Strange New Worlds may be boldly going off on new adventures with Captain Pike (Anson Mount) at the helm, but it’s also revisiting familiar characters—even the most iconic ones. The Vampire Diaries’ Paul Wesley has been cast as James T. Kirk for the show’s second season.
Paramount’s tweet just says “James T. Kirk,” without a rank, and you can bet we’ve been staring at this photo trying to determine whether those cuffs clearly show that he’s a captain yet or not. It’s possible Kirk held a command prior to the Enterprise, but that’s not something that’s been seen on screen.
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Hello there, Jim
@paulwesley will join #StarTrek #StrangeNewWorlds Season 2 as James T. Kirk! pic.twitter.com/71nYL2czUb
— Star Trek on Paramount+ (@StarTrekOnPPlus) March 15, 2022
Variety describes the role as simply “a young version of Kirk” (though Wesley is older than William Shatner was at the start of the original series). Presumably, we’ll get to see Kirk meet his future shipmates Spock (Ethan Peck) and Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding), though the brief announcement doesn’t specify how substantial Wesley’s role will be.
Paul Wesley is inarguably best known for playing Stefan Salvatore, the more brooding and emo of the The Vampire Diaries‘ Salvatore brothers (above). For eight seasons, he bickered with his brother, adored Elena Gilbert, struggled with his bloodlust, snapped necks, and glowered his way through some of the most deliciously over the top vampire stories ever seen on network TV. It’s not a role that seems to lead directly to starship captaincy! But that just makes his casting all the more intriguing.
After the news was announced, Wesley tweeted that he recently met William Shatner on a flight. “I could barely put two words together but ultimately I managed to say hello and we chatted,” Wesley wrote. “I’m not one who usually believes in fate but this was more than a coincidence.”
I am deeply humbled and still a little startled to have been given the honor of playing the inimitable James T Kirk. Ever since I was a kid, I have been awed by the imaginative world Gene Roddenberry created.
Recently, I boarded a flight to LA to discover that the man in the pic.twitter.com/U8GVD4ZemP— Paul Wesley (@paulwesley) March 15, 2022
And Shatner welcomed Wesley to the small club of people who have played James T. Kirk:
@paulwesley Keep my ship and crew safe, Captain!
Congratulations!
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) March 16, 2022
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premieres May 5th on Paramount Plus, though we’ll have to wait until season two for Kirk to show up.
The Making of Star Trek, published in 1968 with input from TOS’s creators (and crediting Gene Roddenberry as co-author), stated that Kirk’s first command was a smaller “destroyer-equivalent” vessel, and contrary to what most people today seem to be think, this was overtly referenced onscreen in the second pilot when Elizabeth Dehner said that Kirk requested Gary Mitchell to serve with him on his first command.
Multiple different tie-in novels and comics have portrayed this earlier ship, each one giving it a different name and class. In the first DC Comics annual by Mike W. Barr, it was the Saladin; in Vonda N. McIntyre’s Enterprise: The First Adventure, it was the Lydia Sutherland; in a Howard Weinstein DC Comics issue, it was the Oxford; in David A. Goodman’s Autobiography of James T. Kirk, it was the Hotspur. Most of those works just depicted it briefly, though Goodman’s book devoted about a chapter to it. Its most extensive portrayal to date was in my own 2019 novel The Captain’s Oath, which called his ship the Sacagawea and featured several of its missions over the four years Kirk commanded it. I expect SNW to conflict with my portrayal, but that’s the way it works in the tie-in game.
I don’t know why today’s fans have this perception that Kirk was supposed to be a new captain in TOS. That’s exactly the opposite of what was stated in the series bible, which stressed that, despite his youth, he was a very experienced and accomplished commander. And despite what the 2009 movie showed, it’s utterly implausible that Starfleet would give command of one of its biggest, most important capital ships to a novice captain.
Incidentally, Paul Wesley (as Paul Wasilewski) once appeared in Smallville as Lex Luthor’s brother, and therefore he played the son of Deep Space Nine guest star John Glover (as Lionel Luthor). Whereas Chris Pine actually is the son of Voyager/Enterprise guest star Robert Pine.
I’m not bothered by changes to canon (that kind of thing rarely bothers me) but I would have preferred a younger actor. Still, he looks the part at least.
I realize that there are all sorts of ways in which introducing James Kirk at this point could be brilliant storytelling. However, seeing the announcement made that Kirk is showing up – in addition to all of the other TOS characters – just feels like a complete failure of the writers and producers to be able to establish an identity of its own for this show.
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@5/twels: It’s too early to call it a complete failure, since they aren’t bringing him in until season 2 and we don’t know how large a role he’ll play. Still, I do find it ironic and concerning that a show called Strange New Worlds is putting in so many connections to old continuity. I just hope they balance them with enough new elements that live up to the title.
