Nimoy on Retirement
2 min readIn a radio interview talking about his latest photography project, Secret Selves, Leonard Nimoy confirms that he is definitely retired.
Even though there are occasional rumors that Nimoy will return as William Bell on Fringe, don’t count on it.
Nimoy may be officially retired from acting, but doing so was not something that he had planned, it just happened. “It was an accident,” he explained. “I was finishing a conversation last year after I had done the Star Trek movie last year and typically people in your profession [journalists] will say ‘What’s next for Leonard Nimoy?’, and I said ‘That’s it, I’m done, I have had enough of this’ and it was just off the top of my head. I hadn’t planned on making an announcement, but it went out there like a shot “Nimoy Quits … Nimoy Retires … It’s over”. And I was kind of glad because it gave some finality to the idea, otherwise I might have simply dribbled along for a while and I didn’t want to do that … So it was an accident, but a happy accident.”
Photography, not acting, had taken up most of Nimoy’s creative energy for the past twelve or so years. “I’ve done very little acting and directing,” he said. “I went back to the Star Trek movie because it offered me a chance to do something with the Spock character that we had not done, and that was to kind of bring him around in a full circle and give some closure to the character. And then having done that and having a very good experience, the people who made the Star Trek movie asked me as a favor to do some appearances on the Fringe television show and I did five episodes, which is what I agreed to do, and I said ‘You got it guys, that’s it,’ and they said ‘If we come to your home, can we shoot some more?’ and I said ‘No, we’re done’. So it’s over. I am totally committed to the photography now.”
Nimoy explained why he came back for Star Trek XI. “The movie was very successful, many years ago. … The last time I played the Spock character, there wasn’t any resolution. It was kind of in some sense he was going off into some distant galaxy to work as an ambassador undercover or something like that. And the character had been marginalized all through the years of The Next Generation episodes and so forth. But these people came to me with the idea of doing a prequel, developing a story that had to do with the early years of the coming together of the Star Trek crew, and Spock would become a crossover character that would help to accomplish this handoff to the new cast and a proper goodbye, in a sense, a proper goodbye.”
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