My, my. Everyone knows Bones does not like intruders in his Sickbay, but just who is this guy he’s complaining about? Muscleman is one of those strong but silent security guards that we see in many episodes. In this case, he is standing guard over Lazarus-A in “The Alternative Factor.”
Muscleman appears again, just as strong and silent as ever, in “The Menagerie,” Parts 1 & 2 .” He is part of the security detail guarding Spock during his court martial. We see him in this scene near the end of Part I when Spock begs the Captain to allow the rest of the transmission from Talos IV. And he reappears in almost exactly the same pose at the beginning of Part 2.
So just who is this Muscleman in real life? He was played by stunt actor Tom Lupo, who at one time stood 6′1″ and weighed 205 pounds. His later became well known as Tom Selleck’s stunt double on Magnum P.I. where he was occasionally quite noticeable, as in the photo above.
Lupo attended USC on a football scholarship and was part of the 1962 USC National Champions. Not only was he an All-American Quarterback and track star in high school, but he was also a top notch trumpet player. During his college years, he joined the Screen Extras guild to earn some extra money. After learning how to do stunt work, his first assignments involved doubling Lee Majors and Lee Marvin. Even after graduating with a degree in sociology, Tom preferred becoming more involved in learning stunt work and engaged in competitive archery to gain even more of an edge. Later on, the archery skills came in handy because he did get work as a stunt archer. His hard work paid off. Besides Tom Selleck, he also doubled Erik Estrada, Paul Newman, Robert Shaw, David Janssen, Kris Kristofferson, Nick Nolte and Robert Urich. Tom is credited as being part of the stunt crew for the movies Eraser, Jurassic Park: The Lost World, Batman and Robin, L.A. Confidential, The Scorpion King, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, among others.
Besides doubling Selleck on Magnum, P.I., Lupo was also seen in small parts on the show. In “One Picture Is Worth” he played a security guard along with Roger Mosely’s double Bob Minor as a janitor. Minor also showed up in DS9 and as Michael Dorn’s stunt double in a TNG episode. Speaking of Trek connections...
Roy Jenson (Cloud Williams in “The Omega Glory”) makes an appearance in the same episode as a bank robber who is responsible for four deaths, including Tom Lupo’s and Bob Minor’s characters.
In a 1980 interview, Lupo speculated that as much as he enjoyed stunt work (at that point he was making around $100,000 a year), he could not see himself doing it forever and thought maybe he would eventually become a director or producer or at least work in another area of film-making. He never made it to that level of directing or producing, but he was often hired as a stunt coordinator for television episodes such as Vega$ and Magnum P.I. and a few films. The above photo shows him working in that capacity on the set of The Scorpion King with Dwayne (”The Rock”) Johnson (Tom is the one on the far right in the blue/gray tee shirt). Like many other TOS stunt workers, Tom has a daughter who also has a successful career as a stunt woman and stuntwoman. Diana R. Lupo also has a Trek connection, working as a utility stuntwoman in the TNG movie Insurrection. It’s amazing how many of the background actors in The Original Series were also stuntmen. This is certainly the case for Tom Lupo. And even more amazing, the ones who were hired have become some of the most famous ones in the industry. Many of these may have been musclemen, like the McCoy is grumbling about, but you could never accuse any of them of being muscleheads.
