11 TV Actors Who Appeared in ‘Starship Troopers,’ Now 25

The legacy of Starship Troopers is fascinating: When else has a film endured accusations of Naziism to become a cult classic on multiple critics’ lists of the best sci-fi films of all time?

Written by Edward Neumeier and based on the Robert A. Heinlein novel of the same name, the 1998 film tells a tale of 23rd-century humans fighting alien arachnids in an interstellar war.

In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, director Paul Verhoeven said he took Heinlein’s “militaristic, if not fascistic” source material and tried to convey that “these heroes and heroines were straight out of Nazi propaganda.”

Not everyone got the point. Washington Post reviewer Rita Kempler wrote that it was “impossible to decide whether [Verhoeven is] sending up the Third Reich or in love with it.” And in an op-ed published in the same newspaper four days later, Stephen Hunter called the movie “Nazi to the core.”

Eventually, however, viewers picked up on Verhoeven’s vision. “Starship Troopers is satire, a ruthlessly funny and keenly self-aware sendup of right-wing militarism,” The Atlantic’s Calum Marsh observed in 2013. “The fact that it was and continues to be taken at face value speaks to the very vapidity the movie skewers.”

And in 2020, The New Yorker’s David Roth wrote that “with the possible exception of Mary Harron’s American Psycho, it’s hard to think of a film adaptation that’s more invested in refuting and satirizing its source.”

Now, after a quarter-century of commendations and condemnations, Starship Trooper is turning 25 on November 7. In honor of that anniversary, scroll down to see 10 television stars who appeared in the action-packed movie.