join the TNG writing team for a six-week internship in 1994 during the series' seventh season, working with such greats as Jeri Taylor, Brannon Braga, Ronald D. Moore, and René Echevarria. Though he was not allowed to write an episode themselves, he was allowed to contribute ideas to the episodes. His main job was to review the unsolicited scripts that were submitted to the series, where on one occasion he found an idea in one of the submitted scripts that he successfully pitched.

Because of Mack's Shakespearean background, he was approached by Taylor, who encouraged him to audition for any guest roles that might arise during his stay. Initially he was offered a role in "Parallels" to portray one of the Enterprise-D captains from another quantum reality, a role that eventually became that of Riker from the alternate Borg conquered Federation. He turned the audition for role down because he felt that it was simply too short and there was no way to play it "credibly" because all the performance required was a "freak out".

When the next episode, "The Pegasus", was being cast, he told Taylor that he wanted to audition for the role of the Romulan Commander Sirol, who was originally written as a female character with a single scene. In spite of being a black actor auditioning for a species traditionally depicted by white actors, he reminded Taylor of the black "Vulcan midwife" who appeared in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, and seeing as Romulans were "cousins" to the Vulcans, he saw no reason why there couldn't also be black Romulans. Taylor gave Mack her answer the next morning by offering him an opportunity to audition, and after Mack impressed both Taylor and episode director LeVar Burton, he was given the role, becoming not only the first writing intern to act on the show, but more importantly the first actor to portray a black Romulan. Following his being cast in the role, Braga and Moore expanded the role and made the character a bit more complex on Mack's behalf.