Tahir: Star Trek Is About Hope
2 min readEven though the franchise is over forty years old, Star Trek still has something to offer to the fans, according to Faran Tahir.
As reported by About.com, for Tahir, a fan of Star Trek from childhood, was swept back to those days by Star Trek XI. “You know, the best test of a movie like that is does it make you feel like a little kid again or not, you know,” he said. “That’s the way I look at it because it’s something that I grew up with, and does it take me back there or does it not? And it did. The cast got together and for a while I totally forgot that I was an actor or in it. I was kind of swept away in the story of it and the action of it.”Star Trek represents hope and that is as true today as it was back in the 1960s. “Star Trek is a pop culture icon, and as time goes on I think this story’s going to live on,” said Tahir. “It has gone through many mutations and many versions and many ways of telling the same story, but the spirit of it is actually, it is of hope, you know, that we can transcend our personal or racial or whatever differences and maybe come to some kind of consensus where we can all live together.”
So it made good sense to make Star Trek XI an origins story. “I think it was good to kind of go back and start the story again and kind of fill in the blanks a little bit to give people a deeper understanding of who these people are,” said Tahir.
Portraying the first captain of Middle Eastern origin, Tahir found out that J.J. Abrams hadn’t deliberately sought to make the captain that any particular ethnicity. “I asked J.J. about it and I said, ‘Was that one of the things that you were looking for?’ said Tahir. “He said, which was really music to my ears, ‘You know, I was not looking for any, or trying to fit any, particular race in there. I wanted a certain effect, I wanted a certain kind of an actor, I wanted him to kind of convey this message.’ And when I look back, I know the other people who had been considered for it and none of them were of the same background. …It was refreshing to hear that, you know?”
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