Plenty of actors are interested in shaping their characters themselves. They want to give input to the writers and producers to make the role their own, but Star Trek: Voyager's Robert Beltran kept his requests to a minimum largely due to the number of characters on the show and the number of episodes that ran each season.

In an interview in the August/September 1997 edition of Star Trek Communicator, the Magazine of the Official Star Trek Fan Club, Beltran acknowledged that "we have basically 26 episodes to do a year, divided by nine characters." He went on to say that he was "content to be a good support for somebody else's episode."

Though there were a few times he asked for a little more, for the most part, he didn't try to get at the forefront of more episodes. He did mention he made some minor requests and there was...