William Shatner had "tremendous" reservations about poking fun at his name in a new advertising campaign.
The 94-year-old actor appears in a new commercial for Kellogg's Raisin Bran - which debuted during the Super Bowl broadcast on Sunday (08.02.26) - in which he teleports into various scenes to give out the cereal and is referred to repeatedly as 'Will Shat', a play on his surname sounding like the past-tense version of an expletive, highlighting the digestive benefits of the high-fibre breakfast food.
But the Star Trek legend admitted he had reservations about the concept because he was bullied over his name when he was younger.
He told Entertainment Weekly: "I haven't lost those apprehensions.
"I mean, I used to get into fights when I was a kid in the locker room. They'd kid me about that. I'd say, 'Don't call me that!' and I'd fight them. It was a sore spot as a child.
"And then adults stopped doing it. But it lurks, and for them to find it was, in itself, a kind of discovery."
The Twilight Zone star wasn't convinced that a pun-filled commercial about poop could be both amusing and "in decent taste".
He said: "Kellogg's wanted to do a Super Bowl commercial talking about fibre, which makes you c*** really well — you s*** really well with fibre.
"And the problem was: how do you make that amusing? How do you get a laugh on that? And that's what they worked on.
"To their benefit, the advertising company started off with my name, and I kept saying, 'Can you do that? Does that mean it's me sitting on a toilet?' So we worked on refining what was in decent taste, if not good taste, about what is amusing about going to the bathroom."
Despite being best known for playing Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek, William tries to distance himself from the series as much as possible, but he felt the opening of the commercial - in which he appears in a futuristic control room - was a subtle not to the sci-fi show without being too much.
He said: "I don't like the idea of referring to it.
I try and edit it out of anything they write for me to say, as much as possible. But visually, it looks good. And I chose clothing that didn't reflect the [Star Trek] uniform, although they had originally planned that way.
"So I think it's a reasonable homage to Star Trek without making it Star Trek.
"I tried to be tongue-in-cheek about it all. I hope that there's a subtext of my knowing — that I'm kidding myself."
