Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Video: Paul Wesley Calls This Week's Shatner-Esque Performance ‘A Wink to the True Fans' — Watch
This week's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds introduced us to the cast of a fictional 1960s sci-fi TV show… and the star of that show sounded very familiar.
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Paul Wesley — who plays James T. Kirk on Strange New Worlds — played frustrated actor Maxwell Saint, the star of the very Trek-like TV show The Last Frontier, and Saint's preening, halting delivery was quite reminiscent of William Shatner's infamous acting style on the original Star Trek series. (Any Trekkie would recognize that cadence anywhere.)
Wesley's Kirk is generally a different, more grounded take than Shatner's was, but when Wesley read this week's script, 'I realized immediately what an opportunity it was to give the viewers a satirical, more humorous version of what I could have done,' Wesley tells TVLine in the video above. He lists 'the pause in the cadence,' 'the gesturing' and the 'Shakespearean elements' as hallmarks of the 'James T. Kirk that we all know from the '60s. And I thought, 'Well, here it is. Let me do it for you now.' And I had an absolute blast doing it… I didn't want to overdo it, but I also wanted to do enough where it was a wink to the true fans.'
Speaking of overdoing it, Wesley admits with a laugh that he had to dial back the Shatner-isms at times: 'We did, obviously, a bunch of takes. And so there were variations in the pauses, where the pause is like, 'Is he gonna say his next line?' And then we settled on sort of the moderate one.'
The Last Frontier's flimsy sets and rubber-masked aliens were a tribute to the analog glories of the original Trek, too, Wesley adds: 'If you watch [the original Star Trek], the Gorn episode, for example [Season 1's 'Arena'], they're throwing Styrofoam rocks at each other, right?… Obviously, in the '60s, they didn't have special effects or VFX, and they couldn't digitize things, and so we wanted to have fun with making the sets so clearly a set, and just sort of like that absurdity, yet imagination and beauty, of something that is a 1960s futuristic set for television.'
So Trekkies, what'd you think of Wesley's… … … performance? Beam down to the comments to give us your thoughts on this week's episode.
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