Star Trek TOS Actor Explains How William Shatner’s Captain Kirk Broke a Golden TV Rule

Star Trek: The Original Series wasn’t just a franchise-starter: it was a legitimate game-changing piece of television, many times over. Whether it was pioneering the sci-fi genre or breaking social boundaries, Star Trek has rightfully earned all of the accolades for being the cultural icon that it has become.

Apparently, William Shatner’s Captain Kirk was more groundbreaking than most fans know. In a new podcast interview, one of Star Trek: TOS‘s lead actors breaks down why the impact of Shatner’s Kirk went deeper than how viewers responded to him.

Shatner’s Captain Kirk Broke The Leading Man Mold

Star Trek actor Walter Koenig (who played Ensign Chekov on The Original Series) has a podcast dedicated to his Trek episodes, called The 7th Rule. The latest episode looked at Season 2, Episode 20 of Star Trek: TOS, “Return to Tomorrow”. The episode is unique in that it features a storyline about bodiless aliens who need to “borrow” the bodies of Kirk, Spock, and other crew members to create android bodies for themselves.

“Return to Tomorrow” allowed William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and others to stretch their acting muscles (so to speak) and let loose a bit more. Dissecting the episode prompted Koenig to share deeper insights into just how much risk (see what I did there?) Shatner took with the character of Kirk, in general.

“Bill Shatner in the role of Captain Kirk took more chances with that character in dimensionalizing him, and showing us a side that was a little… not so complimentary than most leading actors,” Koenig explained. “Most leading actors are trying to be Edgar Bergen. Do you know who Edgar Bergen was? He was a ventriloquist, and the point of ventriloquism was to not let your mouth move when you spoke for the puppet. Most leading actors sort of do that, [but] Bill took chances all the time.”

It’s hard to imagine it now, when William Shatner’s Kirk is such an established icon, but Koenig’s (admittedly outdated) reference is true: In the 1960s, the image of a screen leading man (largely shaped in the 1940s and 1950s), was stoic and square-jawed; Shatner’s idiosyncratic and offbeat charm helped create a different kind of leading man for a different kind of genre, in very different kind of era in American pop-culture. And while producers and viewers may have needed time to see the vision of the character Shatner was creating, Shatner never seemed to doubt it, according to Koenig.

“I mean, for him, it wasn’t chances. [Bill] knew what he could do. He had a strong sense of his versatility. But I always appreciated [that]. There were a couple of times, like in the first Star Trek movie, when he was a little on the petty side. When he wanted the captaincy back at [Stephen] Collins’ expense. And I thought, good for him. Good for him for letting us see that, letting us see that…”

“Return to Tomorrow” not only let Shatner and Co. play around a bit more with their performances – the episode also cemented one of Shatner’s acting risks as a modern meme classic: the famous “Risk is our business!” speech to his crew, when debating whether to let the alien beings possess their bodies.

Come discuss Star Trek with us over on the ComicBook Forum! You can rewatch the show on Paramount+.

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