There’s more to being a geek icon than spending your teens on the bridge of the Enterprise or relocating to Kansas to help develop the Video Toaster 4000 way before the likes of iMovie and YouTube.

words: Bonnie Burton

Actor, author, gamer and blogger Wil Wheaton’s resume reads like a blueprint on how to become a legit web celeb. His blog (one of the first to hit the web) WWdN: In Exile ( http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/ ) is read by legions of fans. Over 10,000 people read his Twitter blog. His voice can be heard in everything from Teen Titans to Grand Theft Auto.

His three memoirs Dancing Barefoot, Just a Geek and The Happiest Days of Our Lives are must-reads for anyone who’s still got crystal clear memories of eyeing the Millennium Falcon for the first time in the toy store. He’s written columns on everything from retro video games to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame for The Onion, Salon and Suicide Girls. Yeah, he’s that cool and geeky.

Geek: Before we get started, I need to know how far you’ve gotten in Grand Theft Auto IV.

Wil Wheaton: I haven’t been playing GTA IV that long since the game came out—maybe five hours so far. My progress meter is at like eight percent or something like that. I’ve gotten to a point where the story took a rather shocking and unexpected twist. The character that you control in the game is a very conflicted guy with a pretty complicated and dark history. The guy is more real and has more depth to him than any of the other characters I’ve controlled in GTA. Until last night, I may have played one or two story missions to advance the game, but I really just spend the rest of my time driving around and crashing into cars. I drive cars until they catch on fire. I like to go driving through the parks and hit the pedestrians. I’ve noticed a couple of things like if you’re going really fast and you hit a wall or a tree something like that you’ll fly through the front windshield of the car. So I drove really fast down the wrong side of the street on the expressway and hit a car head-on, and the driver shot through the windshield and landed on the hood of my car. That level of detail is just remarkable. But it suddenly felt weird just driving around the city mowing down pedestrians.

Has it started to warp your sense of reality when you’re stuck in traffic yet?

I hate driving. I absolutely despise it. I particularly hate driving in Los Angeles. I’ll be out somewhere with my wife and point out things, and tell her if this was Grand Theft Auto we wouldn’t have to sit here like this. We could just drive over that median.

You’ve been in many of the Grand Theft Auto games as the voice of the radio newsman character Richard Burns. Are you continuing his role in Grand Theft Auto IV?

In the GTA universe, Richard Burns shows up in the PSP game Liberty City Stories where he’s in trouble because of something that happened in the riots at Los Santos. And he makes a call to a talk radio station. But Burns in not in GTA IV. Instead I play an animated character in a cartoon within the game called Republican Space Rangers. I play a kind, loving, generous, enlightened alien who is murdered by the Republican Space Rangers in the name of spreading freedom and democracy.

That sounds about right. I bet those same conservative politicians who murdered you are probably the same guys calling the game “worse than Polio” in the press.

Someone was telling me that all of the right-wing blogs are freaking out about Republican Space Rangers. When the college Republicans are not busy telling everybody else why they should go sign up and fight in this war, they have to amuse themselves with something. The usual gang of idiots wig out. Invariably the people who complain about the game haven’t played it. People who have an agenda—whether they’re politicians or leaders of so-called “family” organizations—see it is an easy way to rile up their base. It’s easier to complain about a video game than it is to really address the massive failings of parent education in America.

In addition to lending your voice to video games like GTA and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, you can be heard as Aqualad in Teen Titans and Cosmic Boy in Legion of Superheroes. I read that you’re also in a new episode of Random! Cartoons called “Kyle + Rosemary” for Nickelodeon.

It’s about middle school kids—a Goth girl and a super-geek kid. They meet in a World of Warcraft MMORPG-style game. They fall in love in the game. But then when they try to meet each other in real life, they’re from these two different worlds, and it becomes like Grease. It’s the sweetest thing ever and the animation is tremendous. It’s perfectly made to be viewed online, but so far Nickelodeon is just sitting on it and not doing anything with it, which kind of bums me out. If it was online, it would probably take off.

