93-Year-Old William Shatner Discusses 'Star Trek', Space, Mortality, and Captain Kirk's Death

'It was three years of my, life you?' a 93-year-old William Shatner tells the Guardian when asked about playing Captain Kirk on the original Star Trek series from 1967 to 1969:

It gladdens him to see how much joy the series has brought its many fans, but the richest rewards came in his introduction to science fiction, which activated and nurtured a lifelong curiosity about our species. He reminisces about meeting the great writers of the genre fondly yet frankly, honest enough to sort Ray Bradbury into 'the category right below friend, I think'. He devoured their novels and developed a fascination with the principle of defamiliarization, that concepts taken for granted can be understood anew when viewed through the vantage of a stranger in a strange land. 'Good science fiction is humanity, moved into a different milieu,' he says.

Even on a grander scale, 'The universe charms him with its mysteries,' writes the Guardian, calling it 'the key to maintaining wonder through nearly a century of life. He likes the not-knowing.'

You can see this at play when the TV starship captain became a real-life spacefarer in 2021:

Liberated by weightlessness, he found himself utterly transformed by the rush of perspective one can only assume miles above the Earth. 'It's very personal, what you see from up there, what you read into the stillness,' he says. 'I saw the blankness of space as death, but an astronaut will see something else entirely. And when I looked back at the Earth, I saw life.'
The question of mortality hangs over Shatner, albeit not in a morbid way. He's entranced by the paradox of death, that the absolute unknowability of what happens will be inevitably supplanted by the certainty of finding out... For a man accustomed to boldly going where no man has gone before, it's all just the next phase of a single ongoing adventure.

In fact, Shatner told Jimmy Kimmel Friday that he was always disappointed by the way he'd performed Captain Kirk's death. 'I think you die the way you live,' Shatner says. 'So Captain Kirk always had these grotesque things happening... but without fear. But with joy, and love, and an opportunity to see what's better.' So when performing Kirk's death, he'd imagined him actually gazing upon death itself — and looking upon it with wonder. 'I ad libbed the 'Oh my'.' Shatner's regret? That it 'sounded fearful. And I didn't want to be fearful.'

'Would you like a do-over?' Kimmel asks. (Adding 'I've got some debris...') And Shatner agrees, performing — one more time — the death of Captain Kirk.

The video also includes an appropriate clip from a newly-released documentary about Shatner's life. 'Don't do it half-heartedly,' Shatner says at one point. 'Whatever it is you do — do it fully. Do it passionately. Do it with your whole being.'

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