William Shatner has boldly gone and is still boldly going.
The most shocking thing about meeting the 93-year-old actor, writer, director, singer and philanthropist is how he defies his age and shows no sign of slowing down.
He’s got two new music albums; he’s still exploring strange new worlds, including leading a cruise to Antarctica this winter; and he’s taking on a new challenge in San Jose this Sunday, showing the 1989 movie he directed, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, and doing a running commentary for an audience, something he’s never done.
The screening will be at GalaxyCon, taking place Aug. 16–18 at the San Jose Convention Center.
“That movie was the biggest disappointment of my life,” Shatner said by Zoom last week. “Well, maybe not the biggest, because there have been a lot of disappointments. A huge disappointment because I had great ambition for it and it didn’t result; the results were not what I had hoped.”
It will be a sort of live Mystery Science Theater 3000.
“And the reasons that came about will constitute the commentary that evening while the film plays,” continues Shatner. “I’ve never done this before. In fact, it came as a shock when it was suggested. Do the commentary while the film is playing and talk about what was happening in my mind or on the stage or politically. There were a lot of political problems making that movie and I’ve never spoken about them before.”
Response to the 1989 movie has been mixed, to say the least. The Golden Raspberry Awards, a parody awards show that salutes the worst in film, gave Shatner two Razzies, for worst director and worst actor, and the movie won (or lost) as worst film of the year.
It ended up grossing $63 million worldwide, significantly less than its predicted $200 million.
However, some viewers saluted the film for its thoughtful and controversial view of the deity, the relationships of the aging characters and its take on the sardonic preachers claiming to know God.
Shatner is one of dozens of big-name guests appearing at the three-day GalaxyCon coming to the San Jose McEnery Convention Center this weekend.
His international career rocketed in 1966 with what was the modestly received Star Trek TV series. Fiction became fact three years ago when he was launched in a Jeff Bezos–owned Blue Origin rocket to become the oldest person in space (until slightly older 90-year-old astronaut Ed Dwight got a ride on the same ship).
Star Trek lasted three years and was shrugged off by NBC for lack of ratings. But almost miraculously it was brought back to life years later by the devotion of devoted fans who held Star Trek conventions all over the world. It changed the fortunes of all the actors involved.
Shatner was broke and divorced when the show closed. He earned modest wages traveling with a theater group, lived out of a truck with a camper shell and took any acting job he could find.
The conventions and the fortuitous success of the 1977 movie Star Wars led to a rebirth of the Star Trek franchise for seven feature films with the original cast. The actors, who had received no royalties for the endlessly repeated TV series, now had fat paychecks and made even more money signing autographs and speaking at conventions.
“When all this started, I really wanted little to do with it,” Shatner wrote in his biography of Leonard Nimoy, Leonard: My Fifty-Year Friendship with a Remarkable Man.
“Star Trek was my past, and I did not want it being confused with my future. And on some level, this whole thing made me a little uncomfortable. There was a sort of cult like element to it.”
Eventually, he came around, mostly because of his love of meeting people and hearing their stories.
Mike Broder, the GalaxyCon CEO who is bringing Shatner to San Jose and other conventions, saw the star speak in the 1980s and had no skepticism.
“What I know about this man is that he loves connecting with an audience,” Broder says. “And one of his passions, as you’ve heard him talking about the ecosystem and about technology and his music, he likes to talk about the future.
“Bill has always been hyper-focused on the now and tomorrow and new technologies and new ideas.”
For a commercial break here, Shatner’s résumé is encyclopedic.
Born to Jewish parents in Montreal, he studied economics at McGill University and got a small role in the 1951 film The Butler’s Night Off. He later became a Shakespearean actor with the prestigious Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario.
He was a hard worker who showed up on time and knew his lines. Moving to Hollywood, he took any and every role he could, eventually landing the role of James Tiberius Kirk in 1966. His credits included The Twilight Zone (“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” the one with the gremlin on the plane wing), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the Howdy Doody Show and enough other parts to fill pages of Wikipedia. In 1966 he appeared in the movie Incubus, the second film where all the dialogue was in the obscure language Esperanto.
In 1968 he recorded an album called “The Transformed Man,” reading classic theater and reciting lyrics to contemporary hits such as Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” He’s since recorded 13 albums with artists including Joe Walsh, Brad Paisley, Judy Collins, Billy Sherwood, Sonny Landreth and Iggy Pop, to name a few.
His most recent releases are 2024’s “Where Will the Animals Sleep: Songs for Kids and Other Living Things” and a performance at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with Ben Folds and the National Symphony Orchestra called “So Fragile, So Blue.”
Did his recording career start as a parody?
“No, I don’t think it was a parody,” he says. “I know it’s been taken that way at times. I did a Christmas album that went number one, I did a blues album that went number one, and so my musical career as I like to think of it has been alive and well. What I do is somewhere between singing and speaking but it’s neither and I don’t know how else to characterize it. It allows me to feel that I’m being musical while at the same time I’m not making an idiot of myself, or maybe I am.”
Like his Star Trek character, his life is about exploring new worlds.
“I wouldn’t characterize myself as a musician, but I’m offered many opportunities and when I grasp them I do them as enthusiastically and as fully as I can.”
Which, he thinks, is one thing besides good genes that has kept him young and vital. His schedule is always full with travel and work and challenges.
He’s also written dozens of novels and nonfiction books; won Emmys for TV shows The Practice and Boston Legal; played in the celebrity World Poker Tour; acted as T.J. Hooker in that series; does commercials (you’ve seen the Priceline ads); and shows American Saddlebred and Quarter Horses, doing TV shows and charitable functions with them and raising $400,000 to $500,000 a year for charities for kids and veterans for the past 25 years.
Some final questions:
What did the man who pretended to be in space learn when he went to space?
“When I was up there, I saw dramatically what I had always thought. Everything is connected. Everything on Earth is connected. The worms are connected, the bugs are connected, the animals are connected. Everything is connected to this, this blanket of life and if you kill one and it becomes extinct, if it doesn’t exist anymore, then other things are frantic because where is that mosquito? Where is that worm that I ate? Where is that fungi that feeds the trees? Where? So everything needs to be admired and loved because the Earth is alive.”
What about the aliens? Are they out there?
“Just mathematically, we can’t be the only form of life in the billions and billions of opportunities,” he says. “We’re approaching mankind’s ability to bring something to life, the right chemicals, the right soup, if you will, and electrical charge. We’re close to that. And if our little brains can do it, imagine whatever is functioning in the universe, how easily that is. Life has an imperative. Everything wants to exist.”
My 8-year-old son asked him: Who will you vote for?
“I can get away from answering that question by saying I’m Canadian and I can’t vote here, but also if I were to say I’m voting for that person or that person, I might alienate some of my audience. So, I keep it very quiet, but I, when you watch the arguments that go on, I want you to hear very clearly who’s making the most sense, even to your young brain, who’s making the most sense for you.”
What advice would you give your 25-year-old self now looking back?
“Don’t worry.”
