Star Trek actor William Shatner fittingly celebrated his 90th birthday today by announcing that he is joining StoryFile, an interactive story app where he will participate in the creation of an AI-run interactive video that his family and friends can access in the future.
"This is for all my children and all my children's children and all my children's loved ones and all the loved ones of the loved ones," Shatner said of the AI video. "That's my gift to you down through time."
"William Shatner is going where no one has gone before," said StoryFile CEO Heather Maio-Smith in a statement.
Shatner was born in Notre-Dam-de-Grace neighbourhood in Montreal, Canada to Jewish parents and raised in a Conservative Jewish household. His father was a clothing manufacturer. His paternal grandfather, Wolf Schattner, had anglicized his surname to Shatner. His other grandparents came from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ukraine and Lithuania.
Shatner famously portrayed Captain James T. Kirk on the original late ‘60s Star Trek television show and in the Star Trek movies.
In 2018, Shatner told the The Sydney Morning Herald that he experienced “a great deal of anti-Semitism” growing up in Montreal, and faced discrimination when he attended the city's McGill University, which he said only allowed a small quota of Jewish students.
He said other children would pick fights with him because he was Jewish. Kids would crowd around him and scream at him to fight and he was given the nickname "Toughie."