Ethan Peck on being his own Spock, comedy heroes, and his very famous grandfather
The Star Trek: Strange New Worlds star chats about his newfound fame as an iconic TV legend
It doesn't matter where you are around the world. There's a couple of the iconic aspects of Star Trek that will absolutely be living in your mind and come to the forefront of your brain.
As soon as you hear the name Star Trek, you think about William Shatner's performance as Captain James T. Kirk. Just incredible.
You think about Leonard Nimoy playing Spock. You think about the star ship enterprise, you think a bit of a long live and prosper. The iconic hand gesture that Spock made - it was indelible part of the fabric of Star Trek.
You think about those things and depending on when you grew up and which Trek shows you were exposed to first, other things may start coming to your mind.
Think about an actor who's hired to take on the role of either Kirk or Spock… the absolute balls on them to think that you can go out there and be as good as, if not better, than William Shatner or Leonard Nimoy…? The ego.
But you then start thinking… people have done it. And done it well. Chris Pine in the 2009 Star Trek film as Kirk and Zachary Quinto playing Spock… both were really, really very good. They made their characters their own. For younger generations, particularly those new to Trek, those guys are their Kirk and Spock.
And then you look at Ethan Peck, who's just taken over the Spock role in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. He started playing the role in Star Trek Discovery and even before getting more screen time in the spinoff series, he made the role his own.
Ethan Peck is Spock.
The following interview was recorded for the Screen Watching YouTube channel and the text of it has been modified for clarity. He was a guest at the Metro Comic Con in Melbourne.
Dan Barrett: Obviously you play Spock. Uh, he's one of the most iconic TV and movie characters of all time. How much familiarity do you have going into him? Like obviously he's culturally omnipresent, but how specifically were you aware of the character were you taking on?
Ethan Peck: I remember being, I guess I was seven or eight years old, on the playground with one of my friends making the Vulcan salute and not understanding where it was from, but I had an awareness at that age for that gesture. And I think that sort of speaks to how relevant Leonard Nimoy’s Spock was in pop culture, which is just kind of stunning. And to be cast in the role was, you know, a shock.
My main exposure was to Zachary Quinto’s portrayal in the JJ Abrams films, which I enjoyed so much.
So I hadn't seen much of the original series. Of course, I studied up when I got the role, but my Zachary Quinto was kind of my Spock. Obviously you want to go into it… you wanna do your own thing, you wanna be seen as your own Spock.
When you are going back rewatching the original Leonard Nimoy performance in the original series, how much of it are you watching and how much are you trying to ignore at the same time? So you can be your own Spock…?
Yeah, that's a great question. I would say that I watched probably the first season before letting go. I really wanted to study what Leonard Nimoy as the actor was doing. I wanted to understand the character's perspective with within the world, right? Within the world of Star Trek, of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek.
At a certain point it started to feel kind of alive in me and I stopped watching the original series. I still, when I practice my lines and I'm preparing for scenes, I check in with the voice of Leonard Nimoy in my brain… when I say certain things and I go “how would he say this?” Because there's such a musicality to his voice when he speaks as the character.
I'm a couple of years older than you, so I'm a child of the eighties and for me, Leonard Nimoy was a much older man, because I was watching him in the Star Trek movies at the time. Obviously for you, you need to go back and see him as a younger man in the original series and not so much the oldest Spock that we saw later on.
Exactly. And that's another reason I didn't go too far with sort of absorbing all of his performance as the character because my Spock is five years or 10 years before him. So, I definitely needed to keep in mind an end-point, but there's so much we do on the show with this character… situations that we put him in that he's not been in before, that I kind of need to make an educated guess as to how he might do it.
When you came on, fans seemed to embrace you almost immediately. How nervous were you about that fan reaction?