Wheaton Cool With Star Trek: Nemesis Cut
2 min readAlthough his Star Trek: Nemesis scene was left on the cutting room floor, Wil Wheaton didn’t mind, as he was interested in something other than just appearing on film.
The deleted scene, which can be seen in the Star Trek: Nemesis DVD extras, had Wesley Crusher in attendance at the Riker-Troi wedding.
Filming the scene gave Wheaton what he had long desired, a chance to work with his The Next Generation co-workers as equal adults. “That experience for me was less about whatever made it onto the screen and more about having two days to go back to Star Trek and finally be the adult with the adults, which is an experience I’d always wanted to have as a kid,” explained Wheaton. “I never got to experience that when I was little, and it was incredibly wonderful. I wrote about it in my book, Just a Geek. There are two chapters all about what it was like to be there and to work with everyone again. It was like coming back from college to be with the family.”
That was not Wheaton’s last Star Trek work; he had a voice cameo in Star Trek XI that was originally supposed to be kept secret. “J.J. (Abrams) and I were going to keep that a complete secret because we just thought it was kind of a cool Easter egg thing that no one would ever know about,” said Wheaton of the voice cameo. “Then someone at Paramount found out and they had to do a bunch of bookkeeping with me and they had to credit me. And I didn’t want to get in trouble with my union. So we went ahead and told the world about it. It was really fun. Right up until the moment I was actually standing in the ADR studio at 20th Century Fox with J.J., I was convinced that somebody was pulling a practical joke on me. But I couldn’t figure out who I know that had the money and the desire to pull a practical joke this elaborate on me. It was great.”
Star Trek XI was a good movie, according to Wheaton, especially for the current generation of young fans. “I loved the movie,” he said. “I really liked the way that J.J. made the Star Trek universe relevant to my kids’ generation. And I’m real excited to see where it goes next.”
Wheaton will be seen next on The Ho, Ho, Ho Job episode of Leverage, which airs this Sunday on TNT.
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