William Shatner Grinned and Told Me: ‘You Could Have Come With Me’—Inside My Wildest Interviews With the ‘Star Trek’ Icon

Meeting your idols can oftentimes be disappointing, or so goes one of showbiz’s great adages. Doing so, you risk shattering the illusion you’ve created in your mind, though it’s just as likely the encounter could be everything you’d always hoped it would be. From personal experience, it can be said that in some cases—specifically in regards to William Shatner—things can go either way, and actually have!

For about 45 years, yours truly has worked as an entertainment journalist, writing for a variety of publications, authoring a couple of dozen books covering the worlds of film and television and currently serving as Senior Entertainment Editor at Woman’s World. And over that time, Star Trek has been a subject reported extensively on over the decades, through which there’s been about half a dozen opportunities to interview the Shat; the man who brought Captain James Tiberius Kirk to life in a way that no one else could.

In reflecting on those conversations, it was decided to lock on to three of them, which, in a paraphrasing of the title from one of Clint Eastwood’s most famous films, we’re referring to as “The Good, the Bad and the… Eh.”

The good

The year is 2017 and the setting is New York Comic-Con. Shatner is there promoting the animated film Batman vs. Two-Face, for which Adam West has loaned his voice for the former and the Shat the latter.

We’re sitting at a round table with about a dozen reporters, this guy here to Shatner’s immediate right. We’re all firing out questions and he’s in the middle of answering one. As soon as he’s finished, mine is offered up: “Did you record your part alone?”

He looks at me and replies, “You’re obviously not paying attention. I just answered that question.” To which I apologize and dismiss what I had asked, but he decides to answer it anyway. Well, he decided to answer a question (actually the one he just did), to which I politely said, “That’s a lovely answer, but it’s not what I asked.”

“What did you ask?” he queries in that wonderful cadence of his.

“I asked if you had recorded your part alone.”

He sheepishly responds, “Yes… I recorded alone… by myself… with nobody else there.” Which is pretty much how he punctuates every response that follows questions asked by different journalists.

It’s all pretty delightful, made even more so as he gets ready to leave and somebody asks him if he’d seen the premiere of Star Trek: Discovery. He replies that he did, that he thought it was great fun and had gone to a big premiere event for it. Well, never one to avoid being a wiseass, I look up at him and ask, “Did you go alone?”

Everybody laughs, including Shatner, who turns his head sideways, gives me what I refer to as the “Shatner grin,” puts his hand on my arm and says, “You could have come with me,” and then, doing my best to mimic his cadence, I point out, “You didn’t invite me.”

Big laughs all around with somebody asking me, once he’s departed, if we were taking our show on the road.

So went “the good.”

The bad

 It’s 1994. At the time I was Senior Editor at Cinescape magazine and one of my beats was, of course, Star Trek, and the movie Star Trek: Generations—the film that brought Kirk and Patrick Stewart’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard together—on which we were doing a preview piece. No sooner had my phone conversation with Shatner begun than I realized that in no way was he in the mood to be interviewed.

But I pushed forward and what follows was the exact question that I asked and the precise answer—if you want to call it that—that he gave.

Q: “This is the first Star Trek film you’re filming without Leonard Nimoy, without DeForest Kelly. There’s Kirk on the bridge of an Enterprise without Spock, without Bones. I would have to imagine that that experience was very odd.”

A: “It was odd… It got odder as time went on.”

Just imagine about 15 minutes of that sort of conversation. It wasn’t easy and filled me with genuine frustration at the time, but now it’s something I can laugh about (and hopefully you will too when you listen to my telling in the video at the top of this article).

The ‘eh’

The “eh” took place in 2018 when he was promoting The Steam Engines of Oz, an animated film in which he voiced the Wizard of Oz. I was one of two people who had the opportunity to talk to him for two minutes (admittedly, it went over that length). As we began the conversation, he asked me what I thought of the film and I replied that I thought the story was interesting, the characters were fun, but the animation was “eh.”

He replied, “How do you spell ‘eh?'” 

I said, “E-H?” And he repeated, “E-H. That sounds right.” And then we had our conversation. At the end of our talk, where we managed to work in his appearances on The Twilight Zone and, of course, Star Trek, I asked him what he thought the power of the film was.

“I thought it was the animation,” he offered without missing a beat. Then he burst out laughing. I burst out laughing and that was the end of that. So I call it the “eh,” but it was actually a fun and memorable conversation.