At 91, William Shatner – best known for playing Capt. James T. Kirk in the Star Trek franchise – is still going strong.
Case in point: On Oct. 13, 2021, he became the oldest person at age 90 to fly to space aboard the RSS First Step. Sponsored by Washington-based Blue Origin, LLC, this was the privately funded aerospace manufacturer’s second crewed sub-orbital spaceflight. Minutes after he landed, Shatner experienced the overview effect, a cognitive shift in awareness while viewing Earth from outer space. Shatner stated after landing: “I hope that I can maintain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it.”
“Indescribable”
More half a year later, it doesn’t seem like he has.
“Indescribable,” Shatner said over the weekend during his panel at the Motor City Comic Con in Novi, MI. “There’s no word for weightlessness until you feel it – it’s so weird and indescribable.”
Second-generation Trekkie Kyla Cleere, of Sterling Heights, MI, who cosplayed as a Vulcan, attended the panel with her father, Gordon. It was her father who made her a fan.
“My dad raised me on (Trek). He always had it playing all the time. Ever since I could remember, I’d watch (Trek) with my dad,” she said. “I enjoyed (Shatner’s) panel. I especially liked hearing about his space trip because I’m into space and astrophysics. I enjoyed his talking about the weightlessness of space – it was an interesting experience to hear about.”
Shatner joked with the audience, talking about how men’s applause sounds different from women’s applause, racecars, paintball, his latest CD called Bill, how he doesn’t like pissing people off yet does so all the time, and anything else – except Trek, oddly enough – as he went off on all sorts of tangents, entertaining the masses. At one point, he karate-chopped the table when talking about martial arts.
“Oh, shit!” Shatner exclaimed, wriggling the pain from his fingers. “That hurt!”
He even razzed an audience member during the Q&A session for asking a silly question. It was more like a stand-up routine than anything, something typical for a Shatner panel.
Interestingly enough, he doesn’t like watching himself perform, which is quite the statement, given that he’s been acting since he was a child.
“That’s right. It’s very difficult. I don’t like to watch (myself),” he said. “Ever look at pictures of yourself at 20 and you’re like, ‘Oh, shit?’ Imagine me looking at all those moving pictures of me from all those years – you get the idea?”
Lifetime Achievement Award
On June 2, Shatner – along with fellow Trek actor Whoopi Goldberg and current Trek overseer Alex Kurtzman – will be honored at the 18th annual Brandon Tartikoff Legacy Awards by the National Association of Television Program Executives in Los Angeles. There, Shatner will receive a Lifetime Achievement. His Better Late Than Never co-star Henry Winkler (best known as the Fonz on Happy Days) will present it to him.
“I thought, ‘I don’t deserve it,’” he said, turning serious and introspective. “I’ve done one thing that I think may be an achievement.”
Born in Montreal, Canada, Shatner – the middle of three children and only male in a Jewish household – started acting when he was six in a play. He noticed he made people in the audience cry.
“It was like, ‘Oh, wow. I did that. That’s incredible.’ That’s never been far from my mind, and I believe is the reason why I’m an actor today,” recalled Shatner, an alumnus of the Montreal Children’s Theater and McGill University (where he was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters in 2011).
He continued: “It was sort of an accident. I got positive feedback from family and friends. I thought, ‘That’s cool. I’ll try that again.’ And that’s what started me off.”
Shatner did radio dramas as a teenager and was in musicals at McGill. He also did summer stock. After graduating from McGill, he worked as an assistant manager and actor at both the Mountain Playhouse in Montreal and the Canadian National Repertory Theatre in Ottawa before joining the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario for three years.
There, he understudied for future Oscar winner Christopher Plummer (1965’s The Sound of Music) in Henry V. When Plummer couldn’t perform one night, Shatner stepped up and did a different interpretation than Plummer had done. Plummer was impressed by Shatner’s initiative (the two would later play adversaries in 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the final movie to feature the original Trek actors).
Later, Shatner went to Broadway, then L.A. His first major Hollywood film role was 1958’s The Brothers Kamarov, starring Yul Brynner (1960’s The Magnificent Seven). Besides his career-making role on Trek, Shatner won Emmy and Golden Globe Awards for his role as oddball lawyer Denny Crane on The Practice and its spin-off Boston Legal, both legal dramas created by David E. Kelly.
“Certainly, Boston Legal was a great deal of fun and extremely well-written,” said Shatner. “I’m grateful to have been able to play that part.”
Shatner had a notable role on The Twilight Zone, played the title character on T.J. Hooker, hosted Rescue 911 for seven seasons, served as the Priceline spokesman, and played Walter Bascom on TekWar (an adaptation of his series of science-fiction novels). Additionally, he co-starred with Oscar winner Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side) in 2000’s Miss Congeniality and 2002’s Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous. Many times, Shatner has played a fictionalized parody of himself where. He. Speaks. In. A. Staccato. Cadence. Further, he’s has also written books, screenplays, released albums, and directed various film and TV projects.
“That’s not a lifetime achievement,” he said. “What is a lifetime achievement? Here’s what I think is worthy of a lifetime achievement. In all of us, we carry with us that inner child… (who’s) angry and happy but mostly inquisitive, mostly questioning – ‘Why is the sky blue, Dad?’ … That inquisitiveness, that curiosity about life – ‘Why do the leaves turn? Look at the beauty of the flowers! Look at the ocean!’ – the curiosity about life around us, about our lives around us… about everything – that’s the child in us. That’s the person in us who inquires and is never dulled by experiences. You’ve got to rub the callouses off experience and make us soft and original like we were when we were that age. I’ve tried throughout my life to keep that inner child alive and curious – that may be an accomplishment and I encourage you all to think about that.”
