SET PHASERS TO TREK TALK
A few of the Star Trek Beyond actors share their thoughts on the third Trek reboot filmed in and around Vancouver last summer. Here are five things you should know about the dust, the script, gay parenting, heavy breathing and Jaylo, writes Bob Thompson.
1. Interior over exterior
Zoe Saldana, who plays Lt. Uhura, had a great time enjoying most of what Vancouver life had to offer during her days off. And she definitely preferred the city’s sound stage shoot to filming at a rock quarry near Pitt Meadows, B.C., which passes for an alien planet.
“I liked being on the ship,” Saldana says. “It’s easier. We were like in a quarry and it was just dust everywhere, and helicopters flying really low. I liked being on the Enterprise. It’s cleaner.”
2. Spaced — another frontier
Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty and co-wrote the script for Star Trek Beyond, got his start playing the dork-like Tim on the 1990s British TV series Spaced. So what would Tim think of the third Trek?
Says Pegg quoting a Tim line from Spaced: “As sure as eggs is eggs, as sure as day follows night, as sure as every odd numbered Star Trek movie is s--- ” ... and then here we are in 2016 and I’ve written an odd-numbered Star Trek movie, and I’m happy to say that Tim is wrong.”
3. Imitation Situation
Besides doing a great impersonation of the original Sulu, George Takei, John Cho says he’s enthusiastic about paying tribute to Takei by referencing Sulu as a gay family man in the latest movie.
And another thing — they are not having a spat. “George and I email all the time,” Cho says. “We have big, long, lovely discussions, and we’re on great terms. We were never shouting at each other or anything ... it’s been talked about and responded to and I’m still a huge fan of GT, for sure.”
4. Captain Kirk gets the runaround
Chris Pine’s Kirk is still the centre of attention, but he’s also ducking for cover a lot in the latest adventure
“Yeah, I always have the most fun in these films when we’re laughing or talking and then usually (stuff ) blows up and then we have to do the (stuff )-blowing-up acting,” he says.
“I think I spend the majority of the film saying, ‘Let’s go’ and ‘Can we do it?’ Yeah, I mean, it’s just breathing heavily.”
5. The Jennifer Lawrence factor
One of the new Star Trek Beyond characters is the alien Jaylah as defined by Sofia Boutella, who played the assassin in Kingsmen: The Secret Service.
If Jaylah sounds familiar, it should. In the early stages of the screenplay, Pegg and co-writer Doug Jung had a shorthand for the new character.
“We’d say, ‘Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone comes out, and she finds these guys,’ ” Pegg says. “And it started to get tiring always saying Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone. So then we started calling her Jaylo, and then she became Jaylah, so Jaylah is basically named after Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone.”