No, we still don’t know who the Star Trek 2 villain is. But with the JJ Abrams film slated to hit theaters in less then a year, it seems almost inevitable that a potential leak could be sprung at almost any point.
In the meantime, everyone is still denying the villain is Khan. Of course, this has done little to dissuade some geeks, and when you check the Internet Movie Database, all it says is that Benedict Cumberbatch is “rumored” to play him.
Currently, Damon Lindelof and Alex Kurtzman, the duo who helped pen the Star Trek 2 script, both have new movies, Prometheus and People Like Us, so the mysterious villain is of course going to come up while they’re doing interviews. They obviously have to be careful about what they say, but every once and a while a little gem pops out.
Cinema Blend also just spoke to Kurtzman, who said Cumberbatch is “a genius,” and that “there are certain actors who have the ability to take a line of dialogue and add a ring to it that you didn’t even know you put into the dialogue. He’s one of those really brilliant actors. Just listening to him talk… you could enjoy him reading the phone book.”
He added that sequels “are about your bad guy. Your first movie is always about the becoming of [the hero] and your bad guy has to test that hero in a very significant way. He’s amazing. Are you going to be scared of him? Sh*t yeah!”
Meanwhile, Lindelof told Collider, “Benedict Cumberbatch, I can already say with a certain degree of confidence that he is gonna give an iconic film performance and one of the best sci-fi performances that I’ve ever seen. So I’m really psyched.”
And as Kurtzman also told Collider, “Me and Bob [Orci], Damon and J.J. [Abrams] all feel very protective of Star Trek. The studio wanted it a year earlier and we said, ‘No, we can’t. We’re not going to be ready and we don’t want to rush this.’ We felt very fortunate that the first movie was well received, and the last thing that we wanted to do was destroy that by rushing something. We love our Trek and we just wanted to keep it safe.”
