What did you think of the new Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto)?
For those guys — who are playing characters who everyone knows and has preconceived notions of how they’re meant to be — to have the balls to just come out and own them like they do and have that sense of fun with them, I thought was just amazing. It was an awesome job. Credit to (director and producer) J.J. Abrams — that was why we all wanted to be involved. It would have been quite a different film with another director. J.J. has this sense of fun and a great attitude to how the film should be. Even your character, the villain Nero, gets a funny line. He appears on the Enterprise’s screen and says, “Hello, I’m Nero”, as if he’s just called up for a casual chat. Yeah, we were mucking around with it on the set and thought it’d be a fun idea for him to be a bit of a smart a—. I mean, OK, he’s a baddie, but it doesn’t mean it has to be so dark that there’s no humour in it for the audience. Again, there was a sense of fun in the screenplay that I thought should really permeate throug
