Star Trek’s William Shatner Thinks Chris Pine Should Play Him in a Biopic

Star Trek star William Shatner chose an unsurprising actor play him in a potential future biopic. Shatner appeared on a GalaxyCon video panel to discuss a variety of topics. The host eventually asked who Shatner would want to see star in a film about his life. Shatner’s first instinct was to do it himself, but soon named another actor who’s already filled Shatner’s shoes. “I want to play myself. I don’t want to die!” Shatner said. He followed up with, “I don’t know. [Chris] Pine? Why doesn’t he play me? A good looking, talented guy.” That “good looking, talented guy” plays the younger version of Shatner’s Star Trek character, Captain James T. Kirk, in the Star Trek movies set in the Kelvin timeline.

Shatner bowed out of playing Captain Kirk following the character’s death in the film Star Trek Generations. He’s said recently that he’d consider returning to the role if there was a way to have it make some kind of sense.

‘If they wrote it and it made reasonable sense then I’d love to [revive Captain Kirk],” he said. “I wouldn’t do a series. If the role was written properly and it wasn’t a cameo or gratuitous; being there just to show my face, I wouldn’t do that.”

Shatner said something similar when ComicBook.com spoke to him ahead of his Grand Ole Opry performance in 2019. When asked about the possibility of resurrecting Kirk for a series similar to Star Trek: Picard, Shatner said, “That word, ‘resurrect.’ That’s a key word. Resurrect. You’d have to resurrect me, Shatner, in order to do the daily. I don’t know what Patrick is doing doing that. Doing a series is debilitating for a young guy, for a 25-year-old, which I was doing when I was 25 years old. It’s a physical wrecker, it’s a mental wrecker, and it’s a homewrecker ’cause you’re working 14, 18 hours a day. And in the last series I did, Boston Legal, I had, in rush hour, a two-hour commute. So add that. So no, I would not be interested in doing a series, per se.”

Shatner has also spoken about Kirk’s death scene in Star Trek Generations. “I thought about dying, my death, and this beloved character who’s going to be put to rest,” Shatner said of the scene in a 2018 interview. “How do I play it? You know there’s got to be a moment, you’re alive, and you’re going to die, now you’re alive, and now you’re going to die. There has to be a moment when we all, at that moment of death, we say, ‘Holy cats, I’m dying!’ And you’re dead. How do you treat that moment? And I think we die the way we live. If we live filled with fear, a fear of flying, a fear of leaving the village, you’ll be fearful, you’ll lose your breath, you’ll panic, and you’ll die. Or if you look forward to the next adventure, maybe you’re conscious, maybe we’re conscious when we die. Maybe, we’re aware. A lot of people believe in heaven. We’re all going to go to a lovely place and see somebody. I don’t know what age we see our mother and father. Are they still old? Or are they young? We don’t know. That would be a lovely thing to happen, but we don’t know. It’s how we die that’s interesting. And I think we die the way we live.”

(h/t Trek Report)