Star Trek 2‘s Chris Pine is happy to have Benedict Cumberbatch aboard for the J.J. Abrams sequel.

Pine was filled with praise for Cumberbatch. “Benedict is fantastic,” he said. “He’s just so good, He’s super talented, and we are more than grateful to have him onboard.”

“Benedict has got this intensity about him, and he’s obviously extremely intelligent and articulate,” said Pine. “His vocal quality is something else. He obviously is, unlike many of us, like, an actually trained actor. He actually studied for it.

“[You'll love] everything. He’s really talented. I think it’s all going to be love, a mad amount of love.”

Another Star Trek 2 newcomer, Alice Eve, is also thrilled to be working with Cumberbatch. “I’m very excited to work with him again,” she said. “He’s so very funny, Ben. I don’t know if you remember his character in Starter for 10, but he was so funny. Like King of the Geeks, but he did it so well, and I found a lot of that hard to get through because he was so funny. I like him very much.”

Sir Patrick Stewart may be seventy one years old, but he’s not even close to slowing down when it comes to acting or to living an active life.

Part of why he can keep going is his good health. Stewart is in better shape than many men much younger. “I remember years and years ago, working in rep in Sheffield or Liverpool, I heard an interview with Olivier, where he said that if you’re serious about acting Shakespeare, you’ve got to be as fit as an athlete,” said Stewart. “That really made an impression on me. I’d like to go on doing what I’m doing for as long as possible, and all the great roles, well, they’re marathons, not sprints.”

Although in good shape, Stewart realizes that time is marching on for him. The actor has coronary heart disease, diagnosed six years ago. “I’ve got to that point now,” he said, “where people say things like ‘This conjunction of the planets won’t be seen for another forty-five years,’ and I think, ‘hmm, there’s every chance that I won’t be around for that.’

“But the kind of wake-up call I got puts you in the frame of mind where you don’t want to waste a moment. And being an actor is like spending your life in the world’s most expensive nursery, especially when you’re doing something like X-Men. I can honestly say that I’m having more fun these days than I’ve ever had. A lot of it is to do with the work that I do, and a lot is to do with having got things sorted out better.”

Stewart is still living young, dating a woman in her thirties, and trying new physical activities one wouldn’t normally associate with a man in his seventies. “Two years ago I put on skis for the first time,” he said. “I’ve done it eight times now, and the last time I skied all the way down a … mountain. Going really fast. At seventy-one.”

Stewart will be appearing at the Young Vic in London in a revival of Edward Bond‘s 1973 play Bingo, in which he plays a depressed and drunken Shakespeare in semi-retirement in Warwickshire. Bingo runs from February 16 through March 31.

Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s LeVar Burton will be a guest judge on Syfy’s Face Off.

On Face Off, special effects make-up artists compete to collect $100,000.

Burton will guest judge the episode airing February 22, when the artists will “design aliens based on the work of series judge Patrick Tatopoulos.”

Face Off has been renewed for a ten-episode third season.

Star Trek‘s William Shatner has been tapped to host the 2012 Juno Awards.

The Juno Awards are chosen by the members of the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and presented to Canadian musical artists and/or bands for musical or technical achievement.

This year’s ceremony will be held on April 1 at Ottawa’s Scotiabank place, and will be aired on CTV. Performers will include Feist, Deadmau5 and City & Colour.

Reading Rainbow may have fallen victim to a lack of money and a change in attitude regarding educational television programming, but former host LeVar Burton had found a way to bring it back for a new generation.

Burton believes that today’s children are in need of encouragement when it comes to reading. “There is a brand new generation of kids who could definitely use the kind of spark and inspiration Reading Rainbow provided where actually becoming a reader is concerned,” he said. “As far as I can tell, reading will never go out of style, and neither will good old fashioned storytelling.”

A mobile app is Burton’s first step in reaching out to those children. “The center-point of the App is books,” said Burton “Wonderful, lightly enhanced digital books for children. However we’re also very interested in delivering an enriching experience to kids, much like classic Reading Rainbow did on TV.”

Burton has already retrieved the @readingrainbow Twitter handle from a cybersquatter, and future plans would include DVDs and classic Reading Rainbow episodes, which would be streamed.

“Every day of my life someone comes up to me and tells me about the impact the show had on them growing up,” said Burton. It’s no secret that our educational system is no longer the platinum standard on the world stage that it once was. This is simply my way of continuing to do what I’ve always done, just in a different medium.”

Star Trek‘s George Takei will be performing with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra in Ode to Joy later this month.

