ILLUSTRATION BY NIGEL BUCHANAN
BY AARON COUCH
When writing about a legend who’s still working as a nonagenarian, it’s almost obligatory to include a line about how they are seemingly busier than ever. William Shatner, 92, may no longer be on set 12 hours a day for the roles that made him the first Comic-Con celebrity (Star Trek), or that transformed him into a late-career regular at the Emmys podium (The Practice, Boston Legal), but it’s difficult not to marvel at the pace at which he lives his life.
The actor, who looks and speaks much like he did 20 years ago, maintains a healthy travel schedule that includes appearances at a dozen or so fan conventions every year. Always popping up in new projects (he hosted the extraterrestrial base camp-simulating reality contest Stars on Mars that aired on Fox over the summer), in 2021, he became the oldest person to travel to space, pouring that experience into a music-and-poetry performance at Washington D.C’s Kennedy Center a few months later with friend and musical collaborator Ben Folds. (That recording, So Fragile, So Blue, will be released as an album April 19).
Now, Shatner is the subject of the crowdfunded documentary You Can Call Me Bill (in select theaters March 22, his 93rd birthday), a meditation on his life, career and mortality.
The Montreal-born actor began performing at the age of 6 at camp and never stopped, transitioning from Canadian radio dramas to Broadway to 1950s TV Westerns. He’s been an omnipresent pop culture fixture since 1966, when he was cast as Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek under unusual circumstances never seen again in Hollywood. NBC had a pilot that didn’t work, but the network wanted to try again with a mostly new cast. Where the original pilot was a somewhat dry affair, Shatner brought much-needed humor to the Enterprise.
Though the show was canceled after just three seasons, it earned a cult following in syndication, and Shatner reprised the role for seven feature films.
Along the way, he reinvented himself over and over, as a hard-ass cop who didn’t understand the value of Miranda rights for five seasons on ABC/CBS’ T.J. Hooker, and again as a comedic sendup of himself as the spokesperson for Priceline.com, with ads beaming into homes from 1998 to 2012.