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May 2009 

Return to Table of Contents May 2009

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Interview: John Cho • Anton Yelchin • Simon Pegg
Space Cadets

What do those baby faces know about going where no man has gone before? We talk to John Cho, Anton Yelchin and Simon Pegg about playing Star Trek’s younger versions of iconic Starfleet officers


By Jim Slotek

“Your father was captain of a starship for 12 minutes, and saved 1,800 lives including your mother’s and yours. I dare you to do better.” —Enterprise Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) throws down the gauntlet to a brash delinquent named James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek.

 

No, this is not your father’s Captain Kirk.


When we meet the future saviour of the Federation in J.J. Abrams’ prequel to the ’60s TV series, he’s a cocky 22nd-century Iowa hayseed/rebel. He ends up in a barroom brawl with six male Starfleet cadets after trying to pick up a young female cadet named Uhura (Zoe Saldana).


And he has about as much desire to enter Starfleet Academy as Amy Winehouse has of entering rehab. But — shades of Harry Potter! — it turns out this unremarkable youngster from an unremarkable place has a date with destiny. And there’s a world-destroying villain who’s been trying to kill him since his birth. Whoops, sorry. I forgot to call “Spoiler!” (The fanboy world is divided between those who want to know everything in advance and those who want to know nothing.)


For his part, J.J. Abrams (TV’s Alias, Lost, Fringe) says he knew next to nothing about the Star Trek universe when he signed on to resuscitate the franchise. But, word is, the Kirk-meets-Spock-at-Starfleet-Academy idea had been kicking around Paramount since the ’80s, and was finally honed to the point of being worthy of an A-list director’s interest.


“When they asked me to be involved in Star Trek, it wasn’t an obvious movie for me because I wasn’t a huge fan of Star Trek,” Abrams says in a taped message shown alongside 20 minutes of the film that was screened for Toronto media earlier this year. “But when I read the script by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, I had to do this movie. It’s full of adventure and comedy, it’s sexy and scary. It’s a big, giant spectacle, but it’s also an intimate and emotional story.”


Who knows? Maybe fresh eyes are the key to a successful Trek movie. John Logan, the Oscar-nominated writer of Gladiator and The Aviator, was a huge Trek fan, and he ended up writing the awful Star Trek: Nemesis — a.k.a. Star Trek IX — the movie that once looked like the end of the line for the series.


But despite being a newbie, Abrams has lined up everything Classic Trek fans want, including uncanny young stand-ins for the original characters: Christopher Pine as Kirk, Zachary Quinto (Heroes) as Spock, Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead) as Scotty, Anton Yelchin as Chekhov and John Cho (Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle) as Sulu, plus a special appearance by Leonard Nimoy, dropping in from the future as the older Spock.


And I swear, if you close your eyes, Karl Urban as “Bones” McCoy sounds exactly like DeForest Kelley. Even Majel Barrett — the widow of Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, and the omnipresent “computer voice” in every Trek series — signed on, voicing computers up to within a few weeks of her death this past December.


And though this entire, ahem, enterprise has been cloaked in secrecy like a Romulan Warbird, we do know that many Trek alumni visited the set, including Walter Koenig (Chekhov), George Takei (Sulu) and The Next Generation’s Jonathan Frakes.

 

“I met Jonathan Frakes, who is freakishly large, a huge hulk of a man,” says Cho while in Toronto last year. Cho admits he too, was a latecomer to the sprawling Trek universe. “As a young kid, I thought Star Trek was a little bit silly, I was distracted by the velour. But as I got older and would watch reruns, I realized it was an incredibly intelligent show, daring and thoughtful and meditative.”


On meeting his forerunner Takei, Cho says, “I was nervous about stepping into his shoes, but in his typically magnanimous fashion he said, ‘In a couple of years, people are going to call me the older version of you.’”


Yelchin says that veneration sometimes took second place to puzzling over the original accents. The actor, who speaks Russian, didn’t “get” what Koenig was doing back then, “but it was fun to take things from the old character and bring them to the new one. Words like ‘wessels...wery strange...Wulcan,’ stuff like that was fun to bring on.”


And Pegg, who befriended the late James Doohan’s son Chris, shifted Scotty’s accent slightly from Aberdeen to Glaswegian. “Half my family is Scottish and my wife’s Scottish,” Pegg says. “I had some leeway, and I made Scotty’s accent Northwestern Scottish — just above Glasgow, but pretty Glaswegian.”


SPOILER ALERT!


One thing Abrams’ Trek shares with 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis is that Romulans figure into the story, in this case a rogue Romulan named Nero (Eric Bana) with a hate-on for Spock’s home world of Vulcan, and for Kirk.

 

Yes, I know what you’re thinking — or at least I know what you’re thinking if you have a Starfleet uniform in your closet. In the Trek canon, humans don’t even meet Romulans until the events of the 1966 Classic Trek episode Balance of Terror, which took place years after the events in this movie.

 

All we can tell you is, time travel changes everything.


Jim Slotek writes for the Toronto Sun.

 



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