No matter how many Gorn heads Ben Stiller brings out.
Photo: Craig Barritt/Getty Images
For a half-hour, Ben Stiller tried to get William Shatner to reflect on his Star Trek role as Capt. James T. Kirk and the actor coyly refused — no matter how many times Stiller re-phrased the question or played classic Trek clips. “Ben! That’s, like, 65 years ago,” Shatner protested, to the laughter of a crowd of Trekkies. At one point, in a kind of twisted intimidation tactic, Stiller stood up from his chair without warning and dramatically pulled a black sheet off of a large box between them, revealing the preserved head of one of Kirk’s dreaded nemeses, the Gorn that he fights to the death in the episode “Arena.”
“Is that yours?” Shatner asked incredulously.
“Yes, I bought it at an auction!” Stiller replied, his voice cracking ever so defensively. (He also owns the tunic Kirk wears in “The Enemy Within.”)
Such was their shtick throughout their segment of New York Comic-Con’s Star Trek panel, which teased season two of Starfleet Academy before making time for Shatner to thoughtfully look back on the franchise that has defined his career. When Stiller played him the clip from the Gorn fight, for example, Shatner elected not to go too deep on any personal choices behind Kirk’s staccato, herky-jerky fighting style against the creature, and, instead, asked whether Stiller knew what regolith was. He then launched into a several-minute tangent about how abrasive and regolith-like the terrain was at Vasquez Rocks, where “Arena” was shot.
“It had all this shattered glass. And to fall!? Into that?” Shatner asked not Stiller but, seemingly, the universe itself. “It was like: What have I done?”
But Stiller persisted, and though Shatner said he doesn’t typically rewatch Star Trek, his shell eventually did crack, especially once Stiller rolled the clip from Spock and Kirk’s goodbye in The Wrath of Khan: “I loved him,” Shatner said of Leonard Nimoy, lamenting the emphysema that killed him. “He was my brother.”
After Stiller played a clip from “The City of the Edge of Forever,” he asked Shatner what choices he would make as an actor on an episode like that, widely considered not only great Trek but all-time great TV, period. Shatner, 95, told the room that while the episode’s central question of what if? was a relatable one, he preferred not to overthink the past.
“Choices in life are made with such accident. You don’t know the exigencies life will visit,” he said. “You’ve got to live with the choices you’ve made, realizing they were done with knowledge you had at that moment. If you live with regret, you alter the joy of your life. Regret is spurious.”
