At 95 years old, William Shatner is boldly going—well, who knows, actually? Morbid as it is, the Star Trek icon has been thinking about death lately, including in a new episode of Esquire’s “What I’ve Learned.” “When you’re ninety-five, you shouldn’t be around. You should be dead,” Shatner tells Esquire editor-in-chief Michael Sebastian.
Is there anything after life?” Sixty years ago, Shatner played Captain James T. Kirk in the landmark science fiction series Star Trek, leading the Starship Enterprise on a five-year mission to explore strange new worlds. On October 9, the documentary The Sixty-Year Mission: How Star Trek Changed Television and the World was released, which included Shatner as both executive producer and one of its primary subjects.
You can listen to Shatner’s “What I’ve Learned” interview below. Shatner has done more than Star Trek. He’s been in movies, TV shows, commercials—most notably as the spokesperson for Priceline—and has expanded his public profile to podcasting and leading a heavy metal band. (Yes, really.) But his work on the seminal sci-fi franchise is still a huge part of why audiences still love Shatner, who in 2024 revealed he and his eldest daughter Melanie Shatner, 61, had simultaneously battled different stage 4 cancers.
So, you can’t blame Shatner for thinking a lot about the endless mysteries of the cosmos, and what lies beyond this life. He recalls shooting the 1994 movie Star Trek Generations, in which (spoilers?) Kirk dies at the end. How is he going to react?
Well, I forgot what they wrote, but it wasn't ‘Oh, my.’ So I thought he would react the way he is seeing all these weird things and the planets they visited, all the years of discovering new civilizations and new worlds. And he would react with awe and wonder. My God, here comes a new adventure.” On the subject of Trek, Shatner tells Sebastian how close he was to co-star Leonard Nimoy, who famously played Spock, saying he was “the brother I never had.” But he’s also estranged from his other fellow stars, like George Takei (who played Sulu, the pilot of the Enterprise).
We would appear on stage and he'd make me laugh to hysteria. So I loved him.” But George Takei is a different matter. And somebody would say, ‘You know, Sulu should have been the lead.
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