Don’t Call Shatner an Icon
When asked what’s it like to be an icon, Shatner sarcastically replied: “I feel warm and fuzzy all over, actually.” Turning serious: “Being an icon, that hasn’t any reality to me. You and I are talking and I’m answering questions as intelligently as I can, and it doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. Doesn’t everybody do this? I’ve been at it so long that being an actor, being part of this publicity campaign, and being asked questions is my work. I don’t think of it as being an icon.”
A lot of that comes from the celebrity associated with Trek, the 56-year-old franchise created by the late Gene Roddenberry. Initially, the 1965 episode called “The Cage” was the first Trek pilot, which starred the late Jeffrey Hunter as Capt. Christopher Pike and the late Leonard Nimoy as Spock.
NBC executives called the pilot “too cerebral” and “too slow.” Rather than rejecting the series at the onset, NBC executives liked the concept and commissioned a second pilot – something unheard of – called “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Since Hunter decided to focus on his film career, Pike was replaced with Shatner’s Kirk on 1966-69’s Star Trek: The Original Series.
“I was fairly popular prior to (Trek) – I was doing movies and Broadway,” said Shatner. “NBC didn’t want to buy that pilot. They wanted Roddenberry to redo it because they felt it was intriguing. I was asked to come in and look at the pilot with the idea of playing the captain. I thought it was terrific.”
TOS featured one of the first interracial kisses on primetime television between Kirk and Lt. Nyota Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) in the 1968 episode, “Plato’s Stepchildren.” Shatner never saw it as something controversial, then or now.
“I was asked to kiss a very beautiful woman. Without any reluctance, I did,” he said. “Then it was bandied about for a while that it was interracial. I think it’s hyped higher than I think it ought to be.”
In 1968, TOS was canceled at the end of its second season. However, in a passionate letter-writing campaign, devoted fans convinced NBC to renew it for a third season. While it was canceled at the end of its third season, it found a new life in syndication in the early 1970s.
Shatner voiced Kirk on 1973-74’s Star Trek: The Animated Series. He reprised this role in seven movies, starting with 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture and ending with 1994’s Star Trek: Generations. In the latter, Kirk joins forces with Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) from 1987-94’s Star Trek: The Next Generation to fight Dr. Soran (Malcolm McDowell, A Clockwork Orange). They stop Soran, but not before Soran kills Kirk.
“I actually turned (the role of Soran) down a couple times,” said McDowell. “They eventually got the money up and they needed a good villain to match those two. Your movie’s only as good as your villain as you know.”
Generations marked Shatner’s last canonical appearance as Kirk. When asked how it feels to be the one who killed Kirk, McDowell casually replied with an indifferent shrug, “It’s only a part.”
Shatner has also done voiceovers as Kirk in various Trek video games. To date, his last appearance as Kirk was at the 85th Academy Awards in 2013, where he told host Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy) not to perform his controversial song-and-dance number, “We Saw Your Boobs,” where MacFarlane names the movies in which several actresses appeared topless.
“Seth MacFarlane likes me and devised that opening scene,” said Shatner, laughing. “I thought it was very funny.”
Captains Courageous
Shatner has high praise for Chris Pine – who succeeded him as Kirk in 2009’s Star Trek, 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness, and 2016’s Star Trek: Beyond – and writer/director J.J. Abrams. (NOTE: Paul Wesley of The Vampire Diaries fame will play Kirk in the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which is currently in its first season on Paramount+.)
“(Pine’s) wonderful. He’s good-looking, he’s talented, he’s athletic – he’s got all the equipment to be a leading man in movies for years to come,” said Shatner. “We did 6-7 movies with the original cast. I even directed (Star Trek V: The Final Frontier). We reached around $100 million of box office gross. J.J. comes along and gives us this wonderful ride and he breaks box office records. He has found the key to enlarging the franchise from just people who like (Trek) to people who want to go see an exciting movie, so he’s done extraordinarily well.”
He also praised Stewart. While fans debate who would win if Kirk fought Picard (Kirk, according to Shatner), the two actors are friends in real life. In fact, Stewart appeared in 2011’s The Captains, a documentary Shatner wrote, produced, and directed.
“Patrick is a great actor and a wonderful man,” said Shatner. “I admire him tremendously.”
Shatner also penned a book in 1999 called Get A Life! It was later adapted into a 2012 documentary of the same name. In it, Shatner examines Trek’s cultural impact, its strong fanbase, and his own role within it.
“Through my due diligence, I discovered (fans) were coming to see each other (at cons). It was a novel thing – conversations with friends and old-time acquaintances. But then in the documentary, I made a further discovery. I think they’re coming as a result of the mythology. The mythology of science-fiction – and in particular (Trek) – tries to suggest some solutions to the mysteries of these things we don’t know and really can’t imagine out there in space. They come as part of that mythology and indulge in the conventions as a part of that ritual.”
All said and done, Shatner doesn’t mind being remembered as Kirk.
“I put myself as much as possible into the role of anything I’m doing,” said Shatner. “Every actor brings himself to his part and I emphasize some aspect of the character, but it’s always the human being because he knows no other reality, so he’s playing something that is him but only a part of him.”
“I remain impressed and envious of Shatner’s seemingly boundless energy and enthusiasm for life,” said best-selling author Greg Cox, who’s penned more than 20 Trek novels. “And he will always be THE Star Trek captain for me.”
