William Shatner on Star Trek and the Meaning of Life

3 min readAt 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. “There is this trepidation of life that goes with 95, but also the mysteries of what am I going to see. 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.“So here you have this heroic character, and suddenly he realizes that thing in front of him is coming his way and he's going to die,” says Shatner. “So now Captain Kirk is seeing death. 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 were very close,” he says about Nimoy, “We went through a lot of experiences together and a great deal of joy together. We would appear on stage and he'd make me laugh to hysteria. So I loved him.”But George Takei is a different matter. “People like George and Walter [Koenig] would go to these Comic-Cons, and they’d stand on stage and say, ‘I’m Sulu,’ and they’d get applause. And somebody would say, ‘You know, Sulu should have been the lead. You were so good.’ And they began to believe it. That’s what happened. They feel as though they weren’t as well-regarded as they felt they should have been. That’s been detrimental to relationships.”Shatner stops short of calling it a “feud.” “It's not a feud. I don't know him,” he says, “I haven’t seen him [Takei] in twenty years.”The rest of the nearly hour-long conversation spans Shatner’s advice to young men—“Be honest with yourself and do the best with yourself, but do your best”—the story of his metal band, how he feels about artificial intelligence, and the beauty of people changing as they get old. “Is love eternal?” Shatner wonders, “Does love mean you see somebody across a crowded room and you say, I love you? And that remains there for the next sixty years, you die in each other's arms?”Then, Shatner comes across the most important question: The meaning of life. “Can you imagine what this phone has done to mankind, the good and the bad? The communication between human and that phone has changed everybody’s life. And that change will continue. What is the meaning of life? The meaning of life is the search for the meaning of life.”Does William Shatner have any regrets? He says only, “I don’t want to go.”