The ‘Star Trek’ movie that wanted to cast John Cusack as Spock: “All the possibilities were open”
There is only one Spock from Star Trek, and that is, of course, Leonard Nimoy.
But a cursory glance at the World Wide Web shows that there have been 12 actors in total who have put on the pointy prosthetic ears at some point in time, and sadly, John Cusack isn’t one of them.
Nimoy was undoubtedly the original and best, and indeed the most enduring, having first done the whole bowl haircut, tight top and Vulcan grip thing way back in 1966 on the original Star Trek TV series alongside William Shatner, and making appearances via several movies all the way up until 2013 when he had a cameo in JJ Abrams’ sequel Star Trek: Into Darkness.
Second on the list would be Zachary Quinto, who was in the first Abrams reboot in 2009, simply titled Star Trek, which was a big hit and earned several Oscar nominations, spawning that 2013 sequel and another, Star Trek Beyond, in 2016, which was co-written by huge Trekkie Simon Pegg.
But there were very nearly more Star Trek movies before Abrams set to work on the Starship Enterprise, and there would have been a very different actor playing Spock, according to the producer of four of the Star Trek films of the 1980s, Herve Bennett.
Speaking about the idea of restarting the franchise with the premise of a Star Trek ‘Academy’, Bennett revealed, “It was the best script of all, and it never got produced. We even had location scouts and sent feelers out for the cast. I had an eye on John Cusack for Spock, which would have been great. Ethan Hawke could have been Kirk.”
This would have been in 1989, when Cusack was at the height of his popularity, having starred in several smash teen movies like Sixteen Candles, Say Anything and The Sure Thing, while the Star Trek movies had tailed off in popularity dramatically after the fifth film, The Final Frontier, and the original cast were obviously ageing.
The producers wanted to go with the idea of a new generation and were going to bring back Shatner and Nimoy in order to act as guardians to the cadets, with a new spin-off series bringing back many of the original cast planned, but, as Bennett revealed, “All the possibilities were open, the script was beautiful… but it didn’t happen”.
That was until this year’s Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, the high-budget Paramount Plus show starring Holly Hunter that has the very same premise, and will be returning for a second and final series early in 2027, which left critics impressed.
It also features Tatiana Maslany and Paul Giamatti as part-Klingon, with the latter, for one, saying that he loved being in the show, even enjoying the lengthy prosthetic process he had to endure each day of filming. He also has history with that kind of thing, putting up with being made up into a monkey for weeks on end in order to film 2001’s Planet of the Apes.
As for Cusack, he has struggled to find what could be called a hit in the last decade or so, instead taking on low-budget or foreign films like 2025’s Detective Chinatown.
