William Shatner is irrepressible. He’s a 91-year-old sci-fi icon — the original poster boy for Star Trek — who has by his own description lived a thousand lives. But if time were on his side, the Canadian actor would live a thousand more.
His most famous life, of course, was the 30 years he spent as James T Kirk, the swaggering and impetuous 23rd-century captain who led the intrepid crew of the starship Enterprise over three seasons on television in the 1960s and in seven Star Trek films thereafter. Yet there’s way more to the Shatner story than exploring the galaxy in an ill-fitting uniform.
He has made more than 60 films and appeared in more than 100 TV shows over seven decades, including five seasons fronting the police drama TJ Hooker. These days he hosts a hit documentary series on the History Channel, The UnXplained — about the world’s strangest mysteries — that has just been renewed for another 40 episodes. He has written 31 works of fiction (including the TekWar sci-fi series) and 11 non-fiction ones; he has recorded 11 albums — with his distinctive brand of spoken lyrics — and there’s another in the works. He’s a horse breeder who sold his kidney stone for charity and went swimming with sharks as a 90-year-old for the sake of the TV cameras. Last year he hit the headlines again when he became the oldest person to travel into outer space. Oh yes, there’s food enough here for Boldly Go, Shatner’s new memoir, a free association meditation on life, the universe and just about everything in between.
Boldly Go, Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder, written with Joshua Brandon, isn’t an autobiography per se — Shatner has covered that ground several times already. Instead his latest publication is an idiosyncratic collection of essays that embraces everything from the trials and triumphs of his remarkable life (from growing up a lonely child in Montreal to becoming a global sci-fi hero) to the parlous state of the natural world and the wonder of a universal interconnectivity that binds us to the stars. Look at the chapter headings — We Belong Together, Listen to the Animals, There’s Beauty in Everything, Your Place in the Universe — and you get the idea.
Why did he write it? “I am of the opinion that the universe is vibrating, the Earth is vibrating, we’re vibrating, and those vibrations bring us all together,” he says. “We are all connected, every human being is connected, we’re connected to the Earth and the Earth is connected to the universe. If you can be aware of how connected we all are to each other, good things can finally come about. That’s the best way I can put it.”
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He is speaking to me over Zoom from the home he shares in southern California with his 63-year-old fourth wife, Elizabeth (they are actually divorced, “but only on paper”, a move taken for financial and inheritance considerations). For a nonagenarian, Shatner looks remarkably robust and he’s certainly quick off the mark, ready to pounce on my questions with enthusiasm and the occasional prickly challenge. “I can tell you what I did and what I think,” the actor says of the book. “But I can’t tell you what to think.”
Like it or not — and Shatner does bridle at being called a sci-fi icon — Star Trek is the reason people read his books, listen to his quirky albums and watch his TV shows. You might think that Boldly Go represents the self-indulgent musings of a narcissistic actor, but it has a self-mocking humour and an engaging intellectual curiosity that provides more pleasure and purpose than that. Meanwhile, Trekkies, eager for any tidbit of gossip, will eat up Shatner’s insights into the world of Trek: his fraught 50-year friendship with Leonard Nimoy — the first and greatest Spock; his longstanding feud with George Takei, Sulu in the original cast.
Inevitably Shatner’s decades as a Star Trek captain are woven throughout his life and are frequently referenced in Boldly Go. Is he grateful to the original TV series for the career he’s enjoyed? “Absolutely,” he says. “I was working on Broadway, in movies and on TV prior to Star Trek, but Star Trek was the beginning. It put me on the map as a celebrity and all the stuff afterwards flowed from it.”
The Trek franchise, which encompasses a dozen TV shows and 13 films, is today worth more than $10 billion, but its beginnings were modest. The original series ran for three seasons but was axed by NBC in 1969 due to low ratings, a decision that Shatner admits sent him into a spiral of despair and financial anxiety (Star Trek didn’t pay the big bucks in those days). Yet his career — and the Trek universe — revived spectacularly when the TV episodes went into syndication and when the first film was released in 1979.
What was the appeal of Kirk, Mr Spock, Dr McCoy, Scotty, Uhura and the rest? “It’s the story,” Shatner says. “Here is a group of people you get to love going on an adventure that, although unusual, harkens back to things that happen on Earth. The futurist stories we told were really human stories with a twist. People loved the stories, they loved the characters.”
