Star Trek's DeForest Kelley Was Nearly Unrecognizable On Gunsmoke

Before DeForest Kelley boarded the U.S.S. Enterprise as Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy, "Gunsmoke" fans knew him as a grizzled, revenge-obsessed cowboy. Kelley appeared in the "Gunsmoke" episode "Indian Scout" as Will Bailey, an unkempt cowboy whose soldier brother was killed in a skirmish with a group of Native Americans. After Bailey convinces himself that an Indigenous scout named Amos Cartwright (Eduard Franz) deliberately sabotaged his brother's troop, he becomes fixated on killing him, and Marshal Matt Dillon (James Arness) must step in to try to deescalate the tense situation.

Before earning his breakout role on "Star Trek," Kelley was a frequent sight on the Wild West of the small screen: In addition to "Gunsmoke," the "Star Trek" actor had also played small parts on "Bonanza" and "The Lone Ranger." Although Kelley's post-"Star Trek" career saw the actor largely trade his days on the frontier for a new life in space, he made a notable return to his Western roots when he guest-starred as Jack Potter in the 1974 series "The Cowboys," a short-lived ABC show that followed a group of cattle ranchers in New Mexico.

Kelley's 1966 "Star Trek" casting caused the actor to become largely synonymous with his role as the Enterprise's lovably irritable Dr. McCoy; he made multiple reprisals of the part throughout a spate of "Star Trek" films as well as in "Star Trek: The Animated Series" before his death in 1999.

DeForest Kelley was far from the only "Star Trek" ensemble member to hail from the Wild West of "Gunsmoke." "Star Trek" legends William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy both played characters in separate 1966 "Gunsmoke" episodes — each of which posed very different comparisons to their eventual "Star Trek" roles. Shatner's portrayal of the murderous criminal Fred Bateman in the episode "Quaker Girl" struck a stark contrast to the heroic Captain Kirk. On the other hand — although Nimoy's casting as the Indigenous John Walking Fox in "Treasure of John Walking Fox" added to a string of controversial Native American portrayals that the "Star Trek" actor made throughout his career — Nimoy disclosed in a PBS interview that his "Gunsmoke" character coincidentally shared the "enigmatic" and "clever" qualities that would come to define the character of Spock.

Despite Shatner's and Nimoy's "Gunsmoke" credits, DeForest Kelley definitively brought the most years of Western acting experience to "Star Trek" — a statistic that he took pride in long after securing the part of Dr. McCoy. "Most of the anecdotes he told me were actually Western-related," Kelley's close friend Kris Smith revealed to Bleeding Cool in an interview published in 2022. Smith went on to explain that even after "Star Trek," Kelley nursed a special fondness for the cowboy parts that defined his early years as an actor. "Usually, whenever we [talked] about his career, it was about his career in Westerns," Smith elaborated. "[H]e really enjoyed doing that and being a badass cowboy and scaring people."