Mick Talks About Star Trek & Nimoy

[michelej1]

Vancouver Sun

http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2015/0...leonard-nimoy/

Fleetwood Mac’s Mick Fleetwood recalls Star Trek experience, pays tribute to Leonard Nimoy

March 10, 2015. 5:38 pm • Section: Awesome Sound

I recently had the great opportunity to chat with Fleetwood Mac co-founder and drummer Mick Fleetwood in advance of the band’s return to Vancouver at Rogers Arena on April 4. (They also played here in November.)

During our phone chat, Fleetwood discussed the band’s recent reunion with long absent singer and keyboardist Christine McVie, as well as touring and recording a new album, among other things.

I also got to ask the six-foot, six-inches Fleetwood about his love of Star Trek (he appeared as an alien on a 1989 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled “Manhunt”) and his admiration for the late Leonard Nimoy, whom we all knew as Spock.

“I always loved Star Trek,” Fleetwood, 67, said. “(On The Next Generation), I played an Antedean — half-man, half-fish. Not that it was a huge part but I loved that I could be part of it in some shape or form. I shaved my beard to put all the prosthetics on. I said, ‘I’ll shave my beard off if you promise me that I get to beam down or beam up — at least one of those things. Either up or down, you’ve got to promise me that it’s in the script.’ And they do — they beam me down into the ship. So I shaved my beard off and I had a lot of fun.

“The chap who plays the captain, Patrick Stewart, was a great friend of my sister Susan, who sadly is no longer on the planet. But she was a very well-known Shakespearean actress. He knew Susan and they went to college together so he was very kind to me on the shoot. I was basically an idiot, trying to do what I was doing.

“Leonard Nimoy, I did not know,” Fleetwood added. “I loved his character. I thought it was and is to this day such a powerful perspective: to be this constantly logical, in-a-sticky-position type of guy. I personally loved that. Anything and everything I ever saw or heard about him, you get the sense he was an extremely great guy, intellectually really sound. He’s gone now. Definitely the general vibe is that it’s a real loss. It speaks more about him as a person than maybe his acting. I mean, I liked the stuff he did outside of Star Trek, but that character was an extreme statement. It was fantastic. Having said that, for me his legacy seems to be that his personality, for real, was what eclipsed even the career he had, which I think is even more a compliment than you can dream of.”

Read our complete interview with Mick Fleetwood in a few weeks at vancouversun.com and in print.