I still find it weird that we have these roles on both the big and small screen being played by different actors. The way it separates the movies from the TV shows. I think it breaks a bit of the shared universe illusion, especially considering Beyond had an onscreen portrait of the original cast taken in 1989. And it’s not as if Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto look that much older than Paul Wesley and Ethan Peck, so age is clearly not the factor. As for scheduling a busy movie star, well, they did Unification back in 1991 with Nimoy himself.
Well we’ve had a vampire Batman, now we get a vampire Captain Kirk; truly this is the Golden Age of the Dark Undead (or at least for actors who’ve played them!).
On a more serious note, it makes a fair amount of sense for Christopher Pike to have met James T. Kirk at least briefly before the latter was assigned to NCC-1701; if I remember correctly, Pike left Enterprise of his own free will, so it seems logical that he would play at least some role in selecting his successor, so why not recommend an officer he’s already worked with?
Also, I would still love to see Mr Zachary Quinto make an appearance as Sybock of Vulcan (If only because it would be hilarious to see Fan Reaction to such a development).
@7/Eduardo: “I still find it weird that we have these roles on both the big and small screen being played by different actors. The way it separates the movies from the TV shows. I think it breaks a bit of the shared universe illusion”
Nothing new about multiple actors playing the same Trek character in the same continuity — Saavik, Zefram Cochrane, DaiMon Bok, Tora Ziyal, Ishka, Naomi Wildman, the Borg Queen, T’Pau, Surak, Colonel Green, Airiam, Bruce Maddox, Icheb, etc. And if you throw in the animated series, Kyle, Amanda, the Guardian of Forever, Bob Wesley, Koloth, Korax, and Kor. Not to mention all the other recast Prime Universe characters in this show — not just Pike, Spock, and Kirk, but Number One, Uhura, Chapel, and M’Benga. It doesn’t break the illusion any more than any other recasting. It probably simply comes down to affordability and availability.
“especially considering Beyond had an onscreen portrait of the original cast taken in 1989.”
Yeah, and ’09 had Spock Prime recognize Kirk and Scotty on sight. The idea is that they look the same in-universe no matter how different the actors playing them look.
@8/ED: “On a more serious note, it makes a fair amount of sense for Christopher Pike to have met James T. Kirk at least briefly before the latter was assigned to NCC-1701”
Of course it does; “The Menagerie” explicitly says they did meet at that point. The problem is that it says they only met that one time, and this is years too early for that. Unless they go the Discovery season 2 route and have it all be classified so Kirk has to lie about it to Mendez.
Ah. I almost wish they wouldn’t do this. The appeal of Strange New Worlds for me is precisely because we don’t know much about Christopher Pike and Number One, and it will be interesting to see these people before the arrival of the TOS crew. A young Kirk will upset that applecart a bit.
Yeah, not surprising. I suppose they’re going to milk TOS for all it’s worth.
I’m more disappointed by SNW using the Noonien Singh name for one of the new characters. I mean, come on. Why’d you have to go there? Again with Khan?
If they must, wouldn’t it be more interesting to have that be a revelation about the character, like a very old family secret they’re ashamed of? Maybe shared between her and another lower decks person? You know, make it about story and characters and not marketing.
@10/Christopher: Yes, there have been plenty of moments with the same character played by different actors. But I don’t recall that ever happening with two productions being made at the same time. Recent news all but confirmed there’s a fourth Bad Robot Kelvin Star Trek film in the works. If it’s true, this means we’d have different actors playing the same roles at the same time.
@13/Eduardo: ” But I don’t recall that ever happening with two productions being made at the same time.”
In the Arrowverse, Eobard Thawne is played by Tom Cavanaugh on The Flash and Matt Lescher on Legends of Tomorrow. It’s explained as the Cavanaugh version being Thawne disguised as Harrison Wells, but in their later appearances, no explanation has been given for why they still have different faces or how they relate to one another within Thawne’s convoluted timeline.
Sometimes a play will have one cast in its Broadway company and a different cast in its simultaneous touring company. Some plays even have different casts alternating in the same production, like in the Frankenstein play where Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller swapped the roles of Victor and the Monster on alternate nights (before they both went on to play simultaneous modern incarnations of Sherlock Holmes).
And there have been plenty of cases where a live-action TV or movie series had a contemporaneous animated TV spinoff with a different cast, or with a mix of returning movie cast members and recast performers. A modern example is Marvel’s animated What If…? series, which features a mix of movie cast members and substitute performers (e.g. Lake Bell as Black Widow, Alexandra Daniels as Captain Marvel, and Hudson Thames as Spider-Man).
This is just part of how acting works. Sometimes you get different performers in different venues.
