Captain James T. Kirk has been dead for more than three decades, killed off in 1994’s Star Trek Generations while stopping a genocidal scientist bent on destroying entire star systems. William Shatner just gave the clearest answer of his career about whether he’d ever put the uniform back on, and it’s yes, even at 95.
Shatner made the comment in a new interview with TV Guide Magazine for its Star Trek: The Captains special issue published for the 60th anniversary and released five years after Shatner became the oldest person to fly to space at 90. Asked what it would take to bring him back as Kirk, Shatner didn’t dodge the question the way he often has at conventions and press junkets over the past thirty years. “It’s easy to say money,” he said, before turning serious. “The longer I played Kirk, and especially the talented writers who wrote for the movies, I was allowed to put various shades of character in there.”
Shatner described Kirk as a character built for contradiction, someone who commanded “a deadly instrument of war” but also captained what he called “a dhow of peace,” using the term for a traditional wooden sailing vessel. “I still have the aggression and the instinct for battle,” he said, adding that he has “gotten myself into very dangerous things, fights” over the course of his life.
Related: William Shatner Nearly Returned to New Star Trek: Fans Just Learned How
The affection for Kirk hasn’t faded on Shatner’s end either. Days earlier, on CNN, he was asked point blank who makes the better captain, Kirk or Picard. “By lightyears, Captain Kirk,” he said, without missing a beat.
What’s changed, he said, isn’t the aggression itself but how he handles it now. Shatner compared the shift to woodworking, describing a “planing” down of “all those heights and peaks of attitude and activity” that comes with age. He says that leveling off pushes him toward working things out instead of fighting them out. “How can we work this out? How can we avoid the worst to both of us if we do something more intelligent?” he said. He added that he no longer wants to argue or hold a grudge when someone is upset with him. “Let’s fix it,” he said.
That instinct, Shatner argued, is exactly what makes an older Kirk worth watching. “Aggression is sort of a youthful characteristic,” he said. “So I would, even at the age of 95, I think that Captain Kirk would be a really good captain of a spaceship, which is capable of peace and war.” Kirk has remained dead in canon since Generations, though Star Trek: Picard hinted the character’s body was preserved for something called Project Phoenix, leaving a door open in the story itself even though nobody has handed Shatner a script to walk back through it.
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