![]() So Star Trek is ongoing and Independence Day is back. ![]() I think what’s happened is technology has just attracted more and more intelligent people and, as technology has grown, so has this subculture of nerds and geeks. In fact, what they are are very smart people. ![]() People have a concept of sci-fi fans of being “weird” in some way. Why do you think geek and nerd culture has achieved that dominance? How did we get here? It’s fun, it’s exciting, because I think what’s happened is the nerds and geeks have inherited the earth-and we’re the beneficiaries of it. Incidentally, that was one of four conventions that was going on that weekend. I was at a convention, for example, in Denver the other day, and they told me that 120,000 people passed through those doors on the weekend. Those worlds kind of collide in these conventions. But now every network has their genre show, whether it’s sci-fi or fantasy or horror. There were conventions, there were Star Trek conventions and that sort of thing. Others came along just after us, but for a while there it was just us. I'll tell you, it’s amazing what’s going on-because when we were on television, we were the only sci-fi there was at that time. Abrams reboot? I would imagine that brought in a whole new wave of fans to Star Trek. Have you seen a change in that fan culture since the J.J. I know you’ve been involved in the ongoing Star Trek conventions and Star Trek fan culture, which is one of the best parts of the whole franchise. Yeah, I feel really good about being in a horror project. People like Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre and Vincent Price. I also like being a part of it just because there’s a history of character actors, people I really respect as character actors, who later in their careers became part of a horror genre. It begins to reveal itself, what the show is about, what I’m about, as it gets into the middle of the season, and I think people are going to be in for a surprise now that it’s not the show they thought it was. I don’t want to reveal anything, but it’s way more complex than it appears in the first few episodes. The biggest difference, really, was just there were huge, enormous banks of monitors where special-effects people were already working and setting up what the effects were so that we could take a peek and see what we were doing. Fortunately, I don’t do that in my own life, but it made it really easy for me to have that experience. I was always talking to people who weren’t actually there. We had a green screen in every episode that was the view screen of the Enterprise. I mean, for me personally, it was not that big of leap to be working on green screen or blue screen because I spent so much time doing that when when I did Star Trek. I just saw it last night for the first time, and it’s overwhelming in its hugeness.īut there must have been huge leaps forward, technologically, since the original. Now, it’s just bigger and bigger and bigger. I think it all sprang from him and his imagination and his effects into those kinds of films. I know Roland is now being referred to as the soulful master of disaster, and he is indeed. But I think Independence Day started the ball rolling on that sort of return to the big disaster movie. To hit the set, and find Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum and Judd Hirsch and Roland Emmerich and Vivica Fox and all the people I’d worked with 20 years before-it was like a family reunion. Twenty years later, how has the world of blockbuster filmmaking changed? But as you will see in the new movie, I survived. He was just basically trying to speak through me and communicate through me, and the result was that I was badly damaged. I think they assumed that I had been choked to death, or that the tentacles of the alien had really punished me badly. Vanity Fair chatted with the actor to learn how the new movie justifies his return-and why geek culture has become mainstream. Somehow, against all odds, Okun is back-albeit with a protective scarf around his damaged neck-in Independence Day: Resurgence.īut that’s only the beginning of the return of Brent Spiner. ![]() In one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, the seemingly lifeless body of the gray-haired scientist is thrust up against the glass of an observation room his vocal cords get played like a fiddle by *Independence Day’*s creepy aliens. Brakish Okun-played by Brent Spiner of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame-had died in the original film. And while there’s been plenty of discussion over who among the original cast is returning ( Jeff Goldblum! Bill Pullman! Judd Hirsch!) and who isn’t ( Will Smith! Mae Whitman!), there’s one name in particular on the former list that stuck out-mostly because it seemed impossible that his character had lived to see another movie. Twenty years after the original Independence Day stormed the box office, a new sequel will blast its way into theaters.
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