Jolene Blalock, former Vulcan and Star Fleet commander, was almost a flash in the pan looking back at her career now. Blalock burned hot though, entering modeling at seventeen and rapidly making her way onto TV screens through guest spots in regular series and small roles in low-budget made-for-TV movies. With all that success so early though, why hasn’t she stayed more in the public eye?
Blalock was born on March 5, 1975, in San Diego, California where she was also raised. While she was just one of four children, Jolene stood out with creativity and artistic talent from a young age, from drawing to acting. The actress says she also grew up watching Star Trek, which she would eventually take part in.
Rise to Stardom
Jolene took the jump at seventeen into modeling and acting, starting with fashion modeling shoots and shows throughout Europe and Asia before she hit twenty. Starting around 1997 she began acting, getting guest roles in sitcoms and procedurals from Veronica’s Closet to JAG and CSI. Then she stumbled across a potential goldmine for young actresses- Hallmark.
Unfortunately, Jolene Blalock ended up on the weird side of Hallmark and not the Christmas rom-com side, nabbing the role of Medea in their production of Jason and the Argonauts for television. The film went on to torture high school classrooms for two decades and counting.
Star Trek: Entertrpise
The actual big break came a year later in 2001, as Jolene landed a role in her favorite franchise: Star Trek. In the role of Vulcan T’Pol, Blalock served as a regular throughout the four-year run of Star Trek: Enterprise alongside captain Scott Bakula, and while it isn’t the best of the various Trek shows (Deep Space 9 reigns supreme) it is well regarded as a prequel to the original series.
Between shooting episodes of Enterprise, Jolene was still working on other projects like commercials, guest spots, and a few movies. It was on one of these commercial shoots where she met her husband Michael Rapino, the future CEO of Live Nation and enemy of Swifties everywhere. They married not long after meeting in a small ceremony in Jamaica, which was by all accounts more of a surprise wedding for Rapino.
Since then Jolene has only appeared sparingly across movies and television, bouncing between guest roles in shows like CSI: Miami and terrible, cosmic abominations like Starship Troopers 3. She took increasingly fewer roles before quitting completely in 2017, leaving another Hallmark film as her swan song.
Why did she quit acting?
Why quit though? She was doing well on television for the most part, and at least had geek cred with Star Trek fans, so what made her just drop off the map suddenly? A combination of reasons, but the most prominent one is that she’s stepping back to focus on her family.
Jolene Blalock and Michael Rapino have three children together, and Blalock stated she wanted to focus on being a mother as opposed to being an actress upon first stepping back. Not surprising, considering she had been spotty at best with roles since 2010 (anyone remember Sex Tape?) and already had a rather large gap from 2014 to 2017.
The other thing that contributed was- why work when you have “f*ck you” money? Between Blalock and Rapino, the couple has plenty to last them without either working for the next century or so, so it’s no wonder she’s taken a step back from the long hours acting takes to just be a stay-at-home mom.
What is Jolene Blalock doing now?
These days Jolene Blalock splits her time between that stay-at-home mother job and devoting time to the foundation created by the couple. She volunteers and brings awareness to multiple causes for both human rights and nature conservation throughout the world, most recently focusing her efforts on humanitarian relief and aid in Haiti.
While she has no intentions of returning to Star Trek any time soon, Blalock will no doubt keep busy. With her children getting older and having more time to devote to her foundation, it’s not completely out of the question Jolene Blalock (now Jolene Rapino) could make a return to screens in the coming years. Whether it be in some possible Enterprise or even just a passing cameo, her presence certainly wouldn’t be unwelcome onscreen.
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