William Shatner is 90. For those who thought the actor’s days of exploration beyond his Los Angeles home must be over, here is news. He is still boldly going where no 90-year-old man has gone before, to borrow from the signature voiceover by Captain James T. Kirk of the starship USS Enterprise aired at the start of each episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, the cult ’60s TV series. Nowadays, he is touring the US and Canada, attending comic cons, shooting films, releasing his books and albums — and he has also been swimming with sharks!

“We dragged him all over The Bahamas. We had him on dive boats. We threw him in the ocean full of sharks. He’s strapping his tank on and jumping in the water. It’s incredible,” gushes Josh Gates, the host of the Discovery show Expedition Unknown, still in awe months after the shoot. “Considering his age, he’s remarkable. His mind is sharp as a tack. There are no flies on him. He presents himself like he’s 50 years old, really. There is just nothing about him that would lead you to believe that he’s 90.”

“I’m in an hour of Shark Week,” Shatner confirms gleefully when t2oS catches up with him over the phone.

Space Ace

Encounters in space, not the sea, are what Shatner has been associated with over the past five decades.

A sci-fi icon today because of his turn as Captain Kirk, the Canadian actor, who was cast in the Star Trek series during its original run on NBC from 1966 to 1969 (now called Star Trek: The Original Series), had actually been out of a job, broke and living out of a camper van after the show was cancelled after three seasons due to low ratings. In 1973, he returned briefly to the role, only in voice, in the animated Star Trek series.

But, as Shatner himself admitted at a 2016 Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, the success of George Lucas’s Star Wars, which hit the theatres years after the TV show, revived Star Trek. “Star Wars created Star Trek. You know that?” he asked fans. In 1977, Star Wars: A New Hope minted a mind-blowing $775 million at the box office. “At Paramount Studios, they were running around bumping into each other: “What do we got? What do we got to equal Star Wars? This is a big thing! There was this thing that we cancelled, under another management, it was called Star ...Trek? Let’s resurrect that!… It was Star Wars that thrust Star Trek into the people of Paramount’s consciousness,” he pointed out.

Thus was born an enduring global pop culture phenomenon as 13 feature films, seven spin-off television series and two animated series followed over the next four decades. Shatner would himself star in six of these films, one of which, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, he also directed.

He has also written several books, chronicling his experiences of playing Captain Kirk and life after Star Trek, co-written novels set in the Star Trek universe and a series of science-fiction novels called TekWar that were adapted for television.

So Shatner’s place in popular imagination is firmly in space, despite his considerable career outside Star Trek that includes an Emmy and Golden Globe-winning role in Boston Legal and an Emmy-winning guest actor role in The Practice.

Taking to water

Shatner among the sharks in the Discovery show Shark Week Sourced by the correspondent

So, Shatner at sea was a novel proposition. One asks if the Discovery show was his first sea adventure. He responds: “I’ve done a lot of diving over the years looking at fish and coral, and having a really picturesque time down 150ft. As a scuba diver, when I’d dive, we would be very careful that there weren’t any sharks around. And now I was going into the water to be with sharks, these huge flesh-eating fish, so I had to overcome my fear

He hardly needs any prompting to relive the experience. “There were sharks all around. We were feeding the sharks from the boat to have them around. It’s called chumming. I was told getting into the water and getting out is the most dangerous part of all because they’re liable to bite you. Then once I was underwater, I went about 60ft below the surface and I sat on, I think it was a rock. And I watched the people from the Bahamas work with the sharks. There were four 18-foot tiger sharks and all of the great white sharks. I’m sitting there watching this about 10ft away from me, these giant fish swimming around.”

He is most impressed at how the sharks were dealt with. “Every so often, one of the experts would push the shark’s face out of the way so it wouldn’t bite the cameraman or somebody else or me, for that matter. He just pushed it out of the way like you might with a cow, but of course, this wasn’t a cow! This was a shark that had the bite of — it looked to be like 12-18 inches wide mouth. It was ferocious.”

Another person he recalls vividly was a lady who was called the Shark Whisperer. “She was about 5ft away and she was petting the smaller sharks. They were as quiet and docile as puppies. And then she carried a small shark about 5ft in length over to me and placed it in my lap as though it were a dog. I petted that shark until I made a mistake and had a finger in its gills and then it swam off. She was able to bring it back. And I petted this shark again.”

