AN OLDIE BUT A GOODIE
Thanks to its TV timewarp, SA has somewhat compressed but very fond memories of William Shatner, in town this week. By Riaan Wolmarans
When Captain James T Kirk strode into the room, there was no whooshing sound from the doors, nor a red-shirted crewman handing him a data pad. Instead, William Shatner quietly arrived for this interview from his Gallagher Estate hotel room sans entourage. Even his US agent was nowhere to be seen.
He had only had a single night’s rest since flying from the US to appear at the second annual Comic Con Africa in Midrand last weekend. On day one he was on stage sharing stories and memories, answering questions with razor-sharp wit and striding to and fro, not at all like an 88-year-old star who’d just spent long hours on a transatlantic flight.
He admitted later: “I was blind with fatigue. It was a real adventure trying to stay awake.”
For many at Comic Con Africa, Shatner will always be the dashing commander of the USS Enterprise whose space-faring adventures only warped into South Africa at the start of the 1980s, after the advent of TV locally in 1976. Star Trek had debuted in the US in 1966.
In South Africa, the ’80s were the decade of Shatner. Soon after Star Trek aired here, he was back as the tough titular cop in TJ Hooker. “And you thought, how rapidly that man has aged!” he laughs when told about SA being so late to the TV party.
Next he hosted Rescue 911 — early reality TV so popular here that it spawned urban legends about South Africans in need dialling 911 instead of 10111. And in the 2000s, he won over a whole new generation as Denny Crane in Boston Legal.
But Shatner’s six decades of creativity stretch far beyond the small screen: movies, theatre productions, voiceovers (including My Little Pony), writing novels, making documentaries, vlogging and more.
Then there are his spoken-word albums and last year he had his first go at country music, followed by, improbably, a Christmas album recorded with rock royalty including Iggy Pop, Henry Rollins and Todd Rundgren. So is he a US national treasure?
“No, I’m not a national treasure. National treasure is the human spirit, democracy — that’s the national treasure. I’m a Canadian bystander.”
A Canadian bystander adopted as one of the US’s favourite sons, to be sure. So, looking all the way back to his first theatre role in 1954, which would he pick as the real decade of Shatner?
“This one! I’ve got a new show on the air in the US and they’ve ordered more, so it will last more than one season. It’s called The UnXplained — eventually it will come to South Africa.”
His new TV show is a true-life X-Files probing the world’s mysteries, but his music is taking a more personal turn, with a blues album in the works. “This album is an intriguing proposition — to discover what the blues are, how to do it, how you indigenously sing the blues … I know about pain, I know about sorrow, but how do you express it from a cultural point of view? It’s really an interesting problem to work out.”
His Yuletide album, Shatner Claus, contained “narrative songs” and was described by the Los Angeles Times as a “delightfully dramatic outing”, though the New York Times simply said: “Could we not? Signed, the Grinch.”
At this stage of his career, does he even care about the critics any more?
“Well, sure, I care that people like it,” he says. “I think it was really a terrific album! I had an album going last year at the same time, the country music album, and they asked me to sing at the Grand Ole Opry [in Nashville], so I was on the magic stage of the Grand Ole Opry and at the same time had the Christmas album that did very well in the US and should come back next year … Could we?”
At Comic Con, an inevitable question from the audience was about the late Leonard Nimoy, famous for playing Spock in Star Trek, and a close friend.
Shatner told the audience how Nimoy evolved the role of Spock. “Leonard had grasped the role and now, uniquely, it defined him … there had been nothing like it before and nothing after.”
But what about Shatner himself? Is there a little bit of Captain Kirk still with him after all these years?
“I don’t think, at least in my case, that characters rub off on you,” he says. “You don’t start assuming the character; the character really assumes you. But the fact of the matter is, the actor brings himself.
“Even when he wears a long nose and a beard, it’s still the actor. Laurence Olivier, for all his disguises, was still Laurence Olivier, who thought that’s the way somebody would perform or read a line, whereas another actor in the same costume would read the line a different way. So, I am Captain Kirk, and Captain Kirk is me.”