William Shatner delivered a compelling performance as the original Captain James T. Kirk on Star Trek Generations. As Captain Kirk's character arc reached its conclusion on Star Trek Generations, and the mantle was passed over to Captain Jean-Luc Picard, William Shatner delivered his last memorable line.
However, as a recently-released documentary that chronicles Shatner's illustrious career has revealed, the prolific actor felt that he couldn't quite hit the right note while delivering his last piece of dialogue as Captain Kirk.
Here is everything we know.
Star Trek: William Shatner confesses not hitting the right tone
Anyone familiar with William Shatner knows that the now 92-year-old actor has had a prolific career spanning almost seven decades. William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill is the name of a new documentary directed by Alexandre O. Phiippe that seeks to chronicle and dissect the life of Shatner, including his major contribution in Star Trek.
During the course of promoting the documentary, Shatner sat down with ScreenRant and revealed that he couldn't hit the right notes with Kirk's dying line of "Oh, my." Shatner explained:
"The thing an actor can bring to a written word is the interpretation of how to say it. I love you. I love you. I love you. Variations on the words. So if the writer has written I love you, and the actor gets a hold of it and does something totally unthought of, that's a big deal. The director either gets upset or goes with it. In this case, I thought of Kirk as being so courageous in life that when he faced things that he didn't know about, like the strange, the weird... the entities that the writers thought up, when he faced death, he would face death with a sense of adventure."
He added:
"Oh, what's going to happen now?' So I ad libbed, Oh my.' And I wanted that 'Oh my' to be 'Oh my,' like, dreading it but, but looking forward to the adventure — somewhere in between, you know, and it would be very obvious to you what he was thinking. And I never quite hit it. I never quite got that nuance that I was looking for. I had another couple of takes, but they they didn't understand what I was doing. And awe and wonder. Every time he faced an animal, an entity, he didn't say, 'Oh my' (with fear or disdain), he would say, 'Oh, my look at that. I wonder if it's going to eat me?' You know? I think that was his attitude."
Where to watch Star Trek: Generations?
Star Trek: Generations is available for streaming in the US on Apple TV+. The popular streaming platform offers an individual plan at $19.95 a month, and the family plan amounts to $25.95 a month. There's also a premium plan that would cost $35.75 a month.