One Of Leonard Nimoy’s Best Sci-Fi Performances Had Nothing To Do With Star Trek

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February 27, 2015, marked the 10th anniversary of Leonard Nimoy’s death.

Spock may still live on thanks to Ethan Peck in “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” but without Nimoy, there wouldn’t be a Spock. I think Nimoy himself had accepted by the end what a big part “Star Trek” was going to play in his legacy. You don’t go from writing “I Am Not Spock” to writing “I Am Spock” without realizing that.

Nimoy played a lot more parts than just the Enterprise’s Vulcan science officer, though. He’d been acting for over 10 years before he booked “Star Trek.” Some of his other most famous roles were between the cancellation of “Star Trek” in 1969 and its return in 1979, via “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.” During that hiatus, Nimoy played the Great Paris on the “Mission: Impossible” TV show, began to host “In Search Of…,” and, just a year before he started playing Spock again, appeared as Dr. David Kibner in the 1978 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” remake (directed by Philip Kaufman).

In “Body Snatchers,” Nimoy holds his own in a crowded ensemble that includes Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, and a young Jeff Goldblum. With all due respect to Nimoy’s “Transformers” roles as Galvatron and later Sentinel Prime, his best non-Spock sci-fi performance is definitely Dr. Kibner. A big reason why is that “Body Snatchers,” and Nimoy’s performance in it, are so unlike what you’d expect based on his work as Spock on “Star Trek.”

The story of “Body Snatchers” begins in 1954, when author Jack Finney wrote the story as a book. It was swiftly (in 1956) adapted into a movie by director Don Siegel titled “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Both the novel and movie feature a California town being invaded by “pod” aliens, which can grow near-perfect replicas of living beings. Slowly, the emotionless pod people start replacing the real humans.

“Body Snatchers” remains one of the most famous of the 1950s science-fiction B-movies. The title is a bit silly, but it’s not without menace, and it’s hard to dislodge from your brain once you hear it. What do these “body snatchers” mean to do, you ask yourself, and the film’s answer is plenty creepy. There are a lot of “Body Snatchers” homages out there, including in “Batman: The Animated Series.” One reason the movie remains famous is that it has often been remade, because the eponymous invasion is a flexible allegory.

Many consider Kaufman’s “Body Snatchers” superior to the original, if not the best movie in the “Body Snatchers” series overall. Whereas the original played on suburban Red Scare anxieties, Kaufman’s movie is set in 1970s San Francisco. In a 2013 interview with Vérité film magazine, Kaufman said the film was exploring a “liberal make nice kind of [attitude]” of ignoring problems in the world. Kibner is a big part of that; he’s a pop psychologist who writes books so quickly he’s wearing a wrist brace. Kibner is “trying to explain away the anxieties” people feel, Kaufman noted … and for good reason, because he’s revealed to be a pod person halfway through the movie. If you’re a Trekkie, part of you wants to root for Nimoy no matter what, so the rest of the film forces you to fight that. 

Some have pinpointed “Body Snatchers” as a deliberately subversive take on Nimoy’s typecasting as Spock. He’s once again playing an emotionless alien, but an evil one without any of Spock’s noble heart.

The pod people in “Body Snatchers” have limited emotional range, but in playing one, Nimoy proved he had much more than one note as an actor.