The most likely reason that J.J. Abrams doesn’t want William Shatner in the new Star Trek movie (despite having hired Leonard Nimoy to make an appearance as Spock) isn’t hard to figure. Ever since playing an amusingly wackjob version of himself in Robert Burnett‘s Free Enterprise nine years ago, Shatner has basically been a self-satirizing comic figure — the older eccentric actor who doesn’t realize (and wouldn’t care if he did realize) that he’s completely insane. This persona has paid off for Shatner in numerous ways, but one of the offshoots of the nutter persona has been the surrendering of the authority and heroic gravitas that he once had when his name and face were synonymous with Cpt. James Kirk.
