Steve Pratt talks to Simon Pegg and Karl Urban about joining the crew of the USS Enterprise as Star Trek returns us to the starship crew’s early days.

THE new Scotty, Shaun Of The Dead and Run Fat Boy Run comedy star Simon Pegg, is a self-confessed nerd when it comes to Star Trek. “I was a fan of the show as a kid. I’ve watched it since I was nine. I remember it being on BBC2 at six o’clock teatime and being utterly beguiled by it,” he says.

“I found my science fiction legs with Star Wars obviously, because that exploded in 1977 and was very much a brash lightshow. Then I got into science fiction and enjoyed the cerebral nature of Star Trek, which is what they had to do because they didn’t have the resources to do what they did in Star Wars.

“It was almost like a play every week.

Getting into that as I got older, I just completely fell in love with it. So to become part of it, as a nerd, which is what I am – sorry, but it’s true – is extraordinary.”

Playing scenes in the new film with one of the original cast, Leonard Nimoy’s Spock, was weird for him. “He was talking to me as a man I’ve known since I was nine. And it’s not a man from this planet, it’s a man from Vulcan with pointed ears,” says Pegg.

“So it was kind of odd to have Leonard look at me and say lines, and me not go ‘waaheeooo’, become very excited and need to go to the toilet.”

Brit Pegg joins the US cast in the latest Star Trek movie which follows Kirk, Spock and the other familiar Enterprise characters during their early years.

Every day on the set he had to pinch himself to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. “I came slightly later to the shooting and everyone had already met each other, but when I joined the crew and finally came on board, it felt so right,” he says.

“In a weird hippyish way, we already knew each other and immediately clicked. The spirit of togetherness that pervades Star Trek was very much there on the set.

“I’ve just gushed my way into forgetting what the question was. There you go – I’m a nerd.”

He doesn’t feel you have to be a Trekker to enjoy the latest film, although there’s a lot in it for fans. It was important to appeal to that fan base, but he feels director JJ Abrams has widened the appeal for new viewers.

“This nails it completely because you can watch without knowing any of the preexisting history and love it for the sheer adventure and human story,” he says.

“But if you do know Star Trek and see that the surface of Vulcan looks like Vasquez rocks in California, where they shot the episode Arena – nerd – you think ‘fantastic’.”

A remark he made in his TV series, Space, came back to haunt him. Talking about things that are sure in life, his character says that every odd-numbered Star Trek film is s**t.

“This was back when there were only seven or so. It was a widely-held controversial geek’s eye view of Star Trek. But that’s not true any more. That’s most certainly disproved by his movie,” he says in his defence.

James Doohan, who played the original chief engineer Scotty is no longer alive but Pegg chatted to his son, Chris, about him. He didn’t want to impersonate Doohan but pay homage to him “and do a performance that he would like, perhaps, as a viewer”.

New Zealand actor Karl Urban, perhaps best know as Rohan warrior Eomer in The Lord Of The Rings, approached playing medical office Bones McCoy feeling some need for continuity with the original TV series.

“I tried to identify and capture some sort of an essence or spirit of what the later DeForest Kelley did so wonderfully well for 40 years, and infuse that into my interpretation aof what a younger Bones would be,” he says.

“That was the challenge for all of us, not to deliver a carbon copy.”

Director Abrams was sceptical when he heard Urban was auditioning. “I thought, ‘what? The Lord Of The Rings stud? The evil guy from the Bourne film? Like, come on,” he recalls.

“But when Karl came in and started reading for Bones, it was literally like channelling – it wasn’t an impersonation, it was like channelling the soul of that character. I was blown away.” Urban admits it was “quite a scary experience”, not least because he’s a Star Trek fan. He has an eight-year-old son and, two years before winning the role, he and his son watched the entire DVD box set together.

That helped him when it came time to do the screen test. “I didn’t necessarily have to go back and review the material because I felt I know it quite well,” he says.

“I felt like I knew the character and the archetypes and the relationships and what they meant to each other. The real thing for me was when I took my son Hunter along to this movie, and he thoroughly enjoyed it.

“It was a real fantastic moment for me as a father to be able to be in a movie that my son could see and to have the movie be so wonderful.”

■ Star Trek (12A) is showing at cinemas from tomorrow.