(Credits: Alamy)
Wed 12 November 2025 8:30, UK
At 94 years old, William Shatner has the resources and the leeway to undertake any number of projects, from spoken word albums and a variety of guest appearances to cutthroat reality TV competitions, you name it, but he decided not to do the last one.
Shatner is, of course, the legendary James T Kirk from Star Trek: The Original Series and several of its sequels, but he has also pursued a career as an author and a recording artist.
When AV Club caught up with him in 2021, he was preparing to release his spoken-word album Bill, an autobiographical work crafted with collaborators including Brad Paisley, John Lurie, and Joe Jonas, the last particularly important as the album was released by Jonas’s Let’s Get It! Records and Republic Records.
Shatner shared that “it became an album written during Covid, separated by thousands of miles. [His friend] Rob [Sharenow] was in New York City, and Dan was in upstate New York, and I was in Los Angeles”.
“So by phone and by Zoom and by God,” continued Shatner on the behind-the-scenes, “We fashioned songs that were very, very close to me. Part of my history done poetically in collaboration with Rob and I, and then sending them on to Dan [Miller, producer].” Shatner was also asked who the “funniest person [he knows] personally” is, and he answered, “Probably Tom Bergeron”, which is how they segued into asking him a big question: Why has he never been on Dancing with the Stars?
Shortly after, the actor was asked how he knew Bergeron, to which he responded rather candidly that he couldn’t recall the specifics, but “I remember being an admirer of the show, so I would watch the show all the time for a variety of people. He wanted me to be on the show, learning to dance, and the beautiful girls… And they would ask me every year to be on the show. So when I met him, we just started talking.”
Naturally, the admission showed signs of eagerness, even if it was motivated by friendly persuasion of the pretty female kind, if not his friend, but when the publication asked him about it, pat came the response, “I was busy. They needed like three months; it was too much”.
Shatner was also 90 at the time this interview was conducted, and Dancing with the Stars is, by nature, very physically demanding, with the potential for injury. Late actress Cloris Leachman is the oldest contestant to date, competing in season seven at 82 years old (the youngest was The Hunger Games’s Willow Shields, when she was 14 years old).
But then again, he also went to space at the age of 90, wherein the great Captain Kirk embarked on a ten-minute suborbital flight, an experience he said filled him with “overwhelming sadness”. He elaborated on it in his book Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder: “Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna…things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”
Being someone who is clearly a fan of pushing the envelope, he could still do Dancing with the Stars, showing up as a fun record-breaking flourish for the show currently celebrating its 20th anniversary, an event which has successfully brought back even Bergeron, one of the original judges, following his controversial exit five years ago, due to his criticism of the casting of President Donald Trump’s former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer. However, personally, I would assume the multi-hyphenate would want to do more subversive things if he is to truly “go where no man has gone before”.
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