Trekking Crew

Kirk put his coffee down on the side table. He shut his eyes, concentrated, and blurted, “You’re horny!”

Spock was up getting some tea when Kirk opened his eyes. Kirk felt as if he’d been struck by phaser fire. They were together – always now. It was beautiful. Spock nodded at him. “Always.”
Welcome to the wonderful world of slash fiction, a place where Buffy cavorts with Willow and Malfoy pursues Harry Potter with a bulge in his pants. It’s porn, Jim, but not as we know it. Though a sizeable minority sport among gay communities – who have long acknowledged slash as a key frontline tactic against ‘compulsory’ heterosexuality – slash is largely written by straight college girls for other straight college girls.
The Man, of course, is not happy about any of this. LucasFilm have dashed off innumerable cease and desist orders to prevent gay reinterpretations of Star Wars characters. Anne Rice, now a born-again Christian, has spent a fair chunk of her fortune attempting to halt production of slash fiction based around her Vampire Chronicles.
But legal action has done little to stem the tide. Fan-generated fiction remains one of the more colourful aspects of internet life, particularly among Star Trek fans, the TV loyalists who invented the form as long ago as the late ‘60s and from whence the entire milieu derives its name (Kirk/Spock, see?).
What started out an exchange of erotic correspondence across the UK and Ireland – some of the earliest ‘70s slash hits are said to originate from these shores – now spawns hundreds of successful unofficial companion novels and ’zines, including the great bastions of the internet, Side by Side and Not Tonight, Spock.
These idiosyncratic publications had best get to doubling their bandwidth. There’s a hipper, prettier Trek in town.
It’s impossible not to ponder the various implications for slash fiction when, hours before the London premiere, Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto are walking down the corridor of Claridges’ Hotel. In a moment of perfect cartoon grammar, one girl’s dainty teacup starts to rattle in its saucer as the new Kirk and Spock pass by.
I guess that’s why the wags have dubbed the new Trek film, Trek 90210. This is no accident. J.J. Abrams, the brains behind the eleventh Star Trek movie – a thrilling prequel that could easily be subtitled When Kirk Met Spock – has a reputation for launching bright young things through successive hit TV shows such as Alias and Lost. He also happens to know a hell of a lot about fan fiction.
Still, poor Chris Pine does not know where to look when the three of us – me, him, Mr. Quinto – sit down for tea and a chat about the whole Kirk/Spock milieu.
“It’s not that I’m afraid,” he says. “Well, maybe a little. I‘ve yet to meet a single fan who isn‘t sweet and kind and supportive. And I’m really proud of the movie we have made. I think my fellow actors are amazing and really funny. But our work is done. We don’t have any control over what happens from here. Which is probably just as well.”
Zachary Quinto chooses his words with similar care. “It’s an aspect of this culture that I do not plan on incorporating into my life,” he says. “I can assure you I will never, ever read them. I can only wish the people who have that much time on their hands all the best in life. It is inventive. I’ll give you that. But I can only stay engaged with the whole culture of Star Trek up to a certain point. When it comes to these kinds of rarefied, specialised, erm…”
He searches for the word. Deviant, I venture.
“Yes. That’s it. Deviant. As far as Star Trek goes I draw the line when it starts getting deviant.”
In the flesh, the old buddies really do have a Kirk and Spock thing going on. Mr. Quinto sits perfectly poised and exquisitely presented in a pastel cardigan and shirt combo that only a gentleman of Italian descent could carry off. Mr. Pine is jeans, easy American charm and feet on the couch.
They’ve known each other for years. Mr. Quinto, who bears an uncanny similarity to a young Leonard Nimoy given a fringe that makes him look “like a 12-year-old”, was the first actor signed up for the Enterprise. He was soon followed by his old pal, Chris Pine. When word filtered through a trainer at the gym they both attend that Mr. Pine was on a shortlist of four possible Kirks, the pair met up, yakked about the script, about J.J. and ran through scenes together.
“All the other guys were great,” says the new Spock. “But when I ran through it with Chris at the audition, it just felt right. There was just something going on.”
Turned out there was enough chemistry in the room to convince J.J. Abrams that these two could occupy some of the most iconic roles in pop culture. But I wonder if they weren’t a little weary of the task in hand. Far from being Cinderella figures, Messrs. Quinto and Pine are not the complete unknowns that marketing forces would have us believe. Like the rest of the cleverly assembled cast, they are not big names, but they are buzz names.
Mr. Pine, for instance, is well known among the pyjama party set as the pin-up royal who refuses the crown for Anne Hathaway in the second Princess Diaries film and as Lindsay Lohan’s rival and love interest from the 2006 rom-com, Just My Luck. He’s in demand and on the up; recent entries on the CV include Bottle Shock and Smokin’ Aces and Warner Brothers have reputedly offered him a sizeable sum to essay the lead in the Green Hornet. Indeed, he had to pull out of Joe Carnahan’s hotly anticipated adaptation of White Jazz in order to step onto the bridge as James T. Kirk, winning out over Matt Damon who wanted the role but who was (rightly) dismissed as being too old for the part.
