Shark Trek: William Shatner is boldly going to swim with predators
The 90-year-old actor who played James T Kirk has another mission: to overcome his fear of sharks. James Rampton on the man who knows how to live long and prosper
William Shatner is boldly going where no nonagenarian has gone before: swimming with sharks. The Canadian actor, who turned 90 on 22 March, is terrified of sharks. How did he set about conquering that fear, then? By leaping into the ocean with them, of course. Best known for playing Captain James T Kirk in Star Trek, Shatner travelled to the Bahamas a few weeks ago. His mission? To present a documentary with the borderline-cheesy title of Expedition Unknown: Shark Trek and overcome his phobia of the undersea apex predators.
The actor, who portrayed Kirk in 95 episodes of the TV show and seven movies, recollects his utter terror when he first jumped into the water with a shiver (isn’t that a brilliant collective noun?) of deadly 15-feet-long tiger sharks. “There were all these grey bodies thrashing around. It’s like going to a drive-in movie. You’re looking at the screen – then you walk closer and closer to the screen and you suddenly realise that's not the screen, it’s real! Oh my God, it was overwhelming!” Now he describes the experience as, “unbelievable. One of the great moments of my life.”
Everything is a mystery, from giant mysteries like life after death to little mysteries like, ‘Do snails feel? Do they think?’
These feats would be quite remarkable for a man half his age, but for Shatner, they are nothing out of the ordinary. He defies logic, sceptics and medical science with his inexhaustible reserves of energy. Chatting to The Independent from his home in California, he looks ridiculously, indeed, unfairly fit. Sporting the same bouffant hairdo he has had since the 1960s and a blue floral shirt, Shatner is a figure for whom the term “iconic” scarcely does justice.
An eye-watering 70 years after he first appeared on our screens – as a crook in a movie entitled The Butler’s Night Off, in case you’re interested – Shatner remains a much loved figure throughout the galaxy. To emphasise his abiding influence on popular culture, a 2005 TV documentary outlined How William Shatner Changed the World. He even has a building named after him at his old university, McGill in Montréal.
The actor has featured in The Simpsons and was the subject of a 1979 single by Spizzenergi, which spent seven weeks at the top of the UK Indie Chart (“Where’s Captain Kirk?”, since you ask). Meanwhile, when at a crucial moment in the widely adored 1999 cult movie, Fight Club, Edward Norton’s character is questioned about who his perfect opponent would be in a scrap, his reply is short and sweet: “Shatner.”
While lockdown has caused the imaginative juices of many artists to run dry, Shatner reveals that he has been in a “creative frenzy” for the past 18 months. He says that at an age when he should be wiping bits of food off his shirt, “I'm more productive and more creative than I've ever been”.
Over the past 18 months, Shatner has recorded a new album with a poet from New York; he has made a documentary entitled William Shatner Meets Ancient Aliens; and presented several series of his hit show about the unsolved mysteries of the universe, The UnXplained with William Shatner (more of which anon).
A hugely accomplished rider who has won multiple titles at the Kentucky State Fair World Championship Horse Show, and who penned a book entitled Spirit of the Horse in 2017, Shatner has also taken the time during the pandemic to perfect his horse riding “seat”.
Oh yes, and he has written a book entitled Awe and Wonder, too. The title is no coincidence. Shatner is fuelled by an apparently unquenchable thirst for knowledge. “We should stand looking around us, saying, 'My God, what has my god wrought?' Whether that god is Christian or pagan, the world should excite awe and wonder in us. Why aren't we doing that more? The earth offers us the ecstasy of mystery.”
Shatner is captivated by wonders of all shapes and sizes. “Everything is a mystery, from giant mysteries like life after death to little mysteries like, ‘Do snails feel? Do they think?’ I recently saw two snails entwined shivering with delight. They must have been mating. They were shaking with pleasure.” A dramatic pause (well, he is still first and foremost an actor) before he exclaims: “Snails!” In the same way, “we now know that slime – slime! – reaches up and tries to find the daylight. Slime has an intelligence to it.” Who knew?
An example to us all, Shatner shows the benefits of always keeping an open mind. He demonstrates how positive it is never to imagine that you know it all. He almost whistles in wonder, for instance, when outlining what he recently found out about the “language” of trees. “Some years ago we discovered that trees were giving off a pheromone when attacked by bugs. When a beetle begins to eat a tree, that tree gives off pheromones, so downwind all the other trees start to make a toxin inside their sap that helps deter beetles. Trees essentially are talking to each other.”
Wait, there’s more. “What we didn't know then, but what we now know is that trees also communicate using the mycelium: the latticework underground which laces everything together and which mushrooms grow from. Scientists discovered that the trees give off an electrochemical impulse that travels along the mycelium to other trees. So trees are communicating in an electrochemical fashion in the same way that our brain works in an electrochemical fashion. Think of the mystery of that.”
“That's extraordinary,” I interject, holding my head in my hands in sheer amazement. “It just blows my mind.”
“You see,” Shatner continues, “you had to hold your head in your hands because it blows your mind!”
He is equally startled by the ability of lifeforms to thrive in the most unexpected and hostile environments. He recounts the details of recent discoveries in a mid-Atlantic trench. “There are these hydrothermal vents made of calcified rock.
“And from these funnels, hot water is pouring out. It is heated by magma to 600 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s the sulphur coming out of the bottom of the earth, so it's totally uninhabitable – except for these 13-foot worms and clams that live all around these flutes. They have never seen sunlight, but they are living in sulphurous water at 600 degrees Fahrenheit. I mean, what does that say about life on other planets? We don't know anything. We need to tune into the mystery of the universe.”