Ode to Joy will be performed on February 25 and 26 at the Robinson Center Music Hall in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Takei will act as narrator for Schoenberg‘s “A Survivor from Warsaw” piece. The narration for this piece “depicts the story of a concentration camp survivor from the Warsaw ghetto during World War II.”

Takei and his family were sent to an internment camp in Rohwer, Arkansas during World War II. The actor is chairman emeritus and a trustee of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Takei was also appointed by former President Clinton to the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission.

Tickets can be purchased from the Arkansas Symphony.

For Noel Clarke, one of the newcomers signed for Star Trek 2, the audition for the latest Trek movie was just another audition.

“It was just an audition like all the others, really,” he said. “You do your lines and see what happens, and luckily this time I got the job. It was just a standard audition.”

Although happy about being cast, when Clarke received the news, he tried to keep calm about the good news. “I was at home, in my kids’ room, because they were making noise in the living room,” he said. “So I went into their room. And, yeah, I was told I’d got it, and, yeah, I was happy. I was happy. I don’t get over-excited about things because I’m just kind of like that. I was happy, but a job is a job. You get some and some you don’t get. You can’t get over-excited about stuff because that would mean if you got a review that was good you’d have to be really happy and if you got a bad review you would have to be distraught. I can’t switch it off, so I just read ‘em all. So I got the job and was like, ‘Hey, I’m in Star Trek.’”

Being cast in Star Trek 2 might have a positive impact on Clarke’s future career. “I think it’s just one of those things where it’s another level of accomplishment, where you’ve done another job that is bigger than the ones you’ve done before,” he said. “All of that stuff helps in your career, so hopefully it will just help me in mine, but I have no idea. How people look at me is up to them.”

Clarke was signed to play a “family man with a wife and young daughter”  in Star Trek 2.

Although he had a television resume dating back to the 1970s, Robert Picardo‘s life changed after signing on for Star Trek: Voyager.

Part of the reason that Star Trek was so different was the fandom associated with it. “One of the odd things about getting a Star Trek role that doesn’t have anything to do with any other kind of television show is that the moment your agent calls and says, ‘Well, you got the part,’ you also got your first two convention offers,” said Picardo.

“I don’t know if it’s just science fiction fans, or specifically Star Trek (fans), that they like to meet the actors as well as just watch the show,” said Picardo.

But before the conventions and fan adulation, a show has to succeed first. “The way I used to describe it when they first started airing the Voyager episodes,” said Picardo, “and people who were loyal fans of the Star Trek franchise became accustomed to the new faces of our cast, is that there’s a certain amount of fear as to whether or not they’ll embrace the show, and like it, and stick with it.

“But once they do embrace it, you feel a little bit like you’re boarding a bus that’s already going eighty miles per hour. It’s kind of a shock to jump on, but then it’s a nice ride once you’re there.”

Of course, that bus can slam into a wall if an actor makes the wrong move, like dissing fandom. “What I’ve learned is you can make fun of yourself, and Star Trek fans react well to that,” said Picardo. “You can make fun of pretty much anything, except their interest in the show. You don’t want to belittle their interest in the show, because it means something serious to them.”

Picardo will be appearing this weekend at the St. Louis Science Center.

Just days after the news that The CW picked up Shelter, a pilot produced by J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burk, comes the news that another Abrams pilot has been picked up by another network.

This time, the network is NBC and the pilot is Revolution, a dramatic thriller, to be written by Abrams, Bryan Burk and Eric Kripke (Supernatural).

In Revolution, a “group of characters” is “struggling to survive and reunite with loved ones in a world where all forms of energy have mysteriously ceased to exist.”

When LeVar Burton couldn’t get a Twitter cybersquatter to release the Reading Rainbow name, he marshaled his Twitter followers to help him get the deed done.

Burton wanted to register the @readingrainbow handle at Twitter, but he found out that the name was already taken.

To add insult to injury, the person owning the name hadn’t posted in the last three years, and he (or she) didn’t answer Burton when Burton tried to make contact.

Burton, who has 1.74 million followers, posted the following tweet: “Dear @twitter I’m trying to contact the individual who’s sitting on @ReadingRainbow but he hasn’t Tweeted in #3YEARS Can you help? Thanks!”

Seven hundred of Burton’s fans retweeted the post, which finally caught the attention of Twitter, who sorted the manner. Twitter does not allow “name squatting” and in addition, reserves the right to remove inactive accounts.

“Thank you everyone for your help!!!,” tweeted Burton.