This is Leonard Nimoy, Mr Spock,
the costar of Star Trek. I'd like to
know what this role is that you play.
Just just what is the role that you're
striving for. Basically Mr Spock is
is a product of a marriage between
an earth woman and a Vulcan male.
Vulcan is a planet outside of our
solar system, and he's physically
very similar to the human anatomy,
but his psychological and emotional
orientation are quite different.
He has complete emotional control.
He's. Very scientifically oriented
and is a very logical creature.
He said.
The point is that Vulcan was a
planet that was very war like and
a very fierce race of people who
almost did themselves in because
they were always in conflict with
each other and their emotions were
so strong that they finally decided
that emotion had to be done away
with and it became a a wise choice
to control emotions and gradually
breed them out of the race so that
they could function more logically.
Survive,
will you very seldom show emotion
then is this difficult? Well,
you mean from an acting point of this.
I'm not. It's a challenge.
It's a challenge, but of course,
that's my job showing emotion
or not showing emotion.
Whichever the case may be,
is the actors craft.
You know, I'm often surprised
when a man comes in to my house
and can fix a leaky faucet.
You know that I've been working
on perhaps for a couple hours and
only managed to make it worse.
You say that's his craft.
He comes in.
And does it?
Minecraft is to play interesting
and unusual characters.
Why is your part so successful?
You suppose? Well, I think there
are a lot of reasons. Well,
evidently the mail would would seem to
indicate that there are a lot of reasons.
I think it starts with
the physical appearance.
I think the fact that he is such a.
A wise individual,
I think people are fascinated with the
idea that a man in the future may know
something that we don't know today.
I think they look to him for answers.
He's a very dignified man.
Commands respect.
He's obviously very intelligent.
The control of the emotions I
think is a very important thing.
The fact that he's cool the
fact that he's sophisticated,
he doesn't get riled in a situation
he has control of himself.
All of these things are working.
I think
your makeup is most unusual.
Does that take a long time?
Hour and a half, which after you've
done it for the 150th 175th time,
seems like a very long time.
And whose idea was it to
have pointed ears? Well,
that started with Gene Roddenberry,
who's the creator of this series,
the executive producer he.
He saw the character with pointed
ears and various other physical
things which we experimented with
and and I should say that just
before we started shooting the show,
we had experimented with four or
five different types of years and
we were not happy with any of them
and I got a little nervous about it.
I thought this is going to be awful
funny if these years don't look right
and I went to Gene and I asked him to
give up the idea of the pointed ears.
And he said, no, he wouldn't.
We're going to keep working on this
and will get it right eventually.
And he said,
I promise you that if you do the show
with the ears at the end of 13 episodes,
if you're not happy,
I'll write you a script where
you get an ear job.
What are they made of? They're made of foam
rubber, and it's a it's a tip of foam
rubber tip that's cast in a mold
that's made specifically for my ear,
and it fits up on top of my head.
And it takes about an hour and a half,
not just for the years.
The iron tier maker is it.
Are they uncomfortable to wear it all?
Sometimes, but not terribly.
I'm more or less gotten used to them.
My ears have become accustomed to the point
you're definitely type now.
Can you think of other parts?
Do you think it'll be difficult
to take other parts? I
really don't worry about that.
For this reason,
if if I would concern myself with
that while I was playing the Spock,
I think that playing Spock would
cease to be the pleasure that it is.
I'm having as much.
Fun playing him as I possibly
can when the time comes to
think about other characters,
I start thinking about that then
well, it is so successful it could
go on for years anyway, couldn't.
Well I would hope so. I I'd like
to have a steady job for a while.
Yeah, do you have any time off? We
take a hiatus which we just
finished in the spring.
I had about 10 weeks off during which I
made several trips around the country.
I was in Medford OR I was in New York.
Three different three different
occasions of Washington, SF,
New Mexico. And so forth.
And now we're back to work.
But while we're shooting,
I don't have any time off
now except on weekends,
Saturdays and Sundays.
People recognize you don't think,
yeah, I guess the hair
makes it pretty easy to spot.
Of course, I have had young children
in stores and places when I've
been shopping and say that man
has a haircut just like Spock.
And they didn't realize what they were saying
well. And then on a second look they say,
could it be you know, that kind of thing?
Well, it is your own hair. Yes it is.
Beautiful, it's nice and thick.
The speed of your ship.
How fast does it go? Well,
we we get into trouble if we try
to move any faster than Warp 8,
which is much more times the speed of light.
It's awful fast. We have gone faster
than that in rare emergencies,
but we try to avoid that because
it's awful rough on the ship
and it's rough on the system.
I would think so.
Well beaming down is that painful.
Aiming down you mean that process when
we leave the ship and come down on
what planet? No, it's not.
As a rule what it what it amounts to is,
very briefly, we take matter,
which is the human body and we convert
that to energy and we move it from
one place to another just the way
you move a television picture from
this studio into people's homes.
And when we get it to the
place we want it to be weary,
convert it to matter now.
Our second party, how long does it take?
How much just like a few seconds?
Yeah, now just it doesn't take very
long for the picture to get from the
studio to somebody's home, for example.
That's under normal circumstances.
We don't have any difficulties.
Sometimes we run into barriers just
the way a person runs into trouble.
If they have a mountain between
the studio and their home,
their reception is a little difficult.
And getting through those
mountains is kind of rough.
What do you do in a case like that?
Oh suffer a lot, yeah.
A lot of suffering over
time now we make it alright.
Well, are there any of
these things that you do?
Could they actually take place?
Scientifically?
The scientists tell me that they
could. The people in the various NASA
installations that I've visited and
and there's certainly people whose
opinions I respect tell me that we
work constantly with the threat
of scientific possibility in our
shows that we're not doing fantasy,
that we're doing potential science fiction.
We're doing science fiction,
which means potential science possibility.
Are you married? Yes, I am.
My wife's name is Sandy.
We've been married for 13 years.
I have a daughter Julie, who's 12
and his son Adam who's 10.
What do the children think of this
part that you take my children?
Yes, they're very excited
about it and very proud of it.
I think particularly because Spock is
a character that you can take pride in.
You know it's nice for a change
for me to be playing a character
that my children can be can
be pleased to identify
with for a long time. I played
some pretty nasty characters
and I don't think they were
too excited about that.
Do they always watch his show?
Always, yeah, well,
you've been a delightful guest.
Thank you. Thank you so much
for your pleasure to be here.
Thank you very much.