It is this very subject that he explores in The UnXplained with William Shatner, which is on Sky History at 10pm on Tuesdays. In the series, he puts the microscope on such enduring enigmas as whether recently discovered ancient underground structures as the city of Derinkuyu and the Malta Hypogeum indicate that many more subterranean constructions are just waiting to be unearthed.
An actor who is more willing to laugh at himself than many in his profession, Shatner is also anxious to underline that, despite the fantasies of many lifelong Trekkers, he is not Captain James T Kirk in real life
He also scrutinises the mysterious world of curses. Myths abound about lakes which morph into watery graves and paintings which bring death to their keepers. Can these unexplained curses really have the power to harm us?
Shatner investigates the theory that, “people who believe in the force of a curse succumb to it. If you believe in Voodoo, and somebody practising Voodoo puts a needle in a doll of you, do you suffer pain or death? Is it belief? Is it mind over matter? And if that's the case, we're talking about the astounding capacity of the brain. Imagine the brain being able to kill you. Everywhere you look, there's a mind-boggling thought.”
The actor, who has been divorced four times and has three daughters from his first marriage, is overjoyed by the recent birth of a great grandson called Clive. Always alert to the wonder of life, he is awestruck by the baby’s rapid development. “In the past three months, Clive has changed five times. He is now staggering around walking. It’s a miracle to watch a baby grow. And the way the brain expands exponentially at that age is just astonishing.”
The arrival of his great grandson has only served to accentuate Shatner’s deep concern about the future of the planet. “We're destroying humanity. But Mother Nature is going to go on. The planet will not cease to exist when we cease to exist. In fact, we've seen examples of how the earth cleans itself up in practically no time. There are examples of bays where the fish and the shellfish were destroyed, but when the body of water was cleaned up, Nature returned within a few years.
When something is so dreadful, you don’t want to think about it. You can’t pay your bills, so you say to yourself, ‘I’m not going to think about paying my bills. I’m going to get drunk instead
“So whether there's an oil spill or an explosion, it's all going to be cleaned up in no time at all by the universe. After we're gone, the earth returns to health and something else comes along. When the dinosaurs disappeared, the mammals came along.”
To make matters worse, Shatner says we are in denial about the environmental damage we are wreaking. “When something is so dreadful, you don't want to think about it. You don't want to think about the worst things. You can't pay your bills, so you say to yourself, ‘I'm not going to think about paying my bills. I'm going to get drunk instead.’ That's what we're doing with the planet. It's so awful.”
He goes on to give an example of the devastation we are causing. “In Miami, where people have paid millions of dollars for seaside property, they're already beginning to erect 20-foot walls to dam out the rising ocean. Those expensive buildings are going to be inundated. So the people who bought those expensive houses are saying, ‘wait a minute, I want a view of the sea. I didn't pay all these millions of dollars to get a view of a brick wall.’ But that's what's happening.”
We can’t go any further without mentioning the K word. Fifty-five years after Star Trek was first screened, Kirk continues to be stratospherically popular. In the past, perhaps wary of being typecast, Shatner has appeared eager to distance himself from the character. For example, in a 1986 Saturday Night Live sketch about a Star Trek convention, he told fans to “get a life”.
An actor who is more willing to laugh at himself than many in his profession, Shatner is also anxious to underline that, despite the fantasies of many lifelong Trekkers, he is not Captain James T Kirk in real life. Nor does he speak in that character’s melodramatic, pause-filled manner. “No, I've never had green alien sex, though I'm sure it would be quite an evening. And when I speak, I never, ever talk like. Every. Word. Is. Its. Own. Sentence.”
I don’t want to die. Because, first of all, I don’t want to die. And secondly, because I am fascinated by the discovery of all these crazy things that have no explanation
He was also ready to take the rise out of the fans’ intergalactic obsession with Star Trek on Expedition Unknown: Shark Trek. “It was a particularly successful and amusing programme. Some of the amusement came from the fact that my co-host, Josh Gates, loves Star Trek, and wanted to make it all about that. And so I said to him, ‘why don't we reverse it? Let’s pretend I'm tired of hearing about Star Trek, and you continually remind me about it’. So we used that ploy, and it seems to have worked.”
All the same, Shatner is quick to acknowledge that he would never have achieved career lift-off without Captain Kirk. “I realise that you and I are here now because of Star Trek. And I never forget that. So I owe a debt to Star Trek that I don't let go of.”
Shatner is a man whose enduring lust for life is simply inspiring. Perhaps most admirable of all is the fact that as he enters his 10th decade, he shows absolutely no sign of reaching for the pipe and slippers. He is still loving life too much to contemplate retirement. “Well, what am I going to retire to?”
He still has too much to do. “I don't want to die. Because, first of all, I don't want to die. And secondly, because I am fascinated by the discovery of all these crazy things that have no explanation. There is an explanation somewhere, but we just don't know what it is yet. It’s so tantalising. All these mysterious things around us are just there waiting to be discovered. It’s no surprise that you hold your head and say, ‘it's mind blowing.’ It is mind blowing!”
Above all, then, it is this insatiable curiosity which has helped the one-time Captain Kirk fulfil the celebrated exhortation of his first officer Mr Spock: live long and prosper.
The UnXplained with William Shatner is on Sky History at 10pm on Tuesday
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