Paul Wesley won a Saturn Award for his portrayal of James T. Kirk in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and he explains his approach to the future Captain of the USS Enterprise. Wesley is the first actor since William Shatner to play James T. Kirk on television, and he has also remarkably portrayed 3 different versions of Kirk in Strange New Worlds seasons 1 and 2. But Wesley’s main gig is Lieutenant James T. Kirk, the young version of the Captain Kirk Shatner embodied in Star Trek: The Original Series.
TrekMovie interviewed Paul Wesley at the 51st annual Saturn Awards red carpet before Wesley won the Saturn for Best Guest Star in a Television Series. Wesley addressed the popular cliches of Captain Kirk in pop culture, and how he researched James upon joining the cast of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds to decide what direction he would take in portraying a younger Lieutenant Kirk. Check out his quote below:
TrekMovie: Kirk is such an iconic character, but there is also a cliché of Kirk in popular culture. In season 2, your portrayal went in the other direction, leaning into how smart he was, playing chess and stuff like that. Was that something you researched about the character?
Yeah. There’s a great book called
The Autobiography of James T. Kirk
that I’ve read that actually goes into Kirk as — it humanizes him in many ways. And I’m not suggesting he wasn’t humanized in
The Original Series
, but… he was very evolved. And it was very much an episodic show… So, what I loved about
The Autobiography of James T Kirk
and what I loved about looking into canon and Memory Alpha and studying all those things was that Kirk really was sort of a bookworm. He was a very serious guy at times. And he also had a lot of charisma and all that, but I think I wanted to explore those layers and do something different. I wanted to do something that perhaps people didn’t automatically think of when they thought of James T. Kirk.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 – Everything We Know
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2 ended with an epic cliffhanger and here’s everything known about when it will be resolved in season 3.
- Cast
- Melissa Navia , Babs Olusanmokun , Ethan Peck , Jess Bush , Celia Rose Gooding , Rebecca Romijn , Bruce Horak , Anson Mount , Christina Chong
- Seasons
- 2
- Streaming Service(s)
- Paramount+
- Franchise(s)
- Star Trek
- Showrunner
- Henry Alonso Myers , Akiva Goldsman
