Corin Nemec, the Stargate stand-in who now writes and directs his own films

Corin Nemec

Photo: Jeff Hitchcock / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 5, 1971 Little Rock, Arkansas, United States
Occupation	Actor, screenwriter and producer
Known for	Tucker: The Man and His Dream, Run Hide Fight, Drop Zone

The episode that ended Jonas Quinn’s time on Stargate SG-1 carries a story credit few supporting actors ever get: Corin Nemec’s own. He had joined the show as the replacement for Daniel Jackson, the archaeologist Michael Shanks had played from the start, and part of the audience resented him for it. When Shanks came back, Nemec came up with the story that sent his character home to the planet Langara, and Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie turned it into the teleplay for “Fallout”. It is a small line in the credits, and it describes his career better than his title roles do.

Nemec has spent much of his working life inside someone else’s outline. Fox built Parker Lewis Can’t Lose in the image of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and gave him the part of the schemer for whom nothing is impossible. Science fiction asked him to keep a beloved character’s seat warm. Now, in Pinellas County on Florida’s Gulf Coast, he is directing a horror spoof called Chicken Head that he co-wrote, a project nobody handed him.

The name on his birth certificate is Joseph Charles Nemec IV, and he arrived on November 5, 1971, in Little Rock, Arkansas, into a family that made images for a living. His mother, Janis, was a graphic artist and painter who also wrote poetry. His father, Joseph Charles Nemec III, a production designer of Czech descent, worked on the art direction of The Goonies, and Nemec has said that watching that film at 13 is what made him want to act.

Around the same age he was running with graffiti crews in the San Fernando Valley, a scene he helped shape from the late 1980s. Classes with the Centre Stage LA company led to an agent and a guest spot on Sidekicks. Still billed as Corky Nemec, he got his first major film part from Francis Ford Coppola, as Noble Tucker, one of Jeff Bridges’ sons, in Tucker: The Man and His Dream.

The role that announced him came the following year. In the NBC miniseries I Know My First Name Is Steven, broadcast in May 1989, he played the teenage Steven Stayner, the California boy abducted at seven who escaped his kidnapper seven years later. At 17, Nemec was nominated for the Primetime Emmy for outstanding supporting actor in a miniseries or special.

Fox put him at the centre of Parker Lewis Can’t Lose in September 1990, and the sitcom ran until June 1993. Three years as the smoothest operator at Santo Domingo High made him famous and fixed his image in one stroke. ABC’s 1994 miniseries of Stephen King‘s The Stand, offered the opposite kind of character: Harold Lauder, the bitter, lovesick teenager who ends up planting a bomb for Randall Flagg’s side.

Then came Stargate SG-1. Jonas Quinn, a scientist from Langara, entered in the fifth-season episode “Meridian” in 2002, the one in which radiation poisoning takes Daniel Jackson off the team. Through season six Jonas filled the empty place, and Nemec absorbed the reaction to a casting change he had not made. Fans organised a write-in campaign while he was filming. The producers reached a new deal with Shanks, Daniel returned in season seven, and Jonas was reduced to guest appearances, the last of them “Fallout” in 2004.

This is where the usual account of Nemec goes soft. It treats the Stargate year as bad luck and what followed as decline: Syfy creature features such as Mansquito and Lake Placid vs. Anaconda, a run of Lifetime thrillers with titles like The Wrong Stepmother, direct-to-video turns as the killers Richard Speck and Ted Bundy. The filmography supports another reading. An actor who works that steadily in low-budget genre film is trading prestige for volume and a measure of control, and Nemec kept collecting things the prestige track rarely gives a supporting player, from that network story credit to a production company with his friend David Faustino of Married… with Children. Rahul Dholakia’s Parzania, a drama about the 2002 Gujarat riots, even made him recognisable in India. The cost was visibility. Outside the convention halls, where Stargate SG-1 and Supernatural fans still queue for him (he played Christian Campbell in the latter’s sixth season), the Parker Lewis picture was never replaced by a newer one.

The work nearly stopped in January 2013. On his way to the Belize set of Poseidon Rex, aboard a Coast Guard boat, Nemec was thrown against the side of the vessel when it struck a semi-submerged barge. The right side of his body was shattered and his femur broken in three places. He needed several transfusions and five operations.

The years since have been written partly by him. He co-wrote the screenplay for Dead Man’s Hand, a 2023 western directed by Brian Skiba, with Stephen Dorff and Cole Hauser in the cast. In September 2022 the Tampa Bay Times reported that he was moving to the Tampa Bay area to make a slate of independent films with Scatter Brothers Productions. The paranormal noir Half Dead Fred, with Nemec as the private investigator Freddy Nash, came out of that move. He stayed. In July 2023 he married Sabrina Nova Tropf, whom he met on a film set, in St. Petersburg. An earlier marriage, to his teenage girlfriend Jami Beth Schahn, ended in divorce in 2009; they share two children, Sadie and Lucas.

His latest screen work sits at the dark end of independent genre film. In Kill Trip, written by Kristian McKay and released in the United States by Quiver Distribution on July 17, 2026, he plays Levi alongside Samaire Armstrong and Stelio Savante as festival-goers come apart at a Texas motel. In September 2026 he turned up as Agent Boyle in Hate Thyself, Shivaan Makker’s serial-killer thriller and one of Tony Todd’s final films.

Chicken Head is the project that finishes what the “Fallout” credit started. Nemec wrote it with Matt Florio, directs it and acts in it, with Jason London, Keith Coogan and Tara Reid in the cast, as a mockumentary about a film crew investigating a fictional run of killings in a Florida town. Shooting at Heritage Village in Largo wrapped in March 2026, and by June the edit was about halfway done. The footage can become a feature of around 90 minutes or six half-hour episodes, and the format is still open. “We don’t want to count our chickens before they hatch, so to speak, but we have a great distribution agent,” he told the St. Pete Catalyst. For once, which shape the story takes is his call.

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Tags: actors, Corin Nemec, The Stand, Chicken Head, David Faustino, Michael Shanks

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