What was extraordinary is Shatner was bold enough to shun any protection. “Everybody else had chain mail on, in case the shark bit down. I didn’t have any chain mail and I didn’t have any gloves. So I was able to pet the shark like you might pet a cat or a dog,” he says.

This image is enough to fire the imagination of fans and one asks Shatner if a deep sea adventure avatar of Star Trek would have worked as well. After all, Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator, himself had described the starship “skipper” in the first draft submitted to the network as “a space-age Captain Horatio Hornblower” whose “primary weakness is a predilection to action over administration, a temptation to take the greatest risks onto himself”. Hornblower, one would remember, was a man of the sea, being the central character in a series of novels by C.S. Forester about a fictional Royal Navy officer during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.

But Shatner disagrees. “Star Trek really works only in space although the concept of a five-year mission and the captain that is torn in different directions for different things is a part of Captain Hornblower too,” he points out.

The conversation veers towards the best-known representation of sharks in pop culture — Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws, based on Peter Benchley’s novel that spawned a genre-defining blockbuster.

Shatner agrees with t2oS that the film caused harm to the shark population. “It was very dramatic and wonderful entertainment, but it made people so afraid of sharks that killing a shark became something that was popular. Killing a shark is a very big mistake now.”

“We have learned that to our sorrow, but it’s important information. Millions of sharks are killed for their fins, and that’s absolutely absurd. It’s the most terrible thing a human being can do to the oceans.”

Jaws, incidentally, shared one aspect with Star Trek — effective use of rudimentary special effects available in its time. Just as the shark teeth in the 1975 film looked bone-chillingly real, so was it with Star Trek. “The technology in the ’60s was indeed very primitive and we had to go to story rather than technology, which I think benefited the series,” said Shatner. Elsewhere, he has spoken about how they worked around “the cheesy costumes, the bad sets and the ill-gotten special effects”. Yet, the effect was gripping.

Funnily, Shatner has admitted to have never watched Star Trek himself, except for the fifth film that he directed. “It’s all painful because I don’t like the way I look at what I do,” he told People this March.

But he enjoyed the process of directing the fifth film, he said in response to a query from t2oS. “I love directing. It is the true art of filming and I’ve enjoyed many of the films that I’ve directed both on TV and elsewhere,” he said.

Of the nine stars from Star Trek: The Original Series, only four are still alive and Shatner is the only one of the three leads. He is hugely in demand at comic cons and Star Trek conventions, and at anything to do with space. “I do a number of comic cons during the year. In this past year, they’ve been virtual and now they’re starting to invite people and I’ll go to a few this year,” he says.

Shatner’s star on Hollywood Walk of Fame

He was invited to record a wake-up call based on his spoken introduction from the Star Trek opening credits “Space, the final frontier…” that was played for the crew of STS-133 in the Space Shuttle Discovery on March 7, 2011, its final day docked to the International Space Station.

His voice, therefore, has already been to space even if he has not. In May 2020, Shatner had posted a tongue-in-cheek tweet, asking NASA if he could join the SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-2 commercial space flight to the International Space Station. “Just in case; the suit does fit!” he wrote, with a picture of himself inside a photo of a SpaceX suit.

Three weeks ago, he added a “Safe trip” wish on Twitter, while sharing a video clip of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin team setting off for its suborbital trip to the edge of space on July 20. The team included 82-year-old astronaut Wally Funk, just eight years his junior.

Would Shatner really want to do in life what his screen avatar made a career of? In his book Get A Life!, in which he writes of his experiences with the Star Trek fandom and anecdotes from Star Trek conventions, he has admitted to not being a good flyer. “I hate flying; flat-out hate its guts…. In real life, I am by no means ‘starship captain’ material…. With homes on both sides of the continent, conventions to attend, film and television locations to visit, air travel is an absolutely necessary evil for me, but it never gets any easier.”

With back-to-back civilian space flights taking off this July, Trekkies (Star Trek fans) have been busy speculating if Shatner could have been on board either.

