Skip to main content

Star Trek fans won’t get old Kirk cameo in Star Trek Beyond, Shatner says

william shatner will not appear in new star trek film gallery startrek
Image used with permission by copyright holder
A legendary actor and the original Captain Kirk, William Shatner will not appear in the upcoming third installment of the J.J. Abrams’-produced Star Trek film franchise, Star Trek Beyond, according to the actor.

J.J. Abrams’ film series exists in an alternate timeline to the original show, and that allows cameos of old characters as “grown-up” versions of their past selves, due to a time-warp phenomena that occurred in the first of the newer films.

Recommended Videos

Leonard Nimoy, the original Mr. Spock, made a brief cameo in 2013’s Star Trek: Into Darkness, but it looks as though Shatner will not be getting the same treatment for this year’s Star Trek Beyond.

Shatner has said previously that he had been contacted about appearing in the new film, but according to the actor, those conversations never led to anything real.

In an interview with SFX magazine the actor said, “It would have been interesting to see what their fertile imaginations could have done with somebody who is 20 years older than when Captain Kirk died [in Star Trek Generations] and how they would have explained the difference in appearance. But that never came up. I’m sure they must have thought of it one time or another but I never had a substantial conversation about replaying the role.”

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the iconic space exploration franchise, which first hit screens as a television series in 1966. Fans of the series can still expect to see Shatner in a variety of settings this year, and the actor has been actively promoting his upcoming book, An Autobiography of James T. Kirk.

Directed by Justin Lin (The Fast and the Furious), the new film will be the 13th film in the Star Trek canon, and will star Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, Chris Pine, and Zachary Quinto.

Star Trek Beyond will hit theaters on June 22.

Parker Hall
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Parker Hall is a writer and musician from Portland, OR. He is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Oberlin…
7 best Star Trek villains, ranked
Ricardo Montalban in ‘Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.’

Thanks to its more than 50 years of continued existence, Star Trek has produced just a lot of stuff. That stuff includes several great TV shows, more than a few outstanding movies, and perhaps most importantly of all, some genuinely great villains.

Because Trek has always concerned itself with the politics of the stories it tells, the series has also introduced some genuinely nuanced bad guys. There are plenty of great villains of the week, to be sure, but there are also legendary villains who have made their way onto this list. These are the seven best Star Trek villains, ranked.
7. Nero

Read more
7 best Star Trek parodies, ranked
A space crew stand on a planet in The Black Mirror's USS Callister episode.

For more than 50 years, Star Trek has been an institution, especially among the nerds of America. The original Star Trek series has spawned various movies and additional shows in the years since it aired, and those shows have been met with various levels of acclaim and criticism.

Alongside all of these more faithful series, though, there have also been a number of parodies of Star Trek, its tropes, and the world it's set in. We've gathered seven of the very best of those parodies for this list, which range from TV episodes to entire movies.
7. Star Trek: Lower Decks
Star Trek: Lower Decks First Look

Read more
10 best episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise, ranked
The Enterprise NX-01 departs drydock on Star Trek: Enterprise

Every Star Trek series is someone’s favorite (Star Trek: The Animated Series stans, we see you), but when it comes to the 18-year Golden Age of Trek between 1987 and 2005, the prequel series Enterprise is easily the least beloved. Airing on UPN for an abbreviated four-season run, Enterprise was meant to shake things up after three consecutive series set in the late 24th century.
Imagined as a sort of origin story for Star Trek in the style of The Right Stuff, creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga wanted to capture the danger and excitement of United Earth’s early interstellar space program, even planning to spend the entire first season on Earth preparing for the launch of Starfleet’s very first Starship Enterprise. The network, however, had other ideas, insisting that Berman and Braga not meddle with the consistently successful Star Trek formula. Thus, despite taking place two centuries earlier, Enterprise became, essentially, “more Voyager,” which in turn had been “more Next Generation,” a once-great sci-fi procedural that was nearly a decade past its peak.
That’s not to say that the series didn’t improve throughout its four-season run. After two years of struggling to justify the show’s very existence, Berman and Braga swung for the fences with a radically different third season that reinvented Enterprise (now renamed Star Trek: Enterprise) as a grim and gritty serialized drama unpacking the aftermath of a 9/11-scale attack on Earth. While immediately more compelling, the revamp failed to boost the show’s sagging ratings, and it was reworked yet again the following year, and leaned further into the “prequel to Star Trek” angle under new showrunner Manny Coto. This, many fans will argue, is where Enterprise finally found its legs, but it was too little and too late to prevent its cancellation. Still, each iteration of the troubled spinoff had its highlights and our list of the 10 strongest Enterprise episodes is spread fairly evenly throughout the run of the show.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for each listed episode.

10. Babel One/United/The Aenar (season 4, episodes 12, 13, & 14)

Read more