Interesting rank braid on the sleeves. In TOS the captain was two solid bars with a sine wave design on top, with a broken band in between the two. Three solid bars with the sine wave was Fleet Captain. In this picture, Kirk is shown wearing 3 solid bars, no sine wave that I can see, the latter change which could simply being a design detail change. Anson Mount, in Discovery, was shown with three solid bars, though the middle one was thinner than the proximal and distal ones. Trying to look closely at the new Kirk photo, maybe the middle one is thinner too. I can’t quite tell. Anyone else tried blowing it out to micro-measure like you’re one of the stars of the Big Bang Theory? ;)
@15/Troyce: In the pilots, the rank stripes were straight, not wiggly. Since this is several years before the second pilot, that works.
@14,
In the Arrowverse, Eobard Thawne is played by Tom Cavanaugh on The Flash and Matt Lescher on Legends of Tomorrow. It’s explained as the Cavanaugh version being Thawne disguised as Harrison Wells, but in their later appearances, no explanation has been given for why they still have different faces or how they relate to one another within Thawne’s convoluted timeline
I may be misremembering, but I think Season Five’s finale used the Negative Speed Force and its ability to weather timeline changes to explain in-story why the Wells Thawne variant still exists despite the original Letscher Thawne having been KIA at the end of Legends Season Two.
The real-world explanation, of course, is budgets and actor availability. It’s easier to keep using Cavanaugh instead of flying Letscher up to Vancouver.
In retrospect, though, I really wish they’d killed off Thawne for good after the end of Legends Season Two. Using a character with such a convoluted personal timeline (on top of over-relying on Thawne and not developing the Rogues) has just caused too many problems for The Flash.
@17/Mr. Magic: Both The Flash and Legends are filmed in Vancouver. The Flash stuck with Cavanaugh’s version initially since Cavanaugh was already a regular cast member at the time in another role (well, multiple other roles), and since then, they’ve stuck with him because he’s the version that has more of a connection to the Flash characters, while LoT sticks with Letscher because he’s the only version of Thawne that ever appeared in LoT, and having Cavanaugh show up would be confusing to LoT viewers who don’t also watch The Flash.
It does look to me like Kirk is supporsed to be a captain in the picture; this is probably too much to hope based on the format of the announcement but maybe this is a one episode/one arc appearence? We get to have Kirk meet Pike and the rest, while keeping the knew crew seperate. Kind of like how TNG, DS9, and VOY each had a crossover from the previous show to start out their own series. Obviously this is different, being season two, but having Kirk appear as a guest star for a few weeks would allow the show to incorporate Kirk while still being it’s own thing and not trying too hard to cram too many TOS charecters in. Unfortunately, the very fact that they made this announcement seems to indicate that Kirk will be more of a permanent precence for at least the second season. Since he appears to be a captain in the picture, I wonder how they will keep him around?
There’s lots of stuff in the TOS bible that either never made it to screen or was contradicted later on. The bible is a starting point and once the show is running, all bets are off. Is it possible that Kirk commanded another ship before the Enterprise? Sure. Is it possible that Enterprise is his first command? Yup. And Dinner says that Kirk ASKED for Mitchell as his First Officer in his first command. Nothing says that it was approved or that the first command referenced was the Enterprise. For all we know, Starfleet (or UESPA at the time) felt that Kirk and Mitchell were too close in personalty and temperament and that they felt that Kirk needed someone who was more likely to challenge him when necessary.
I hope that Kirk and Pike don’t actually meet as it would be yet one more thang that Starfleet has classified, lied about or covered up.
@19/Echthelion: Yeah, I’m expecting a guest appearance, probably more than one episode but maybe just an arc.
“Unfortunately, the very fact that they made this announcement seems to indicate that Kirk will be more of a permanent precence for at least the second season.”
Not necessarily. Even if he’s just in a couple of episodes, the news would surely leak anyway. I think someone already posted a location-filming photo of him; it’s impossible to keep such things secret anymore what with all the phone cameras everyone has. So no matter the size of his role, they had reason to make a formal announcement to get ahead of social media.
I’m still not convinced that the “first command” mentioned in WNMHGB couldn’t just be the one they’re on.
Interestingly, Diane Carey once recalled (in the Voyages of Imagination book) that when she was first writing tie-ins, she wasn’t allowed to use destroyers, tenders or anything other than starships, because Paramount insisted that was all Starfleet had. (And this would presumably have been in Gene Rodenberry’s lifetime, when he was still keeping an eye on them.) So the “destroyer-class” idea obviously hasn’t been set in stone throughout the franchise’s history.
Cool. About all I can say about it.
@22/cap-mjb: “I’m still not convinced that the “first command” mentioned in WNMHGB couldn’t just be the one they’re on.”
