Shatner Confesses Sadness At Being Left Out of Film

William Shatner (Kirk) said that he is sincerely disappointed to have been left out of J.J. Abrams' upcoming Star Trek film and hoped that the imagined young Kirk and Spock in his latest book would be as interesting to Star Trek fans as the young Kirk and Spock who will appear in the upcoming movie.

In a pair of YouTube interview clips from Creation posted at TrekMovie.com, Shatner was asked whether he was really sorry not to be in the film or if his joking about it with Leonard Nimoy (Spock) was "just shtick" for the stage. "I really am disappointed," Shatner admitted. "Call. Look up Paramount get ahold of J.J. Abrams and just let him have it!"

Asked what qualities an actor would need to play a young Kirk, Shatner said, "Handsome, swathe, debonair, athletic, rich...that’s enough." His own book about Kirk and Spock as teenagers, Academy-Collision Course, arrives in October, written with Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens .

"It's an adventure story," Shatner explained. "It's the beginning of hopefully a series of books about them as adolescents and it has nothing to do with the movie...it's the story of the teenage Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, the trouble they were in and how they got to be who they were." The actor said he was inspired writing with the Reeves-Stevenses: "It became an experience for me in that I was beginning to see insights to the Kirk character that I was playing. I was able to write down other things that I thought might occur to him."

Shatner does not see the film as necessarily competitive with his books. "CGI is the new magic of film. But nothing compares to the chambers in your imagination," he explained. "It’s called the theatre of your mind, and that's what books appeal to. The inner life that the actor must have. That’s the inner life that characters in fiction must have."

Though Kirk's romantic exploits are legendary, Shatner laughed when asked who was more of a ladies' man, Kirk or Denny Crane from Boston Legal. "Denny Crane's ladies are a little older," he said. "Leonard’s got a thing about heavy women and their beauty and he’s got a thing about older women and their beauty."

Sci-Fi Pulse has a transcript of the interview clips for those who can't watch YouTube videos.

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