Leonard by William Shatner

seriously. We knew our audience would take the show only as seriously as we did. To get to the core Spock, as he once explained to an interviewer, “I went through the process of gradually internalizing more and more and more. There were times that I had to remind myself of that because that wasn’t my nature. On the contrary, my training as an actor was to use my emotions, to use gesture, to use color in my speech, to use tonalities to be interesting. And to be passionate. I always enjoyed playing passionate characters, so this was quite a shift for me. It wasn’t me at all. It became me.”
    Perhaps Roddenberry had known more than we suspected when he cast me in the role of Kirk, because it turned out that our differing approaches to our parts resulted in perfect harmony. Leonard explained it better than I would: “Shatner was energy personified. A ball of energy, constantly looking, digging, searching, which gave me a place to exist as Spock. Much more so, with all due respect, to Jeff Hunter. Jeff Hunter played Captain Pike as a thoughtful, more introverted person. My tendency, when I was in a scene with him, was to try to be more energetic around him. Bill Shatner provided all the energy you needed in the scene, allowing me to be more reflective and more reactive. The fact that Shatner came on the way he did, I think it helped me a lot in developing the Spock character.”
    As the weeks passed and Leonard became more comfortable in the role, he became very protective of Spock. Next to playing Spock, writing his part had to be the most difficult. The crux of great drama is the expression of emotion; just imagine how difficult it was for the writers to bring to life a character whose most identifiable character trait was that he did not express emotion. “We couldn’t let him show emotion,” remembered Dorothy Fontana, or D. C. Fontana as she became known. While she personally wrote several episodes, she also worked with the other writers the entire run of the show and knew how hard it was to write for that character. “Since he was half-human, there were moments when we had to let him show something. We had to let something leak through.” One device the writers used several times was creating some sort of mind control that the enemy used to force Spock to display an emotion—once it even was love. As long as the script was logical, Leonard clearly enjoyed the opportunity to explore his character. And while Leonard remembered being a pain in the neck for the writers with all his script notes, claiming he was very often highly critical, no one I’ve spoken with actually remembers that to be true. Dorothy Fontana doesn’t recall that, and I can’t remember a situation until much, much later, when we were making the movies, that he became overly protective of Spock.
    Only once during the original series was there a real issue. The head writer for the show was Gene Coon. It was Gene Coon who created the Klingons, an irrational race of warriors who believed in nothing but conquest and would destroy anything and anyone that got in their way. The Klingons were the perfect enemy. During that first season, we were given a script in which Spock did something he hadn’t done before; I don’t remember what it was, but Leonard felt it was completely inconsistent with what he had been developing for the character. As he had been throughout his career, he focused on small details that others might have overlooked. So he went to Coon’s office to discuss it.
    Coon was in the middle of the next script. The last thing he needed was an actor fussing over a detail that no one would notice. Leonard explained to him why the scene didn’t work. Apparently, Coon listened carefully, then suggested, “Just do it.”
    â€œI can’t,” Leonard told him, an actor being protective of his character.
    â€œThis conversation’s over,” Coon snapped.
    By the