For the longest time I thought your first big acting role was in Stand by Me, but fans might be shocked to learn before that you played the mouse Martin in The Secret of NIMH!

Back then I would go with tons of other kids for different roles. I went into the audition and the director Don Bluth hired me on the spot. I remember walking back to the car where my mom was and I told her, “He wants me to come back tomorrow for the job.” At that time I didn’t know that with animation they record the voices first. I was excited because I thought I could watch the cartoon while I was doing the voice. I didn’t know any better, I was probably eight or nine when I did the movie. It took forever for the movie to come out, and when I finally got to see it I remember being so upset that they drew my character Martin as really tubby, and he didn’t look anything like me! I guess I had a husky voice as a kid. (laughs)

I had read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, which is an absolutely magnificent book. It should really be required reading for nine- and ten-year-olds. That actually explains the roots of my love of science fiction, because after I read that book, I knew the author’s name—Robert C. O’Brien. So when his name was brought up again as another suggested book to read, I grabbed it. It was a book called Z for Zachariah. It’s a post-apocalyptic story about a girl who lives in a valley and there’s a global thermonuclear war. The way that the weather works in her valley, the fallout never comes in. She and her brothers and her father survive and live on a little farm. After a while they notice no one is coming into the valley anymore. So her father and brothers go to check things out and they don’t come back. Some time goes by and she sees smoke on the horizon and it gets closer and closer. And eventually this dude comes in and he’s got a radiation suit on, pulling a radiation wagon. The bulk of the story is finding out this guy is bad. It exposed me to post-apocalyptic fiction, which is my absolute favorite kind of science fiction. This stemmed from recognizing the author’s name which wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t involved in NIMH.

Your IMDb reads like a geek wish list of TV shows even after your role as Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Post-Star Trek there’s going to be some science-fiction stunt casting, which actually works out really well for me because I got to do Outer Limits and Perversions of Science and Tales from the Crypt—and those are shows that I love. So in that case it was really cool. I don’t know how many other actors of my generation who are as deeply involved in real geek culture as I am.

Speaking of geek culture, how the heck did you end up evangelizing NewTek’s Video Toaster?

The thing I loved about the Video Toaster—and it’s the same philosophy that made me want to start my publishing company, Monolith Press—is that I always believed creative people should not be constrained by non-creative decision makers. You see it happen a lot in television and music where there are a lot of creative people who just end up with something rather beige and non-offensive just because that’s the reality of mass market publishing.

The Video Toaster was providing a tool for creative people to make professional-quality video and do it for a very small investment. You can draw a straight line from the Video Toaster to iMovie. The only thing that we were missing with the Video Toaster back in the early ’90s was a distribution method. The Video Toaster just came along too soon. If we had happened three years ago as YouTube and Google Video were getting started, I’d probably be talking to you from my yacht. (laughs)

It was really exciting for me to have been a part of the personal video revolution. I had been an actor my entire life, that I wasn’t sure if the decision to be an actor was my own. When I left Star Trek with the intention of going to school I had the first break from working in 11 years. So I looked back and realized my entire childhood had been spent as an actor, and I didn’t know if that was something I wanted to continue to do. I figured out rather quickly that fame and celebrity and the whims of the audience are very fleeting. I had been around the entertainment industry long enough, and worked with super-talented people that were struggling, to realize that a lot of it didn’t have much to do with ability as much as it had to do with being in the right place and knowing the right people.

I went to a NewTek party, and I saw that what these guys were doing was something I really believed in. This was empowering people and taking power away from the studios. It was starting to lay the foundation of a more egalitarian filmmaking society. I was in the right place at the right time. They hired me to work in the marketing department and I went around the country introducing people to the Video Toaster 4000. And I worked in product testing as well. I brought a little bit of my experience from film and television to the design process.

