William Shatner interview - Radio Times, June 2005

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William Shatner interview - Radio Times, June 2005

Jeff Dawson meets the man who's had to endure 39 years in the intergalactic shadow of Star Trek. Until now…

"For little-known Canadian actor William Shatner, Star Trek was a godsend…but also a curse. Lord knows, over nearly 40 years, how many times he's had to endure one of those dreadful conventions where men wear pointy ears and order halves of shandy in Klingon.

While some had begun to regard Shatner as a puffy exercise in hammy self-parody, at 74 he's undergone an astonishing renaissance. As one of the stars of hit drama series Boston Legal , Shatner's mantelpiece is currently creaking. For his portrayal of eccentric lawyer Denny Crane he's scooped both Emmy and Golden Globe awards - coveted baubles he never got a sniff of in any previous incarnation.

It's his first recurring dramatic role since lawman TJ Hooker in the early 1980s. "You know every decade has a milestone in it," he laughs, " … and then there are millstones that litter the landscape as well."

Shatner's recourse to the quip is near pathological. It has earned him a reputation of being sarcastic, rude even. The quips certainly get him out of in-depth discussion. Perhaps it's the cynicism of a man who quit fighting the Star Trek behemoth long ago, throwing in his lot to write sci-fi novels, milk his connections, then suffer the backlash of his former crewmates, who berated him as an egomaniac?

For all their glories together, there aren't many of the old gang who've got much nice to say about Shatner. "Len [Nimoy] and I are friends - I see him all the time. And the others I don't see any more," he says, curtly.

Shatner nearly wasn't Kirk at all, of course. Had Jeffrey Hunter been more convincing in the pilot episode, Shatner would never have been summoned to the bridge. Back in 1966, he was a jobbing TV actor, with appearances in The Man from UNCLE, The Twilight Zone, The Virginian and Mission: Impossible, when producer Gene Roddenberry called him up.

Rightly, Shatner saw it as just another low-rent gig. "These were workaday shows," he says. "The same sense of survival that I've had from when I started out, more than 50 years ago - to keep my head above water - is still with me, and therein maybe lies the explanation of the [All-Bran] commercials that you're seeing in Britain."

To cap it all, Shatner even has a CD, Has Been, that's become a cult hit. A Spockishly illogical romp with hipsters like Ben Folds and Aimee Mann, it lays to rest those laughing-stock renditions of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and Mr Tambourine Man from his 1968 album The Transformed Man, often voted the worst record ever made.

Shatner's an odd one, but talented, nonetheless. And by several light years, the finest Enterprise skipper of them all. He waves his arm around Denny Crane's Boston Legal office. "Star Trek is like a sceptre, giving me a command of a lot of things," he says. "All this … even the Bran Flakes." "

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