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He’s no Norma Desmond — he doesn’t spend his evenings watching himself in old episodes of Star Trek. But he does attend the conventions. “I enjoy the conventions when I am on stage fielding questions,” he says. “I have acquired a way of doing this hour so that it becomes a kind of mutual distribution of information. The fans are interesting, it’s part of the reason why I go.” What are they like? “From 6 to 76, from pink to a strange shade of purple.”
It’s clear he’s still puzzled by the breakdown of his friendship with Nimoy in the years immediately preceding the actor’s death in 2015 and it still galls him that some of his other colleagues on the Star Trek set disliked their handsome leading man. When Nichelle Nichols (who played the communications officer Uhura) told him that they found him “cold and arrogant”, Shatner was shattered. “I was horrified to learn this, ashamed that I hadn’t realised it,” he writes in the book.
Takei has been the most relentlessly vicious in his criticism over the decades, accusing Shatner of being self-centred and oblivious to the needs of other actors. Last year Takei even mocked Shatner’s voyage to outer space, deriding the former Star Trek star as a 90-year-old “guinea pig” to assess the impact of space on an “unfit” specimen. Shatner, finally, has had enough of the sniping from his former colleagues.
“I began to understand that they were doing it for publicity,” he tells me. “Sixty years after some incident they are still on that track. Don’t you think that’s a little weird? It’s like a sickness. George has never stopped blackening my name. These people are bitter and embittered. I have run out of patience with them. Why give credence to people consumed by envy and hate?”
Shatner won a well-deserved Emmy for his portrayal of the outrageously narcissistic lawyer Denny Crane in Boston Legal, David E Kelley’s deliciously sharp comedy-drama in which Shatner enjoyed a fabulous bromance with James Spader’s loveable lawyer Alan Shore. “James Spader was wonderful, the whole cast was wonderful,” Shatner says, “and I have never heard a word from them saying how much they didn’t like me.”
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In Boldly Go he writes about the high points in his career. The one-man show he took to Broadway in 2012 and then on tour was one of his proudest moments as an actor. “I wrote and directed it. I was able to entertain people for 90 minutes on stage with no dancing girls, no music, nothing else but me telling stories.” And he talks about the low points in his life: the drowning of his third wife, Nerine, in the family swimming pool; being forced to live in his pickup truck after his first divorce; the tinnitus that has plagued him ever since he stood too close to a special effects explosion on set.
In places Boldly Go mirrors the Sixties flower-power philosophy of the first Star Trek, in which the feelgood glow of Earth’s utopian future offered an uplifting message for where humankind was going to be in the 23rd and 24th centuries. It’s in stark contrast to the bleak pessimism of most of today’s science fiction, a pessimism Shatner’s book shares. It’s imbued with a melancholy for the state of the planet just as much as it’s a hymn to the beauty and wonder of the natural world.
Is the world a better place today than it was in the Sixties? “It depends on what area you are looking at,” says Shatner, who has three daughters and five grandchildren. “If you are talking about poverty it has improved a lot — there are a lot less people under the poverty line. We are making great strides in education, acquiring more and more knowledge. But as for our ability to live on Earth, it’s decreasing rapidly. So that everything else we are doing is extraneous to the coming tsunami of global warming and all the things that apply to it. I ache for the future of my children and for civilisation.”
His brief trip to outer space last year, a guest of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin project, only intensified Shatner’s feelings. “What it did was push me even further into anxiety about the world and grief about what is happening. Everything about the Earth is beautiful, every insect, let alone the great animals, and as you and I are talking things are going extinct. What a terrible, sad thing that is.”
He’s aware of his own enormous privilege. “I am drinking a clear glass of water and eating good food. That puts me in a different category to billions of other human beings.” His health is good — “there has never been anything seriously wrong with me” — and he takes care of himself by eating well, avoiding alcohol and smoking; he still rides horses competitively. Nevertheless he thinks about death “all the time”, though that hasn’t stopped him living each day to the max. “I have all kinds of things happening. Documentaries, another album, another book, a hit show on Netflix. I am busier now than I have ever been. My family life is full and loving. The word lucky doesn’t even approach my good fortune.”
Boldly Go is published by Atria Books at £20
