Which OG Star Trek stars are still alive? What we know as Walter Koenig passes away

Walter Koenig, the actor who won over generations of sci-fi fans playing Russian crewman Pavel Chekov on Star Trek, has died at ninety. His rep confirmed he passed away Sunday of natural causes at his North Hollywood home. Koenig, who was raised in Manhattan as the son of Lithuanian immigrants, had also made a strong impression on audiences as the villainous Alfred Bester on Warner Bros. Television’s Babylon 5, a role quite removed from the boyish Chekov fans knew and loved.

He first joined Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek at the start of its second season, appearing in thirty-six of its fifty episodes. He later reprised Chekov across the Paramount films between 1979 and 1991. As per a report shared by USA Today, his passing leaves William Shatner, ninety-five, and George Takei, eighty-nine, as the only two surviving members of the original cast.

Shatner, who played USS Enterprise commander Capt. James T. Kirk, released a spoken-word album Love & Other Mysteries in August 2026 and made his heavy metal debut at Chicago’s Riot Fest that September. Takei, who portrayed helmsman Lt. Hikaru Sulu, remains an outspoken civil rights activist and a vocal presence on social media.

Walter Koenig reveals the unusual way he found out he had landed the role on Star Trek:

It turns out, Koenig almost never gave Star Trek a chance in the first place. In a 2013 interview for the TV Academy Foundation, he admitted that he hadn’t watched the show before coming aboard, sharing that

“I’d flip through the channels and I’d see Styrofoam rocks — they were so obviously Styrofoam — and I said, ‘This has got to be phony.’ I didn’t give it a chance.”

As per a report shared by The Hollywood Reporter, Koenig had actually portrayed a Russian on screen before Chekov, playing a student who had defected to the U.S. on a 1963 episode of the NBC drama Mr. Novak. He also guest-starred on a 1964 installment of The Lieutenant, another series created by Roddenberry, playing a young sergeant whose chances of becoming an officer are complicated by the fact that his mother is a communist.

After his Star Trek audition, Koenig spent a couple of lonely hours waiting in an outer office, unsure whether he had gotten the job. A man eventually approached and asked him to follow him into the wardrobe room. Koenig recalled that

“He drops on his knees in front of me, and takes my crotch in his hand, and I’m saying, ‘What are you doing?!’ I didn’t see the tape-measuring ruler in his other hand, and he was measuring from my crotch to my cuff to decide how long my pants should be. He says, ‘You do have to have a costume, don’t you?’”

He then added that

“That’s the auspicious way I learned I was on Star Trek and it was going to change my life.”

George Takei remembers Walter Koenig:

The main cast of Star Trek: The Original Series and the first six feature films brought together William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei and Walter Koenig. That group has been getting smaller over the years. Kelley died in 1999 at seventy-nine, Doohan passed away at eighty-five in 2005, Nimoy followed in early 2015 at eighty-three, and Nichols died at eighty-nine in 2022, a situation which now leaves only Shatner and Takei from that original lineup.

As per a report shared by Variety, Takei took to Instagram to pay tribute, writing that

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“My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today. Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man."

"Just last month, on Sept. 14, he turned 90, on the same day Brad and I celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary. I will always treasure that he and I shared that date. Walter was more than Chekov. He was a writer, a teacher, a thoughtful man, and a loyal friend. To the fans who loved him for so many years, thank you. He loved you too. Rest well, my dear friend. Keep navigating a steady course,” he added.

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