The unlikely star turned down the role of Spock in Star Trek

Ask any actor to name the performance that made him want to be an actor, and you'll have people referencing Marlon Brando's monumental crushes in A Streetcar Named Desire. Meryl Streep in Sophia's Choice or Denzel Washington in “Malcolm X” — big, deep tissue dives that require professionals to use almost every part of their gear. They want the audience to cry and cheer as they capture the whole human experience. They don't want to play, say, a monotone Android whose sole function in the plot is to provide the occasional information dump. This would leave them with nothing interesting to do and likely little to add to their wheel.

So when Gene Roddenberry started casting “Star Trek” pilot In 1964, he probably didn't have any actors knocking on his door to play Vulcan first officer Spock, whose adherence to logic and lack of emotion seemed like a dull task next to the impulsive Captain James T. Kirk and the cantankerous medical officer Leonard. “Bones” McCoy. Obviously, no one at the time knew how the character would be developed, nor could they have predicted the show's profound pop culture impact, so this isn't a case of nearly every leading man in Hollywood turning down John McClane in Die Hard. 20th Century Fox shelled out an unprecedented $5 million to TV star Bruce Willis. They really only had a pilot script to go on.

And that's why one aspiring actor turned down an iconic role to become one in Mission: Impossible.

Martin Landau had already spoken about James Mason's murderous assistant in 1959. Alfred Hitchcock's classic “North by Northwest” when Roddenberry and NBC offered him the role of Spock in a “Star Trek” pilot called “The Cage.” Landau rejected them because, as he said Starlog In 1986, he “doesn't know how to play wood”. Instead, he took on the role of master of disguise Rollin Hand in the first three seasons of Mission: Impossible.

Again, in all fairness, Landau could not have known that the series would become a cultural phenomenon that is still spawning new shows and movies 59 years after it premiered on the network. But even if he was knowing that, Landau says he still would have turned down the offer. As he told Starlog:

“I'd make the same decision today. But I knew if the show worked, the Ghost would be very effective. Think of the turmoil of the 1960s. A super-intelligent creature with pointy ears who logically thought it was right, except for me. I didn't want to play that , I would have become a news anchor.

If you think that kind of disrespect for Spock would have gotten Leonard Nimoy fired, think again. Landau and Nimoy were very close friends. When the latter died in 2015, Landau wrote a touching tribute to his friend for timecalling him a mensch. “Although (our) first meeting was cordial, we both realized that we could play the same roles, and we would definitely be competitors for those roles,” he wrote, adding, “And so it was. Over the years, our careers diverged , we remained friends and always rejoiced at our individual successes (…)”

As for Landau's post-Mission: Impossible career, he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton's excellent Ed Wood, so not playing Spock worked out pretty well for him.