When you go to conventions now, do people come up to you more to chat about Star Trek or your blog and books?

When I do appearances, regardless where they are, it has very little to do with Star Trek, and more to do with my books and blog. The only time I really encounter anything to do with Star Trek is when someone my age tells me that Wesley was an inspiration to them and now they’re a doctor or scientist. Or it’s someone around my age who brings their kids to meet me so they can see Wesley all grown up.
Of course, I don’t know if I really want to be the guy going to Star Trek conventions every weekend and saying, “Hey, remember when?” That’s one of the reasons I don’t really talk about it much when I go to do these shows.

You’ve been fairly vocal about the idea of director J.J. Abrams wanting to reinvent Star Trek. Obviously, it’s difficult to work on a beloved franchise and not get some kind of backlash from the die-hard fans. Are you excited or apprehensive about the next phase of Star Trek?

It’s something we’ve all heard before—”Long time fans of the franchise are going to be served and everyone is going to love it. But people who have never watched Star Trek before will also have fun. Even if you hate science fiction you will love this film. This movie is perfect for everyone!” And it just becomes this marketing thing.

But the people working on this next film have a very unique and daunting challenge. Star Trek is a phenomenon that spans generations. It has one of the most passionate, entrenched fan bases in the history of media. The truth is, over the last several years, Star Trek was run into the ground and the franchise was nearly destroyed by the films and the television series that were not being guided by a good hand.

J.J. Abrams is a pretty good filmmaker. Cloverfield and the first season of Lost were great. So you have this guy who’s really creative and has a pretty good track record of making science-fiction related programs and you put him in the right seat and say, “Now fly this franchise and recreate it.” The pressure that he must be under to deliver something magnificent, and the amount of studio interference must be enduring, has got to be nearly indescribable. So I have a lot of sympathy and understanding based on those things.

But as a sci-fi fan, we live in a post Phantom Menace world. That movie was a huge kick in the nuts to a lot of people. For those of us that Star Wars meant more to us than just a movie, it was devastating. I think the same thing with Star Trek. It means more to people than just being a TV show. If you look at the track record that Hollywood has making lifelong properties that really matter to people into movies you see a string of failures. Star Trek fans really want this to be good.

That makes since considering a lot of the older Star Trek films have been pretty bad.

Oh, they’re horrible! There are two really great mainstream films, and two that are really enjoyable for Star Trek, fans, and the remainder are unwatchable. If we’re going to be Star Trek fans and hold J.J. Abrams to a certain level of excellence we have to be willing to admit and acknowledge that we’re even lucky this is even happening at all.

Are there any franchises that you would be interested to see get a second chance, or that you hope Hollywood passes over?

I’m really conflicted about The Prisoner. It’s one of my favorite sci-fi, Orwellian, post-apocalyptic, paranoid, weirdo, awesome shows ever. I am extraordinarily nervous of the plans to make it into a new movie. I heard it was in pre-production about two years ago. That’s something I wish they would just leave alone. I don’t think you can improve on it. You can’t take what they did in 18 hours and then put it all into a two-hour movie.

It’s hard not to get twitchy when Hollywood gets the urge to mess with our favorite sci-fi shows.

When I criticize something it’s because I love it, and that’s something that comes from geek culture. We love these movies, books, comics, video games and TV shows that really mean a lot to us, and when these franchises let us down, one of the things about being a geek is that you take it personally. Because everyone makes fun of you; all the cool kids pick on you for liking these things and give you a hard time about it. Then when the thing that I love puts out a crappy episode then it’s like, “I’ve been defending this over and over! And now the cool kids can come back and throw it in my face and laugh at me more.” I know that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to normal people, but within geek culture that’s just the way we respond to these things.

[Commotion over the phone] Sorry about that. My wife just brought over a scarf that her friend knitted for me. It says “awesome” in binary. It’s even black and green. It looks like an old CRT! I can’t wait to wear it!