Caffeinated Clint
Thomas Mapother IV joins Starfleet?
Tom Cruise may be readying to be beamed up! (Sure it’s not the first time).
According to IGN Movies, Cruise may be in talks to cameo in the forthcoming “Star Trek”.
Ol’pearly whites would play the role of Captain Pike – a character that appeared fleetingly in the original series – as a favour to director J.J Abrams (he definitely wouldn’t be doing Paramount any favours), who he worked with on “Mission : Impossible III”.
Cruise isn’t against cameos – he appeared in “Young Guns”(1988; you’ll go mad trying to spot him though); “Austin Powers in Goldmember” and was recently rumoured to be doing a cameo in the new Ben Stiller comedy “Tropic Thunder” – so this is a definite possibility. And the “Star Trek” series isn’t frightened of cameo players either – you’ll recall Christian Slater had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him part in “Star Trek VI : The Undiscovered Country” (1991) and more recently, director Bryan Singer popped up in “Star Trek : Nemesis” (2003).
Don’t know the character of Pike myself – let alone anyone in the “Trek” world by any great measure – but the abovementioned site says he was “James T. Kirk’s predecessor as captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise and Mr. Spock’s first commanding officer. Pike was the captain in the original and unaired TV pilot, “The Cage,” where he was portrayed by the late Jeffrey Hunter. When NBC balked at the cerebral nature of the show and wanted a new, action-heavy pilot filmed, Hunter was unavailable so a new character, Captain Kirk, was created. The unaired pilot was later recycled for the two-part first season episode “The Menagerie,” which saw Spock court-martialed for trying to take a disfigured Pike back to Talos IV, the setting of “The Cage.” In Trek lore, Spock served with Pike for about a decade.”
At this stage, the only confirmed cast members for “Trek” are Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto. Greg Grunberg is expected to play a role too – if even just as ‘ship hand #42’.
