Sci-Fi Storm

Issue #19 of Star Trek Magazine is on shelves now in the U.S. (July 9th in the U.K.) with plenty of interviews included. Read More for an excerpt of an interview with Eric Bana, who played the Romulan Nero.

Writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have noted that their successive
iterations of the movie script beefed up the character of Nero, but for Eric
Bana, many of the ingredients were in place from the start. “Essentially, I
was trying to draw on an incredibly tragic and brutal past,” he says. “For
me, that was the most important thing about him. I felt like Nero had this
incredibly tragic back story, and had become a villain as a result of the
things that had happened to him. That was more interesting than just him
being born as the villain. To me, he was just a Romulan who had had a lot of
amazingly treacherous things done to him, so whilst he wasn’t human, I felt
there was some sort of characteristics there that humans could definitely
relate to, and I wanted to draw on that.”

Bana agrees that the days have gone when audiences will accept
two-dimensional bad guys.

“I always like it when we have a reason to know why our villain is the
villain, and not just have to accept that he’s the villain because we?re
told that he is.”

However, that initial reading did flag up one potential problem. “I guess
the only concern I had initially was that I identified the fact that Star
Trek was definitely a ‘heroes’ movie’ not a ‘villain’s movie,’ and the
danger would have been to not have given enough to Nero,” he says. “But
J.J., Robert and Alex were already attentive to that, so that really came
along and was being really well serviced by them. They gave me enough to
play with!”

One element really attracted him. “I was fascinated by the notion of Nero
being in jail on Rura Penthe for so many years, him biding his time, and
being unbelievably patient in enacting his vengeance,” Bana says, adding,
“Some of that is not played out in the film, because it’s not in the final
cut, but it?ll be out on the DVD.”