After a flurry of location-shoot leaks out of Toronto this week, Paramount+ has officially announced that actor Paul Wesley, best known to genre fans for his work as Stevan Salvatore on The Vampire Diaries, will be beaming aboard Star Trek: Strange New Worlds in Season 2… as James T. Kirk.
Little — well, nothing — is known about how Kirk will fit into the Strange New Worlds story, though television production fans in Toronto have spotted the actor on location with SNW lead Christina Chong (La’an Noonien-Sing) both in and out of Starfleet uniforms on the streets of the Canadian city, so it’s possible some kind of time travel element may bring the pair back to a relatively-modern-day Earth — or, some other planet, if the TOS-era Hodgkin’s law of parallel planetary development comes into play.
(Okay, that last bit’s a stretch but who the heck knows!)
@azizsyawash Idk why the extras were cheesed at me recording 😭 #startrek #toronto #school #paulwesley #vampirediaries #toronto
We can leave you with this deep-near-canon bit of material gleaned from Stephen Whitfield’s famous The Making of Star Trek book — which indicated that Kirks’ first command, prior to the USS Enterprise, was “a destroyer class ship,” but beyond that, no on-screen content has placed the man into a captain’s chair before his time aboard the big E.
I am deeply humbled and still a little startled to have been given the honor of playing the inimitable James T Kirk. Ever since I was a kid, I have been awed by the imaginative world Gene Roddenberry created.
Recently, I boarded a flight to LA to discover that the man in the pic.twitter.com/U8GVD4ZemP— Paul Wesley (@paulwesley) March 15, 2022
empty seat beside me was the one and only William Shatner, having himself just returned from space. I could barely put two words together but ultimately I managed to say hello and we chatted.
I’m not one who usually believes in fate but this was more than a coincidence.
And of— Paul Wesley (@paulwesley) March 15, 2022
course I had to get a picture.
So thanks Mr. Shatner for the good company. And for seating us together, my thanks to the great bird in the sky. Can’t wait for all of you to see our Captain Kirk on your screens.— Paul Wesley (@paulwesley) March 15, 2022
Another possibility is that Wesley’s time aboard Strange New Worlds comes at a time between Pike’s departure from the ship and the beginning of the Original Series in “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” or in a storyline set sometime after “Turnabout Intruder.”
Either way, it’ll be until at least 2023 until we learn how Wesley will factor into Strange New Worlds — but keep your sensors locked here at TrekCore for all the latest info as it breaks!
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds debuts on Thursday, May 5 on Paramount+ in the United States, Australia, Latin America, and the Nordics, as well as on CTV Sci Fi Channel in Canada. Additional international distribution has not yet been announced.