William Shatner recalls original “Star Trek” pilot being scrapped and completely recast: ‘That’s really different’ Daysia TolentinoSat, September 12, 2026 at 3:42 PM UTC 0 William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk on ‘Star Trek: The Original Series’Credit: CBS Photo Archive/GettyKey Points William Shatner shared why the first pilot of Star Trek was scrapped. The rejected episode was titled “The Cage” and starred Jeffrey Hunter in the lead role as Captain Christopher Pike.
William Shatner recalls original “Star Trek” pilot being scrapped and completely recast: ‘That’s really different’
Daysia TolentinoSat, September 12, 2026 at 3:42 PM UTC
0
William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk on ‘Star Trek: The Original Series’Credit: CBS Photo Archive/GettyKey Points -
William Shatner shared why the first pilot of Star Trek was scrapped.
The rejected episode was titled “The Cage” and starred Jeffrey Hunter in the lead role as Captain Christopher Pike.
Shatner was later offered the role of Captain James Kirk in the second pilot, which he said was “an example of the crazy magic of science fiction.”
Before there was Captain Kirk, there was Captain Pike.
William Shatner recently recalled the moment he was offered a role on the original Star Trek series. The opportunity came after NBC had rejected the show’s first pilot, titled “The Cage,” which saw Jeffrey Hunter in the lead role as Captain Christopher Pike.
“They made a pilot, and they had all these characters, including Spock who smiled a lot,” Shatner shared with Paul Wesley in an Interview Magazine piece published Tuesday. “Nobody quite grasped the character they were going to play. They presented it to NBC, and NBC said, ‘We don’t like it, but it’s sufficiently interesting and curious and different.’”
Rather than toss the entire show, the network gave the production team another chance to get it right. Although they would go on without Hunter.
“They said something that I’ve never heard of before or after,” Shatner recalled. “They said to Paramount, ‘We’ll give you another amount of money’ — whatever that was — ‘to make another pilot, but rewrite it, do another draft of another script, and recast it.’”
As a result, Shatner, who had been living in New York at the time, had gotten the call to go to Los Angeles and play Captain James Kirk. He was offered the role outright, which he thinks was a result of his TV work in New York. The 95-year-old remarked that “they had seen enough of me to make a conclusion based on everything I had been doing.”
Advertisement
Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock and William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk on ‘Star Trek: The Original Series’Credit: CBS Photo Archive/Getty
“I came back to Los Angeles, saw the pilot, and thought, ‘My gosh, that’s really different and interesting,’” he continued. “They recast everybody except Leonard [Nimoy, who played Spock], who grasped the role, made it his own, and we made another pilot and this one sold.”
The original series ran for three seasons from 1966 to 1969. Since then, the Star Trek franchise has borne 14 films and 13 different TV series, including Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which sees Shatner’s interview partner Wesley take on the mantle as Captain Kirk.
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
William Shatner speaks onstage during Emerald City Comic Con at Seattle Convention Center on March 7, 2026Credit: Mat Hayward/Getty
Shatner explained that the second pilot was special because it played with the audience’s imagination. The world-building in Star Trek was “an example of the crazy magic of science fiction,” he said, which has endured throughout the decades.
“In that pilot, I was attracted to the magic, the imagination behind that pilot with the swollen heads and the pulsing,” he said. “It was such wonderful makeup. It was intriguing from many points of view. I saw what NBC must have seen, a certain pomposity, a certain, ‘To the starboard, sir.’ That character was just in my wheelhouse, I guess.”
on Entertainment Weekly
Source: "AOL Entertainment"
Source: Entertainment
Published: September 13, 2026 at 03:00AM on Source: PRIME TIME
#ShowBiz#Sports#Celebrities#Lifestyle