Pegg: Krall And Treks Not Taken
3 min read
Simon Pegg spoke recently about Star Trek Beyond‘s Krall, and things that didn’t make it into the movie.
“Krall, initially, was physically augmenting himself with bits and pieces of other aliens,” said Pegg. “That [idea] became him sort of rather doing it on a genetic level. Initially, he was a mishmash of various species and stuff life. The hypocrisy of him: A walking advertisement for integration, even though he’s against that.”
Pegg also spoke about Krall’s motivations and how they decided to go in the direction that they did with the character. “We liked the idea of them seemingly going where no one has gone before but actually finding themselves somewhere where not only someone had been before, but the Federation had been before,” said Pegg. “We wanted to play with the history and take a character from the beginnings of the Federation. And we didn’t want him to just be out for revenge. We wanted his motivations to be a little bit more complex. With Nero and with Khan, behind all this misjudged bluster, they kind of have a noble cause. One of them lost his wife and child. The other one was protecting his crew, and had this misplaced sense of loyalty, but was kind of just a little bit pissed off.
We liked the idea of someone being a little mad, and feeling passed over and forgotten. Someone with a terrible ego complex.”
Pegg and Doug Jung toyed with the idea of redeeming Krall but it just didn’t work out for them. “We wrestled with the end right up until almost before we shot it,” said Pegg. “Doug and I were trying to find a way for Krall to come good. We wanted him to, in his final moments, maybe help Kirk vent the Abronath into space. We just couldn’t get him to switch that quickly. We decided to have him look as if maybe he’s gonna help. He sees his reflection in the side of the glass, and he realizes that he is just a monster. Nero had a fairly vague sort of death. Khan was put on ice in case we wanted to bring back Benedict Cumberbatch. Doug and I said, ‘Let’s have our villain be completely destroyed.'”
When asked about a love interest for Scotty and if the character needed a love interest, such as Uhura (there was a mild flirtation in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier), Pegg said that “as a co-writer of the film, if I’d written myself any kind of romantic interest with Zoe Saldana, I’d have been thoroughly hauled across the coals!”
But “we did have a little reference, in a deleted scene on the DVD, where Scotty talks about going out for a drink with Lieutenant Romaine [The Lights of Zetar], and that’s a character from the original series that Scotty was romantically linked to.”
When asked about a fourth film, Pegg hasn’t heard anything definite about the story yet. “It’s become a bit bittersweet, really, because we lost Anton tragically, and that’s deeply affected all of us,” he said. “It’s going to be so difficult to do it again without him, but we’ve become so close over the years, and even moreso now. J.J. is J.J. He’s very secretive, and I think that this is something he was kind of cooking up, or has been cooking up for a while story-wise. I don’t know anything about it. I’m intrigued! Personally, I feel like I’m fascinated to find out. It would be interesting with Kirk, now that he seems to have got past his daddy issues, you know, come to a good place psychologically in terms of his relationship with his dad. I can only imagine how it will be to suddenly have to face him.”
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