Jimmy Ortega

Jimmy Ortega is a stuntman, stunt actor, and stunt coordinator who appeared in three Star Trek spinoff series. He only received credit for his first appearance. His stunt costume from the Star Trek: Voyager episode was sold off on the It's A Wrap! sale and auction on eBay.

Ortega was born in El Paso, Texas and has moved to Los Angeles in 1978. He is married since 1988 and has two children, a boy and a girl. He received two awards, a Stuntmen Award in 1986 for best spectacular sequence in the mini series North & South, starring James Read, Kirstie Alley, Jean Simmons, Jonathan Frakes and his wife Genie Francis, Jim Metzler, and David Ogden Stiers, and a Screen Actor's Guild Award in 2001 for the outstanding performance of the cast in Traffic, where he doubled actor Benicio Del Toro and played a minor part. He doubled Del Toro also in the 1998 film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in which Star Trek performers Richard Riehle, Larry Cedar, Ransom Gates, Gregory Itzin, Milt Tarver, and Lisa Hoyle also appeared. In 1994 he doubled Star Trek guest actor Carlos Carrasco in the academy awared honored action film Speed, alongside Alan Ruck, Richard Lineback, Jordan Lund, Chuck Hicks, and Patricia Tallman.

Other films he performed stunts in are Hooper (1978, with Brian Keith and directed by Hal Needham), Nightforce (1987, with Richard Lynch), The Naked Gun (1988, with Ricardo Montalban and stuntwoman Leslie Hoffman), Taking Care of Business (1990, with John de Lancie and Gates McFadden), Predator 2 (1990, starring Kevin Peter Hall), Night Eyes 2 (1992, with Tim Russ), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), John Carpenter's Escape from L.A. (1996, with Michelle Forbes, Leland Orser, and stunt performers Maria Doest, Phil Chong, and Eugene Collier), Mars Attacks! (1996, with the late Paul Winfield), the academy award winning L.A. Confidential (1997, with James Cromwell and Matt McCoy), the comic adaptation Spawn (1997, alongside stuntwomen Spice Williams-Crosby and Faith Minton), The Mask of Zorro (1998), John Carpenter's Vampires (1998, with Steve Blalock and Marjean Holden), the television movie Babylon 5: Thirdspace (1998, starring Patricia Tallman and Clyde Kusatsu), John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001, with Joanna Cassidy and Marjean Holden), Ocean's Eleven (2001), The Italian Job (2003), Spider-Man 2 (2004, starring Kirsten Dunst and Donna Murphy), Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), Ocean's Thirteen (2007), and the upcoming drama Days of Wrath (set for 2008, with Jeffrey Dean Morgan).

Ortega has also appeared in several television series such as CHiPs (1979, episode Valley go Home with Robert Pine), Flamingo Road (1982, episode Heatwave with John Beck and Paul Lambert), Dallas (1989, episode April Showers with Beth Toussaint), Falcon Crest (1989, episode Charley, directed by Reza Badiyi and with Allan Graf and Sierra Pecheur), Renegade (1992, episode La Mala Sombra with Branscombe Richmond and John Vargas), Martial Law (1999, episode Substitutes with Tom Wright and Tony Plana), American Body Shop (2007, episode SuperQuads with Gary Guercio), and in several episodes of The X-Files, Alias, ER, V.I.P., and Charmed.

Ortega has also stunt coordinated a number of films and television series such as The Seventh Sign (1988, the West Indies Sequence), the Oprah Winfrey production David and Lisa (1998), several episodes of the television series Friends (1996-2003), the comedy series Veronica's Closet (1997-2000, starring Kirstie Alley and Wallace Langham), the Pilot episode of Joey (2004), and Dead Write (2007, with Robert Pine, Jonathan Breck, Jasmine Anthony, and Jane Austin).