Movies

Scott Stewart Bakula (/ˈbækjʊlə/; born October 9, 1954) is an American actor. He is known for his roles in two science-fiction television series: as Sam Beckett on Quantum Leap – for which he received four Emmy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award – and as Captain Jonathan Archer on Star Trek: Enterprise. From 2014 to 2021, he portrayed Special Agent Dwayne Cassius "King" Pride on NCIS: New Orleans.

Bakula starred in the comedy-drama series Men of a Certain Age and guest-starred in the second and third seasons of NBC's Chuck as the title character's father, Stephen J. Bartowski. From 2014 to 2015, he played entrepreneur Lynn on the HBO show Looking.

Early life
Bakula was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Sally (née Zumwinkel) and Joseph Stewart Bakula (1928–2014), a lawyer. He has a younger brother and a younger sister. The family surname comes from Czech and Slovak ancestry, translating literally to "stick" (spelled bakuľa). He attended Jefferson College, followed by the University of Kansas for a time, but left, saying:

...because I was offered a tour of Godspell, a national tour that was from St. Louis. I thought that sounded great, and I went to my parents and I said "I want to do this tour", and they said, "Go ahead, maybe it will get it out of your system. And you come back to school in a year or two, you come back." The tour was gonna start in August and the tour never started and school did, and then the tour fell apart, and there I was sitting at home. So I was left holding the bag, basically, and then had to decide where to go from there. And I applied, was applying to other schools. I was gonna go to a Mormon theatrical kind of school, and the more I looked at it the more I spent time examining the school side of it. I just realized what I really needed to do was just pick up, pack up and go to New York.