New 'Star Trek' director Noah Hawley hints at a new cast for reboot

Could the reboot of the Star Trek movies be more radical than we first thought?

In November, it was announced that Noah Hawley, the showrunner behind the Fargo series, would be taking on Star Trek 4.

The news came after three years of limbo for the veteran sci-fi property, following the box office disappointment of Justin Lin's Star Trek Beyond, which ended up losing Paramount in the region of $50 million.

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But now it seems that Hawley may not be making the sequel many presumed he would be.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, he said: “To call it Star Trek 4 is kind of a misnomer. I have my own take on the franchise as a life-long fan.”

Asked if his movie will be taking on a new cast, he added: “Yeah, I think so. Yeah.”

Then, when asked whether any of the previous stars – the likes of Chris Pine, who played James Kirk, or Karl Urban, who played Bones McCoy – would be returning, he said: “It's early days. I don't know. But new characters often involve new cast.”

This would tally with comments made by Simon Pegg in an interview with Gold Derby in December, who said that he wasn't yet signed up.

Pegg, who played Scotty in the movies, said: “No, I don't know anything about it. I think - Noah Hawley's been hired to write something for Star Trek, which is very exciting because he's a brilliant writer and always creating interesting stuff. Whether or not we're involved with that I don't know.

“I don't think so. I don't think - I don't think that Noah's thing is necessarily gonna be Star Trek 4. I'm talking out of my a** as usual, which gets me into trouble all the time. But we'll see what happens with that.”

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Hawley went on to namecheck Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn in his interview with THR as being his touchstone for the new project.

“It's William Shatner putting on his reading glasses and lowering Kahn's shields, which cost like $9.50. There's no big action sequence. He's just more clever,” he said.

“There's something really uplifting about that feeling. I went to Paramount and just had my own ideas for what I wanted to do with it. So that's the direction that I'm going in. It's still very early days, so I can't really be more specific. But it's going to be different.”

Hawley’s next series of Fargo, starring Chris Rock, Ben Whishaw and Jessie Buckley, airs in April.