Jonathan Del Arco has spent thirty years making small parts sound like the cleverest person present: a Borg drone who learns to say "I" and a pathologist who reads the dead back to the police. Neither role is large. Both are remembered.
Fi1m perspective
A Borg drone is a machine with a face, and the point of the design is that the face does not matter. In 1992 Star Trek: The Next Generation separated one drone from the rest and gave it to Jonathan Del Arco, and the episode, "I, Borg", asked him to make the machine want something. The character was called Third of Five and then Hugh, and the profiles that still follow him describe the part as isolation, curiosity and a slow recovery of the human. That is a lot to do under prosthetics, and it is the reason he was asked back in 1993, and again twenty-seven years after that.
The career in between is the working actor's: New York stage first, including a touring company of Torch Song Trilogy, then a screen debut on Miami Vice in 1987 and a move to Los Angeles in 1990. The 1990s and 2000s were guest work, on 24, The Sopranos, Dollhouse, and a first-season run on Nip/Tuck in 2003 as Sofia Lopez, which the profiles treat as the part that got him noticed outside the Star Trek audience. From 2007 he was Dr Fernando Morales, the medical examiner on The Closer, and when that series became Major Crimes in 2012 he went with it as a regular and stayed until 2018.
Morales is the role most viewers know him for, and it is worth being honest about how it works. He delivers autopsy findings bluntly, is drier than the detectives listening, and gives the impression of a man who suspects he is cleverer than everyone he works with. Our review of Major Crimes did not single him out, and that is fair: it is a programme that is the same programme every week, and Morales is part of what makes it reliably the same. There is skill in that, and a ceiling.
We were fonder of him in Star Trek: Picard (2020) than the three episodes strictly earned. On the reclaimed Borg cube Hugh spends his time trying to keep the other former drones alive, and Del Arco plays him as a man who has been doing this quietly for years and expects no thanks. Watching him, we found ourselves caring about a character we had last seen as a teenager's afternoon television, and the feeling was sharper than anything the show's plot managed around him. He has said of the return: "When I originally played the part, I was playing someone else, and when I'm playing the part now I'm playing myself." It shows.
He has also written and directed a short, Tea with Alice (2018), and taken a lead in the independent Borrowed (2022). Someone should give him a long part where he is the one who has to find things out, rather than the one who already knows.
Biography
Jonathan Del Arco is a Uruguayan American actor and activist. Born on 7 March 1966 in Uruguay, he moved with his family to Port Chester, New York, at the age of ten. He became interested in acting as a teenager, moved to New York City after high school, and made his professional debut in a touring production of Torch Song Trilogy. His screen debut came in an episode of Miami Vice (1984). He relocated to Los Angeles in 1990.
Del Arco is best known for playing the Borg drone Hugh in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1992) and reprising the role in Star Trek: Picard (2020), and for his long-running role as medical examiner Dr. Fernando Morales in The Closer (2007–2012) and its spin-off Major Crimes (2012–2018). He has appeared in numerous other television series, including Nip/Tuck, 24, The Sopranos, NCIS and Chicago Med. He is also active in political, environmental and LGBT+ rights campaigns, and received the Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award in 2013. He is married to Kyle Fritz.
