Brent Spiner, best known as the lemon-colored android Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, is currently starring in a webseries called Fresh Hell, where he plays a fictionalized version himself trying to get his acting career together. Well, now he’d like get his real life career back up to speed and he’s asking everyone to help by getting him into Star Trek 2.
As part of a promotional webchat for Fresh Hell, Spiner talked about just how much he wants to be in the next Star Trek flick:
I am thinking more about the next Star Trek movie and more about who can I be in it. I did this character Arik Soong [on Star Trek Enterprise], not to be confused with Dr. Soong on the [TNG], this was his predecessor. And I would like to start a campaign, maybe right here tonight, its called BBS—Bring Back Soong. And I want you to flood JJ Abrams offices with that: BBS, Bring Back Soong.
If you didn’t watch Star Trek: Enterprise (and according to the ratings that describes most of you), Dr. Arik Soong was the great-grandfather of Data’s creator Dr. Noonian Soong. Arik Soong was obsessed with “augments,” the genetically engineered humans that Star Trek II baddie Khan Noonien Singh came from, and ended up stealing and growing a bunch of Augment embryos that threatened the Enterprise crew, as you’d expect they would.
Now, the Star Trek reboot takes place over a hundred years after Soong’s appearance on Enterprise, so he’d be pretty old if he showed up again. But that probably wouldn’t stop him from playing the character, especially he feels he’s now way too old to play Data again:
Look at me. I am a shockingly older gentleman. I don’t see that I could wear that makeup anymore. I think that would look really stupid. I love the character and I wish I started it much younger, but I was already in my mid sixties when I started [joke]. I just don’t think I could get away with it. Yeah they could CGI it, but why not just CGI the whole character and forget about me.
It’s kind of refreshing to see a Star Trek actor that’s willing to admit he looks really old, isn’t it?
(We’re looking at you, Shatner.)
[Trek Movie via Blastr]