‘I’m not ready to go anywhere, I’m too busy!’
according to legend, bestowed by the devil in exchange for his soul – is due later in the year.
Like Hendrix, Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and a raft of later music icons, Johnson was 27 when he died in 1938. It’s no coincidence that Shatner finds the phenomenon and all its supposed supernatural connotations “fascinating,” as the late Leonard Nimoy’s Spock might have said.
“I’ve always believed that something lies beyond our existence and understanding; another realm is a very good way of putting it. I’m not talking about heaven and hell, or matters of faith and belief, but rather the growing evidence we are accumulating that points more and more to a frustratingly elusive ‘something else’ out there.”
I speculate, teasing, that Spock might have put it more succinctly as: “There’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.”
Shatner laughs but replies: “I was interested in the unexplained before I ever played Captain Kirk.”
He is quick to acknowledge that the instant recognition and worldwide fan adulation he still enjoys for playing USS Enterprise’s Captain James T Kirk has helped him land paying gigs that could equally be described as passion projects.
While shooting The Unxplained, he met Derek Amato, a former homeless man from Denver, Colorado, one of only 30 people in the world with Acquired Savant Syndrome, where victims display genius-level abilities after suffering severe head traumas.
Amato, now 48, knew the basics of guitar but had never sat at a piano before sustaining a serious brain injury nine years ago when he hit his head on the bottom of a swimming pool.
After emerging from a coma he discovered he could not only play the piano – at virtuoso level – but could also compose music, something he’d never previously even attempted.
“This guy is living proof of how little we really know,” says Shatner. “One minute, he’s a homeless guy who can strum a few chords.the next, he’s a gifted concert pianist. How the hell does that happen?where did it come from? Will we all, way in the future, be able to unlock such natural gifts from our own ‘inner realms’ or are we doomed forever to not know?”
One new episode, Deadly
Cults, resonates deeply personally with Shatner. “A very good friend of mine lost his fiancee to a cult and he tried everything he possibly could to get her out,” he says. “Sadly, she ended up taking her own life.”
Another upcoming episode features a dog owner whose husky detected her cancer long before her doctor did. Shatner clearly enjoyed shooting the series but he’ll never watch it.
He’s never seen an episode of Star Trek, police drama TJ Hooker, or even Boston Legal, either; nor his guest appearance on The Big Bang Theory last year.
“When I talk to fans, many are amazed they know far more than I remember about what
Kirk did in such-and-such an episode,” he says. “I just never enjoyed watching hourly or half-hourly TV as an actor and it still doesn’t appeal. But I’m grateful beyond words that a whole new generation of viewers is discovering Star Trek through shows like Big Bang.
“If anyone thinks I’ve had enough of Captain Kirk at the age of 89, they’d be terribly mistaken. I owe a great many of the things I have achieved in showbusiness to that character and I’m not ever going to forget that.”
Pandemic life is far quieter for Shatner, following his recent divorce from fourth wife Elizabeth, 27 years his junior. That subject is off the record. Shatner has maintained his silence as well as, reportedly, “most” of his fortune – in excess of £80million.
His third wife, Nadine, drowned in their swimming pool in 1999 after drinking heavily and taking sleeping pills.
These days the father of three spends much of his spare time riding his horses. “Don’t ask how many,” he implores. “My business manager might be reading and he’d be horrified.”
Shatner has written several Star Trek novels and released spoken word collections – a long way from the classical acting path he started on by joining the Canadian National Repertory Theatre in 1952 after graduating with an economics degree.
HIS FIRST small role was in a production of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, his second in Shakespeare’s Henry V. In 1956 he made his breakthrough on Broadway, understudy to fellow Canadian Christopher Plummer.
They were reunited in 1991 as enemies in the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, in the lucrative spin-off movie series that has far outlasted the TV series.
Shatner has appeared in no fewer than 243 scripted TV and film productions with an astonishing further 438 credits for small-screen appearances as himself, including a string of lucrative commercials. He’s just started work on yet another album that he describes as an “autobiographical mix” of music, poetry and spoken word.
So, having had any suggestion that he might retire brushed aside as “ridiculous,” I ask him – as a parting shot – what else he might be looking forward to. With his phaser on stun again, he immediately shoots back: “Death!”
And, after waiting for my response – temporary stunned silence – he adds, again in that so-distinctive Captain Kirk voice: “It... is… inevitable.”
Then he laughs, insisting: “It really isn’t something that holds any great fear for me, whatever ‘other realm’ I may or may not end up in.
“But I’m not ready to go anywhere right now – I’m too busy and there are too many more things I want to do.”
So don’t beam him up just yet, Scotty...
● The Unxplained, Sky History, Tuesday, 9pm. Series one is free to view on Blaze from July 22