“Anything I tell you is 100 per cent the truth.” William Shatner – Bill, as he prefers – is sitting across from me in a plush Auckland hotel suite. William Shatner!
He has just finished telling me about his close encounter with an endangered monk seal while on holiday in Hawaii, and before that it was the rather thrilling tale of the time he hunted down a 2.7m-tall Kodiak bear in Alaska, armed only with a bow and arrow.
It is an incredible piece of storytelling, and the quote above is his response to my hesitant query about whether he has ever fudged the truth – even just a little – for the sake of a good story.
“You know something, I haven’t,” he declares, spreading his hands in a gesture of innocence. “And why these things happen to me, I don’t know. Even my own family sometimes don’t believe me.
“But they do – these stories happen to me. I do not fudge the story. Sometimes, I’ll make up the last line – give it a good ending. But all these things that I talk about happen to me and I don’t know why.”
The story of his bow-and-arrow bear hunt, though, is one that Bill is not too proud of these days. However, that in no way reduces his fondness for telling it.
“I would never, ever do that again,” admits the 82-year-old veteran of more than 100 TV shows, almost as many movies, and countless public appearances.
“Killing a magnificent animal like