He responded to one such observation on Twitter on July 13: “If you recall (Richard) Branson used to advertise that I was going (in Virgin Galactic) for publicity until I spoke up. When they finally contacted me they asked for $100k for the privilege of going, but they wouldn’t guarantee a round trip.”

At warp speed

William Shatner poses for photographs during the Destination Star Trek event at ExCel in London. It was modelled on the captain’s seat in the flight deck of the USS Enterprise. Getty Images

Even if Shatner remains Earth-bound, he has done some pretty cool way-into-the-future stuff. Entertainment Weekly reported in March how he became the first person to work with StoryFile — an upcoming interactive storytelling app — to create an AI-powered interactive conversational video that his family and friends can interact with for years to come.

“The technology used to deliver interactive storytelling includes the patented Artificially Intelligent Interactive Memories System on Conversa, which uses natural language processing and other innovative technologies,” explains the report. He spent more than 45 hours recording answers to be used in the interactive videos. Users of the app can ask questions of the Shatner video through cellphones or computers connected to the Internet, and artificial intelligence will scan through transcripts of his remarks to select and deliver the best answer. They may even be able to beam Shatner into their living rooms as he was filmed with 3D cameras that will enable his answers to be delivered via a hologram.

But Shatner did not stop at making an AI version of himself; he has also auctioned memorabilia of Captain Kirk and his Boston Legal character Denny Crane, authenticated on the blockchain using Real World Asset Non-Fungible Tokens, through Third Millenia, a company he has co-founded. “These figures, pieces and props represent a bold step into the future of consumer products where, using crypto technology, consumers can be assured of what they purchased,” Shatner has stated.

Stage and song

Such an avant-garde actor started his career on the most classical pitch — on stage doing Renaissance plays. During his time with repertory theatre in Canada from 1954 to 1956, he acted at the Stratford Festival in title roles in Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Broadway-bound tour of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, before moving to New York in 1956. For Henry V, he was understudy to another Hollywood great of Canadian vintage, Christopher Plummer (of The Sound of Music fame). Once when Plummer fell ill, Shatner had to step up. Years later, the New York Post quoted Plummer on his reaction to seeing Shatner take his place: “Shatner made sure he did everything I didn’t do — stood up where I had sat down, lay down where I stood up... he was original to the last... I knew then that the SOB was going to be a star.”

Asked which play he would choose to film if given a chance, Shatner responds: “Henry V is a very fine play of Shakespeare’s. That would’ve been wonderful if I could’ve done that on film.”

Another lesser-known aspect of his career is his dramatic recitations of popular songs. He began with the 1968 album The Transformed Man, delivering interpretations of popular songs Mr. Tambourine Man and Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, paired with readings from famous plays. To understand what he does, log on to YouTube, which has a recording of him opening the 2005 AFI Life Achievement Award, offering a tribute to George Lucas, “from one star voyager to another” as he describes it, with Frank Sinatra’s My Way, performed Shatner-style, mixed with drama and comedy, complete with backup Stormtrooper dancers and a cameo by Chewbacca!

“I began singing for fun. It’s not quite singing and yet it isn’t quite reciting poetry. It’s somewhere in between,” he tells t2oS.

He might have begun in fun but it has become serious business. His 10th spoken word album, The Blues, topped the Billboard Blues Chart as recently as October 17, 2020.

What’s next @90?

Ask him what it feels to be active at 90 and the actor, whose latest film Senior Moment with him in the lead released four days after his milestone birthday this March, responds with a flurry of his upcoming work. “I’m doing quite a few projects. I have a new album coming out in August that I think will be great. (There’s) a new talk show titled I Don’t Understand and (I will be) continuing on with the third season of the UnXplained (a one-hour non-fiction series that explores the world’s most fascinating, strange and inexplicable mysteries that he hosts and executive produces).”

One knows better than to persist with the age-related query. Twitterati often gets a taste of his acerbic humour. When someone tweeted a “Shout out to @WilliamShatner, an original artist and the legend with sharp wit”, pronto came the rebuff: “I’m 90, not deaf! Stop shouting!”

(Expedition Unknown: Shark Trek is streaming on Discovery + and will air on August 23 at 7pm on Discovery Channel)