Mr. Quinto, meanwhile, is already nothing less than a sensation. Though he first appeared on the radar in 2003 as computer boffin Adam Kaufman in the third series of 24, he is best known as Sylar, the dashing super powered serial killer from TV mega-hit Heroes. Mr. Quinto’s efforts as a psychopath out to sap his fellow superheroes powers has, villain or no, been charismatic enough to attract a army of supporters, not figuratively, you understand. Sylar’s Army or Sarmy for short, is a vast online network of fanatics who carry out commendable charity work under the banner ‘Every villain needs a legion of evil supporters’.
Didn’t he worry that his glittering career might well get crushed under the weight of such an iconic role?
“Honestly, no,” says Mr. Quinto. “I think that when Leonard (Nimoy) and Bill Shatner created these characters, science fiction had a real stigma attached. But I think science fiction is far more mainstream now. Also, attention spans have diminished greatly over the last 25 years. The notion of an actor becoming inextricably tied to one of their characters just isn’t realistic. Hopefully, the opposite is true. Hopefully, the film will give me greater opportunities. One of the greatest pleasures about doing the film was getting to know Leonard and watching how gracefully he deals with the whole Spock thing.”
Unlike his former colleague (Mr. Shatner), Mr. Nimoy has been a vocal supporter of the Trek prequel and even pops up in cameo, courtesy of a neat temporal plot twist, as the older Spock. He was, says Mr. Quinto, incredibly supportive of the new boys throughout the gruelling two-year process. I wonder if Mr. Pine didn’t feel a little neglected when he did not receive similar cheerleading from his predecessor?
“I guess I missed out a little bit,” he shrugs. “It would have been nice to have his input, just to get his perspective on the whole thing. I wrote him a letter very early on and introduced myself and he wrote back wishing me ‘good luck’ so we had some kind of connection there. In the end, though, it was good for me to be able to work on the character without the very formidable presence of Mr. Shatner. It meant that I was working scene by scene without thinking about the grandiose expectations around this very iconic character or the cultural psyche. And it meant that I wasn’t trying to do the Shatner pause. I couldn’t have if I wanted to. If I had we would have ended up with a Naked Gun movie.”
Like Mr. Abrams, neither actor was a Trekker before getting the gig. Both loved The Voyage Home and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, a film which, Mr. Quinto admits, had such a profoundly visceral effect upon him as a kid, that it still freaks him out when he thinks about it. Mr. Pine, who sat down with a box-set shortly after he landed the role, would receive an even nastier visceral shock.
“Am I going to have to wear a unitard? That was my first question for J.J.”, he tells me. “I had seen the show growing up because my grandmother was a huge William Shatner fan and my dad was also in a couple of episodes of The Next Generation. But when I went to watch the first Star Trek movie and seen Dr. McCoy emerged from a space pod wearing a one-piece that zipped down to the navel, I thought ‘whoa’. It would have destroyed a lesser man’s career. Oh man. A unitard. What have I done?”
The film, which pitches the youthful graduate crew of the Enterprise against Eric Bana’s pissed-off marauding Romulan, has mad fun with the rules of the Trekiverse without doing anything to startle Trek virgins away. When Kirk and Sulu attempt a death-defying attack on a planet-obliterating drill, you can bet the non-character in the red suit is the one who won’t make it back from the away mission. And yes. In keeping with interplanetary protocol, Kirk does find the time to get it on with a voluptuous green lady.
“It’s much harder than it looks,” Chris Pine assures me. “There’s a lot of make-up and a lot of intimate scrubbing involved. You know what I‘m saying?”
Both gentlemen are aware that this is a huge deal. Since Christmas, test audiences have consistently made favourable comparisons to such popcorn classics as Star Wars and Jaws. On the strength of these responses, Messrs. Pine and Quinto have already been signed up for two further Trek instalments.
“You have to be appreciative,” says Mr. Quinto. “You turn up for work and see the scale of this film sometimes. It’s unbelievable.”
For Mr. Quinto, landing such a peachy part must taste especially sweet. Born and raised in a Catholic neighbourhood in Pittsburgh, as recently as 1998 he was waiting tables in Galway, his ancestral home.
“My parents are Italian and Irish,” he explains. “When I came of age I wanted to explore my roots and I wound up living in Ireland. I can’t speak Italian so it was the easier option. But Galway turned out to be the most amazing place. I served coffee. I put on Chekov’s The Bear. It’s a real artist and busker town.”
He smiles.
“If it all ends tomorrow, I’m coming back for my old job.”