Just before the Enterprise launched in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ second season, Men’s Health sat down with its new Captain Kirk, Paul Wesley, to talk Trek, bourbon, vampires, and snowboarding—so, a focused interview.
Wesley has been portraying Kirk since 2022 and the first season (for Wesley, really, the last episode) of Paramount’s latest iteration of the iconic series, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Wesley is the most recent actor (after Chris Pine) to portray the character, first brought to life by William Shatner in 1966. (Kirk has only appeared on screen in five separate iterations, including Shatner, Pine, and Wesley as the main movie/series protagonist, with Sandra Smith and Jimmy Bennett portraying a body-snatched Kirk and a child Kirk, respectively.) Needless to say, there were big shoes to fill. How big? “There are no bigger shoes to fill than Shatner’s,” Wesley says. “You almost have to be a lunatic to take on the role of James T. Kirk, because he's arguably the most iconic character in the history of television.”
Wesley’s lunatic approach was to create a gap between the Kirk we know and the Kirk who must have preceded him. “I took inspiration from [the original], but I because I’m playing Kirk before he was captain of the Enterprise, I wanted him to be different from the Kirk that we have seen on screen in the original series,” Wesley says. “And so I wanted to give him time to grow into the Kirk that we all sort of know. It's a slow kind of walk towards the Kirk that we know and that was done intentionally, and I wanted to kind of give it my own spin so that it wasn't, you know, some sort of an imitation.”
Wesley says he filmed his first episode before speaking to that other Captain Kirk, the Kirk we know, William Shatner. “I didn’t really ask him for advice,” Wesley admits. “I feel like he’s kind of over people asking him about Kirk.”
Ditto for Pine, the other Kirk we know: “I did see Chris Pine at a party. So I had to go up to him and say ‘hi.’ I didn’t ask him for advice either.”
Watch the video for more on Wesley’s non-imitation Kirk.
