Paul Wesley on Curating and Cultivating Kirk
Wesley has now inhabited the character of James T. Kirk for a few years on ‘star trek: Strange New Worlds’, but what did the veteran television actor feel he needed to do to create his own, unique Kirk?
This article contains spoilers for season 3 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
With approximately 19 episodes left in the entire planned run of the show, the original adventures of the starship Enterprise are coming to a close in this newest Paramount timeline. Which begs the question - what will this new world look like when it concludes? Will Pike (Anson Mount) submit to his dark future fate? Will Pike still be Captain at the end of this five-year mission? What part will the infamous James T. Kirk play, and when will he take the helm? As veteran television performer Paul Wesley sits down with FilmSpeak, he reveals that while much of season 3 is in the books, and season 4 has been filmed, even he doesn’t have all the answers.
What is definitive, is Kirk is playing a larger and larger part the deeper we get into these particular voyages, which gives veteran television performer Paul Wesley time to construct Kirk even further. At least, his version of Kirk. It’s surely difficult to follow fellow Kirks Chris Pine and the iconic William Shatner, but Wesley continues to carve out his own take on the character.
To see the full interview with Paul Wesley, click below. Or keep scrolling for the remainder of the article.
In recent episodes this season, Wesley’s Kirk has stolen the show, most notably in “A Space Adventure Hour” and the most recent episode, “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail”. In the latter, fans saw Kirk take command of the Farragut, as both that ship and the Enterprise were half destroyed in a battle with a monstrous juggernaut of a scavenger ship. Audiences have seen Strange New World’s Kirk in leadership positions before, but this is the first real taste we have seen of Captain Kirk in this iteration of the character. Which means he hasn’t grown into the big chair of command just yet.
As it stands now, Wesley defines Kirk as a young officer who's driven by instinct. “Kirk is someone who will trust his gut, and he's also fearless in many ways” Wesley explains. “He can make mistakes, he can regret certain things, but he’s the kind of guy who will jump out of the airplane and then figure out how he's going to land mid air.
That doesn’t mean Kirk isn’t the leader we all know him to be. “Above all else, he values Starfleet, the Enterprise, the Farragut” Wesley clarifies. “He values his crew above himself. He is selfless in that regard, and that's non-negotiable.”
What the audience has also had the privilege to explore is Kirk’s fraternal side. The brotherly relationship between he and Spock perhaps had the seed planted in “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” as Wesley had his first real meeting of minds with the young Spock (Ethan Peck), yet Spock isn’t Kirk’s only brother. Eventually perhaps, maybe later in the series, we might see a young Dr. Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy, but what’s different about Stange New Worlds is we get to see Kirk and his brother Sam ( ), a relationship that has never been explored on film in any great detail before. In the canon of other Kirks, those two men (and Bones) have a massive effect on the life and leadership of Kirk.
”I'm not breaking any ground by saying this, but it's pretty well known that Kirk and Spock are very much a sort of yin and yang,” Wesley describes. “They go together to create the perfect circle, and the logic and aspects that Spock has are some of the things that sometimes Kirk perhaps lacks. Kirk uses pure human instinct, and the human instinct of Kirk is some of the qualities that Spock sort of lacks. And I always find, even in my own personal life, that the best friendships are the ones that can complement each other, perhaps in ways in which we initially don't expect. With Sam, I think the two of them have a kind of competitiveness there, but above all, there's a deep love. [James] and Sam don't have the closest relationship to their father, and I think they rely on one another. I think they are really each other's true family, and they only have each other ultimately”.
While Wesley’s Kirk is perhaps not the overly confident Captain oozing Charm through every pore, it’s simple due to him growing into that character. There are several things Wesley considers to be non-negotiable characteristics, and that sense of humor is also key. Wesley, perhaps not as Kirk, but at least a nod to another Kirk got to let loose a little in “A Space Adventure Hour” when he channeled the infamous cadence of one William Shatner. “When I first read the script, I actually wasn't going to do that at all” Wesley explains (perhaps to save face if Shatner ever sees the performance). “I was going to create a totally fictitious (I mean, the character was fictitious, Maxwell Saint) and then at the last minute I [thought] let's infuse, let's create a combination of Maxwell Saint with his own mannerisms, his own characteristics and his own absurdity.
Part of the charm of Strange New Worlds is how much it can often lean into camp. The adventures don’t always delve into the politics of The Next Generation or the war-torn Deep Space Nine. That specific episode, and especially Wesley’s faux-Shatner is a great reflection of that sense of irreverence. “The whole thing's meant to be ridiculous and bad and kind of over-the-top in a really funny way. A little bit of that as a wink. Because I never got to do that. Lieutenant Kirk is the subdued version, because that's my interpretation of the character. When I re-watched season one of the original series, frankly, I thought the pop cultural stereotype of James T Kirk was very over-exaggerated. And I thought he was actually quite subdued. So my, my version, or my interpretation of James T Kirk is a very subdued one. He evolves, and he has a charisma, but he sort of becomes a little bit more mischievous and boyish as he becomes more comfortable with himself. But I didn't get to really do that because I'm playing an earlier version of Kirk. So I thought, well, this is a fun opportunity to do a little bit of that mixed with Maxwell Saint, and just play up the ridiculousness. Just really take the dial and turn it up to 110”