I don’t believe Dehner would’ve used that turn of phrase to refer to the ship they were currently on. And we know for a fact that it was intended to be another ship. The Making of Star Trek, which credits Gene Roddenberry himself as its co-author and contains much behind-the-scenes material directly from TOS’s own creators during its production, stated explicitly in its section “An Official Biography of a Ship and its Crew” that Kirk’s first command was a smaller “destroyer-equivalent” vessel. That was from the same book that was fandom’s exclusive source for other factoids like Kirk being the youngest captain, the Klingons and Romulans having an alliance, and the ship’s forward dish being a navigational deflector, and nearly the only source at the time for the idea that the show was set in the 23rd century (though James Blish was the first to state that in print). These are things that were never stated in TOS but were universally accepted by first-generation fandom as true because they were in TMOST. So why should this be any different?
As I said, the idea that Starfleet would give a capital ship to a first-time captain is nonsensical. Civilians like Abrams and Kurtzman and Orci may have thought that was valid, but there’s no way the WWII veterans who made TOS would’ve portrayed Starfleet procedure so unrealistically. Of course he had at least one command before the Enterprise. That’s the way it would realistically work, that you start with smaller commands and work your way up to the capital ships. Heck, I tried to convince CBS to let me give Kirk two previous commands in The Captain’s Oath, since TMOST never says the destroyer-equivalent ship was his only prior command, just his first, and the more experience he had, the more believable it would be.
“Interestingly, Diane Carey once recalled… she was first writing tie-ins, she wasn’t allowed to use destroyers, tenders or anything other than starships, because Paramount insisted that was all Starfleet had. (And this would presumably have been in Gene Rodenberry’s lifetime, when he was still keeping an eye on them.)”
That would’ve probably been during the era when Richard Arnold was cracking down on the tie-ins and enforcing a very narrow, rigid set of rules that was really more about his own personal power trip than anything else. I mean, Peter David often tells the story of how Arnold rejected a comics script of his as “too violent” but then approved an even more violent script that Peter submitted under a pseudonym, suggesting that Arnold simply had a vendetta against Peter.
I mean, that rule is obvious nonsense, because the Antares in “Charlie X” was meant to be a merchant marine ship. The reason we didn’t see ships smaller than the Enterprise was because they couldn’t afford to build the miniatures. But they were definitely meant to be there. (And we did see a couple in the animated series.)
@@@@@ 24 – “Civilians like Abrams and Kurtzman and Orci may have thought that was valid, but there’s no way the WWII veterans who made TOS would’ve portrayed Starfleet procedure so unrealistically.”
Yet those same WW II vets allowed Kirk’s first officer to forge orders, kidnap a flag officer, forge more orders, assault Starfleet officers and steal the ship without so much as a reprimand.
Kirk abd crew also stole the Enterprise, sabotaged the Excelsior and refused to follow orders. Based on the outcome, they may have given Kirk & company what would be considered a mild penalty but there’s no way in hell they’d still be in uniform afterwards.
Kirk also threatened to destroy an entire planet because he, his first officer and an ambassador were being held hostage after violating sovereign space. Imagine that happening with a submarine loaded with nuclear missiles attacking a small country on Earth, say North Korea. The US didn’t nuke North Korea back to the Stone Age when the USS Pueblo and it’s crew were captured and they certainly didn’t do it on the say so of the captain of the Pueblo.
And Starfleet most certainly would install a cadet as captain of a Starship because we saw it happen and it was approved by the people that own Star Trek. Dumb? Yes, most certainly but something that Starfleet has actually done.
@24/CLB: “As I said, the idea that Starfleet would give a capital ship to a first-time captain is nonsensical. Civilians like Abrams and Kurtzman and Orci may have thought that was valid, but there’s no way the WWII veterans who made TOS would’ve portrayed Starfleet procedure so unrealistically.”
There’s a big difference (or there should be!) between a first-time captain and someone who’s never been on a ship until that day. Just because someone wouldn’t realistically go from a cadet to captain of a starship doesn’t mean they wouldn’t go from a commander to captain of a starship. It predates Abrams, Kurtzman and Orci and goes back to Berman, Hurley and indeed the older Rodenberry, who portrayed Riker as being offered a number of starship commands while serving as first officer of the Hood and the Enterprise (D and E).
I realise that TOS doesn’t give much information about the step before a starship captain but it’s indicated in a number of episodes (notably “The Tholian Web”) that Spock would take over as captain if something happened to Kirk: You could argue that it was only an emergency appointment until a more experienced captain was assigned, but to my non-military, not-WWII veteran mind it doesn’t seem unrealistic that someone could be made captain when their previous posting was first officer of that or another ship. So I could easily see Kirk being given command of the Enterprise after previously being second-in-command of another Constitution-class.