Page 47 - SHARP September 2022

filled with people who don’t want to look at reality and do something about it.
You say that your trip to space helped you appre- ciate the fragility of life on Earth. I’m struck by how mournful you seemed in the return footage. There’s a clip of you overcome with emotion, trying to articulate the experience to Jeff Bezos while the team is celebrating with champagne. I’ll tell you, about the moment you’re describing, that I went to sit down someplace to try and figure out what it was that was moving me so much. And then I realized I felt a sense of grief for the Earth and what we’ve done to it, and the millions of things that are going and have gone extinct that took bil- lions of years to evolve. And so, I was in mourning and grief for the Earth. And then, as a day or two went by, I realized I had known how insignificant the Earth is and I’d seen examples of it. The insig- nificance of the Earth and the insignificance of human beings on the Earth amounts to nothing. But the final realization is that we’re aware that we’re insignificant. And that awareness might be what makes us unique.
I was invited to a meeting of some well-known scientists sometime after that, and they played the clip you’re talking about, and at the end of it, Bezos embraces me. And I thought, My God, I’d forgotten that. That there’s love. There is empathy and sympathy among human beings.
You come back to your friendship with Leonard Nimoy throughout the book, partic- ularly in a chapter on human nature, where you speculate that we’re made of different Lego pieces that can work with or against other people’s natures. What were some of those Lego pieces you and Nimoy had in common? It’s possible — and I believe 90 per cent of what I’m saying, because there’s always a little bullshit — that there’s no such thing as coin-
cidence. Leonard and I were born four days apart. He was born in Boston and I was born in Montreal, which are similar cities in terms of their age, in terms of the East Coast artistic scene. He was born shortly after me in a family similar to mine and in a city similar to mine.
He had a very academic approach to acting, isolating moments and beats and so on, which was different from my approach, which was chaotic. I did whatever was there — whatever opportu- nity presented itself. Leonard, although coming to it differently, had the same professionalism about acting I did. So, when we met and were forced by Star Trek to be in each other’s compa- ny, we began a friendship. Everything that hap- pened to him happened to me, through the three years on the set, and the many more years going to events, making the movies. It was a beautiful friendship. I thought and felt about him like a brother, the brother I never had.
The ending was so peculiar that I grasp at any explanation, one of which is that when you have an illness, when you know you’re dying, you’re not the same person. So that’s what I ascribe his behaviour to in the last several months of our relationship. But for a time, it was like we were conjoined.
Another of your long-standing associations is with Captain Kirk. I wonder if people’s percep- tion of Kirk as a risky maverick isn’t a bit flat. He’s also a Navy guy: solid, strategic. You talk a lot in the book about putting in the time, being prepared for the job, and showing up. How much of William Shatner is in Kirk?
I never thought of it in quite that manner, but I think it’s true. If I use the phrase “But I’m Captain Kirk” about a situation, I can get a laugh. For example, as the gantry was being readied to be pulled away from the spaceship, the guy who was doing the countdown said, “If you want to get out, you can get out now.” For a moment, I was so apprehen-
sive about the hydrogen and about human error that a part of me thought, Jesus, I’ll get off. And then I thought, I can’t: I’m Captain Kirk. [Laughs] Or people think I’m Captain Kirk, with all those heroic characteristics. I can laugh at it, because I’m a frightened actor about everything. We’re all frightened: of death, of disease, of accidents, of monkeypox. So, there are elements of Captain Kirk that are in me. But there are also elements that I must aspire to, to keep up the front.
You speak about how your survival instinct has always been bound up with work. How do you maintain that drive to keep working in your nineties?
Well, it’s a process of — what would the word be? — senility, where I forget that I’m 91 and I think, well, I could do that. And then I do it and I think, why am I so tired? Because I’m 91, and I keep forgetting. So, the answer is forgetting. You forget your age, you go stumbling on.
May you continue to forget your age.
May I do that until I die. And wonder why I’m dying.
MAN WORTH LISTENING TO
“The world is filled with people who don’t want to look at reality and do something about it”
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SEPTEMBER 2022 • GUIDE 47
BOLDLY GO: REFLECTIONS ON A LIFE OF AWE AND WONDER BY WILLIAM SHATNER IS AVAILABLE OCTOBER 4TH AT INDIGO.CA ($35)