Remembering 'Star Trek's legendary Mr. Spock, Leonard Nimoy
Leonard Nimoy, a gifted actor, director, photographer and philanthropist, was always more than Mr. Spock. But he embraced the indelible identification with the eminently logical Vulcan, one of pop culture's most iconic characters.
“I feel a sense of ownership, in the same way a grandfather feels about his grandchildren. I have a blood connection,” Nimoy told USA TODAY in 2009, just before the premiere of J.J. Abrams’ first Trek film, which features Nimoy’s elder Spock Prime playing against a younger version of himself (Zachary Quinto).
Nimoy, who died in 2015, had written seemingly contradictory autobiographies, I Am Not Spock and I Am Spock, but there was no ambivalence about returning to the role that garnered him fame and fan adulation, and to a franchise that he said always conveyed hope.
“I think that’s what Star Trek offered originally, and still does," he said. "It’s a very optimistic show. It’s easy to forget the crew of the Enterprise are highly skilled, intelligent people. All studied the sciences. They come together with a sense of camaraderie, working as a team to solve problems.”
Nimoy’s protectiveness of the half-Vulcan, half-human Spock was apparent from his description of conversations with Quinto, who reprised his Spock in this summer's Star Trek Beyond.
“We talked about what I was given to work with when the series first started and what evolved later, physically as well as (in) the development of the internal psychological struggle he was going through to find a balance between the emotional and the logical,” he said. “We talked about how the makeup evolved. It took some time to find the shape of the ears, the color of the skin, the haircut, the eyebrows.”
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Son Adam Nimoy, director of the documentary For the Love of Spock (Sept. 9, in theaters and VOD) says his father saw a connection between Spock, who stood out due to his pointed ears, eyebrows and emotionless logic, and his own experience growing up in Boston as the son of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents.
“One of the things my dad pointed out to me very early on was that Spock was the only alien on the bridge of the Enterprise. He is the outsider of that crew,” Adam says. “His objective as Spock was to find ways to integrate himself with the crew, to participate in the human community that surrounded him. That’s exactly what my father went through as (the son of) immigrants.”
Nimoy was proud of the role, and chose the title I Am Not Spock to explain there was more to him than that, Adam says.
“He really prided himself in being in that first pilot of Star Trek. (Spock) was the only character in the original pilot in 1964 who continued into the series,” Adam says, adding: “And continued into J.J. Abrams’ re-imagining of Star Trek.”
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For all of Star Trek’s success, the franchise has had its struggles, too: The series was canceled by NBC in 1969 after three seasons and weathered lulls at various points in its film cycle. In 2009, Leonard Nimoy saw a parallel between Trek and Spock, who died saving the Enterprise at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, only to come back to life in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, one of two Trek films Nimoy directed.
“Star Trek and Spock have gone through a lot of resurrections. We were canceled at the end of the second season, revived for a third season by audience demand. They put us on for another year and then we were canceled (again),” he said. “For 11 years, there was no Star Trek production and I certainly thought it was over. And then along comes Star Trek: The Motion Picture. When that was finished, I thought, ‘Well, that takes care of that.’ And then here comes Star Trek II, in which Spock died, and I thought, ‘That’s the end of that.’ And it certainly wasn’t.”